One thing that stands out about Friday’s gay rights rally in Jerusalem is just how far world religions have come in embracing cynicism.

Religions are mutually exclusive. Each claims its own truth and condemns nonbelievers to fates ranging from eternal water-boarding to impossibility of enlightenment.

But the western world is a now a multicultural one, like it or not, and leaders of competing religions have learned to buddy up, particularly within the holy trapezoid of Protestant, Catholic, Islamic, and Judaic beliefs.

It is impossible that the multi-faith cabal is anything but cynical theatrics. If these leaders believe the fundamental tenants that they preach, they must believe that their cohorts are liars and heretics. Whether it’s their faith or their chumminess that’s a lie, there’s a damn lie in there somewhere.

Yet our modern culture of believing in something doesn’t have many critics. Liberals love it, seeing as they invented multiculturalism and love mushy things in general. And conservatives have learned that it’s box office poison to alienate the other.

It wasn’t until watching Richard Dawkins’s excellent documentary The Root of all Evil? that I realized what an odd product of history it is that every established religion is legitimate. It amounts to Muhammad flying around on a miniature spaceship, if you think about it very hard.

But in Jerusalem, ground zero for the sacred trapezoid, we’re faced with religious leaders banding together against gays:

The Vatican on Wednesday urged the Israeli government to cancel the rally, saying it would “prove offensive to the great majority of Jews, Muslims and Christians, given the sacred character of the city of Jerusalem.”

So now we decide what happens in a particular place based on the imagined majority view of people scattered around the world holding beliefs loosely related to that location? This is nonsense. Demonstrations offensive to the majority must be permitted in a free society; it’s even more absurd if that imagined majority resides far outside the society in question.

Noting that Christian and Muslim clerics also opposed the event, Mr. Yishai [an Israeli deputy prime minister] told Israel Radio, “If we cannot be sensitive to Jewish feelings, perhaps we can listen to those of other religions.”

Now that religious fundamentalists have learned to incorporate the “sensitivity” jargon of human resources, it’s only a matter of time before they co-opt tolerance. Oh, wait—

“They are making a statement against God himself,” said Rabbi Levin, of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada. “They are creating bad feelings. They are not being tolerant of our feelings.”

This is backward. One should tolerate the “bad feelings” that other people insist on “creating,” not suppress the creation of bad feelings. (Has Rabbi Levin just graduated kindergarten?)

Out of tolerance I don’t think any religion should be banned (or discouraged) by the state. Members of religion X should be allowed to demonstrate in a city that is holy to religion Y. The anti-gay should be allowed to demonstrate in New York. And gays should be allowed to demonstrate in any city. That is tolerance.

That Levin understands the concept so poorly is impossible. He is manipulating the language and poisoning the argument, just like the best and worst political and public relations hacks. The only difference is he’s in the God business.

But seeing as these guys have adopted a corporate culture of religious inclusiveness, I guess that means they’ve stopped killing each other? They all agree that homosexual sex is bad, and there’s not much else to argue about?

… the Israeli military killed 18 Palestinian civilians in a shelling attack in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, the Israeli security forces went on a heightened state of alert to guard against a Palestinian attack.

Ergo, the peaceful gay rally had to be moved into a sports arena. Gotta love that multicultural Godzilla.