In many countries, despite the knowledge science now affords us about human sexuality, irrational hatred of sexual minorities is encouraged - even promoted - by religious leaders, in supposed reliance upon their understandings of religious texts. They rely on their imperfect human understanding of what was written in ancient books long before Alfred Kinsey demonstrated the realities of human sexual experience.
Most religious people are good and kind. I honour those in all religions who are struggling to make a charitable, informed and unbiased contribution to the global struggle against HIV/AIDS. However, officially the Catholic and Greek and Orthodox Christian churches are still in serious denial about the evidence - just as they originally denied the opinions of Galileo and Copernicus that the Earth circled the sun.
Instead of re-examining their holy texts by reference to science (as they have in the past), spiritual leaders have adopted a new, irrational approach. An example may be found in attitudes towards gays.
Last year, the representative of the Holy See told a United Nations meeting that criminal laws against sexual minorities should be abolished. Yet that church teaches that gays must adhere to a celibate life and never engage in their ''unnatural'' sexual conduct. This is a seriously conflicted and unstable instruction.
Given that members of religious faiths should have expertise on the extreme difficulty of enforcing celibacy, it is astonishing such an instruction should be given by presumably rational people, and taught in churches, mosques and temples. Yet so it is.
The stigma over sexual conduct often taught by religious people can no longer be accepted. It is now a major cause of death in the AIDS epidemic. It has to stop. Not only because it is immoral, conflicted, irrational and wrong. Not only because it is a denial of the essential spiritual message of love at the heart of religion. But also because it is seriously impeding the global struggle against HIV and AIDS.
As Bishop Desmond Tutu has said: "Show me where Christ said, 'Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones'. Gay people too are made in my God's image. I would never worship a homophobic God."
We have a problem which, at its core, arises from the fact that 30 years into this epidemic, we do not have a cure or a vaccine. We have palliative treatment of great utility. But the world cannot afford to provide such treatment to 2.7 million new HIV infections each year.
Prevention cannot work so long as our societies stigmatise and hate many of the people most at risk. Only by getting into their heads and helping them to practise and promote safer sexual and other conduct, can we bring the AIDS epidemic down.
We cannot do this effectively without co-operation and support from religious leaders. Yet too often they are silent or speak against the policies that may help to reduce the stigma; promote the necessary realism; and spread the love of God, not the hate of vulnerable minorities.
Too many preach that condoms must not be distributed, because they promote extramarital sex, and falsely claim condoms are ineffective to prevent the spread of the virus.
Too many oppose early factual education of young people in the safer sex that may help save their lives. Too many condemn syringe exchanges that help reduce the spread of infection by injecting drug users. Too many oppose providing condoms in prisons and other institutions that are potential incubators of the epidemic.
Too many object to the decriminalisation of sex work. Too many fight fiercely against the removal of legal discrimination against gays. Far too many resist removing patriarchal attitudes to women, defending the persistence of their second-class status on unconvincing religious grounds.
Those who criticise these attitudes are often castigated as God's enemy. The religion in which I was raised had, at its core, love for God and for one another. Reconciliation. Universalism. Non-discrimination. This should be the message of religion, especially today. Yet everywhere, the message is different in practice.
Too many old men preaching dangerous messages. Sadly many of them in the past, as we now know, have been hypocrites and false-sayers.
This is an edited extract of the former High Court judge Michael Kirby's speech to a symposium in the Netherlands this week on AIDS and religion.
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