In Friday's post, I said:

But this god would be nothing like the ethically good deity presented by the crescent religions.

By "the crescent religions". I meant the three religions that originated in the fertile crescent, which is composed of Mesopatamia and Palestine--Judaism, Christianity and Islam. From a google search, it appears that this is not the common usage that I thought it was. People seem to call them the monotheistic religions, or the Western religions, if anything. One might be tempted to call them religions of the book, but I think that this would be misleading when one considers the enormity of the Hindu scriptures.

Come to think of it, Islam didn't originate in Mesopatamia or Palestine, so my usage really doesn't make sense. I'm going to have to ask some of my historian friends what the collective term for these three religions is.