My take on this is that a programming language is just a tool. Use the right tool for the job. Depending on what you want to accomplish different languages may be better suited. I use Python for most of my programming these days. It's not a speed demon though there are several very serious efforts to bring it's performance up to par with languages such as Java.

Note that for most applications Python's performance is not an issue at all. In the past when I've needed to squeeze out more performance out of a specific bottleneck in my code I've implemented that part in C and then created bindings to Python.

But heck it's not a religious thing. To this day I still use Perl when I need to write a dirty one-liner.