In recent months, a spate of atheist books have argued that religion represents, as End of Faith author Sam Harris puts it, "the most potent source of human conflict, past and present." Posted on 11/24/2006 7:42:55 PM PST by Teófilo
by Dinesh D'Souza - Republished with his permission.
In recent months, a spate of atheist books have argued that religion represents, as End of Faith author Sam Harris puts it, "the most potent source of human conflict, past and present."
Columnist Robert Kuttner gives the familiar litany. "The Crusades slaughtered millions in the name of Jesus. The Inquisition brought the torture and murder of millions more. After Martin Luther, Christians did bloody battle with other Christians for another three centuries."
In his bestseller The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins contends that most of the world's recent conflicts — in the Middle East, in the Balkans, in Northern Ireland, in Kashmir, and in Sri Lanka — show the vitality of religion's murderous impulse.
The problem with this critique is that it exaggerates the crimes attributed to religion, while ignoring the greater crimes of secular fanaticism. The best example of religious persecution in America is the Salem witch trials. How many people were killed in those trials?
Thousands? Hundreds? Actually, fewer than 25. Yet the event still haunts the liberal imagination.
It is strange to witness the passion with which some secular figures rail against the misdeeds of the Crusaders and Inquisitors more than 500 years ago. The number of people sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition — which was active over a period of 350 years — is estimated at 5,000.
This figure is tragic, and of course population levels were much lower at the time. But even so, it is minuscule compared with the death tolls produced by the atheist despotisms of the 20th century. In the name of creating their version of a religion-free utopia, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong produced the kind of mass slaughter that no Inquisitor could possibly match. Collectively these atheist tyrants murdered more than 100 million people. Moreover, many of the conflicts that are counted as "religious wars" were not fought over religion. They were mainly fought over rival claims to territory and power. Can the wars between England and France be called religious wars because the English were Protestants and the French were Catholics? Hardly.
The same is true today. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not, at its core, a religious one. It arises out of a dispute over self-determination and land. Hamas and the extreme orthodox parties in Israel may advance theological claims — "God gave us this land" and so forth — but the conflict would remain essentially the same even without these religious motives. Ethnic rivalry, not religion, is the source of the tension in Northern Ireland and the Balkans.
Blindly blaming religion for conflict
Moreover, many of the conflicts that are counted as "religious wars" were not fought over religion. They were mainly fought over rival claims to territory and power.
Yet today's atheists insist on making religion the culprit. Consider Mr. Harris's analysis of the conflict in Sri Lanka. "While the motivations of the Tamil Tigers are not explicitly religious," he informs us, "they are Hindus who undoubtedly believe many improbable things about the nature of life and death." In other words, while the Tigers see themselves as combatants in a secular political struggle, Harris detects a religious motive because these people happen to be Hindu and surely there must be some underlying religious craziness that explains their fanaticism.
Harris can go on forever in this vein. Seeking to exonerate secularism and atheism from the horrors perpetrated in their name, he argues that Stalinism and Maoism were in reality "little more than a political religion." As for Nazism, "while the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominantly secular way, it was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity." Indeed, "The holocaust marked the culmination of ... two thousand years of Christian fulminating against the Jews."
One finds the same inanities in Mr. Dawkins's work. Don't be fooled by this rhetorical legerdemain. Dawkins and Harris cannot explain why, if Nazism was directly descended from medieval Christianity, medieval Christianity did not produce a Hitler. How can a self-proclaimed atheist ideology, advanced by Hitler as a repudiation of Christianity, be a "culmination" of 2,000 years of Christianity? Dawkins and Harris are employing a transparent sleight of hand that holds Christianity responsible for the crimes committed in its name, while exonerating secularism and atheism for the greater crimes committed in their name.
Religious fanatics have done things that are impossible to defend, and some of them, mostly in the Muslim world, are still performing horrors in the name of their creed. But if religion sometimes disposes people to self-righteousness and absolutism, it also provides a moral code that condemns the slaughter of innocents. In particular, the moral teachings of Jesus provide no support for — indeed they stand as a stern rebuke to — the historical injustices perpetrated in the name of Christianity.
Atheist hubris
But if religion sometimes disposes people to self-righteousness and absolutism, it also provides a moral code that condemns the slaughter of innocents. In particular, the moral teachings of Jesus provide no support for — indeed they stand as a stern rebuke to — the historical injustices perpetrated in the name of Christianity.
The crimes of atheism have generally been perpetrated through a hubristic ideology that sees man, not God, as the creator of values.
Using the latest techniques of science and technology, man seeks to displace God and create a secular utopia here on earth. Of course if some people — the Jews, the landowners, the unfit, or the handicapped — have to be eliminated in order to achieve this utopia, this is a price the atheist tyrants and their apologists have shown themselves quite willing to pay. Thus they confirm the truth of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's dictum, "If God is not, everything is permitted."
Whatever the motives for atheist bloodthirstiness, the indisputable fact is that all the religions of the world put together have in 2,000 years not managed to kill as many people as have been killed in the name of atheism in the past few decades.
It's time to abandon the mindlessly repeated mantra that religious belief has been the greatest source of human conflict and violence. Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history.
Dinesh D'Souza. "Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history." Christian Science Monitor (November 21, 2006).
Expressed permission granted by Mr. D'Souza to republish this article in Vivificat! via e-mail to me dated 11/23/2006. I also translated this work into Spanish with Mr. D'Souza's permission, and it is now available at the sister blog.
Original lay out and credits due to the Catholic Education Resource Center.
THE AUTHOR
Dinesh D'Souza is the Robert and Karen Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. D'Souza has been called one of the "top young public-policy makers in the country" by Investor’s Business Daily. His areas of research include the economy and society, civil rights and affirmative action, cultural issues and politics, and higher education. He is the author of: Letters to a Young Conservative, What's So Great about America, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus; The End of Racism; Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader; and, most recently, The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in an Age of Techno-Affluence. Dinesh D'Souza's new book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 will be published in January by Doubleday. Visit his website here.
PING!
And no, I'm not a Christian-basher, or religion-basher. But it's darkly amusing to read how basically no one, no country, no faith, no institution is responsible for anything ever done in its name. Soon we'll be hearing how Islam isn't responsible for the current rising tide of anti-western/anti-Chrisitan feeling, but atheism is behind that, too.
Strong beliefs are responsible for a lot of good things, which those faiths' adherents claim responsibility for; strong beliefs are responsible for a lot of bad things, too, and it's not always "someone else's" fault.
Oh, and this is an interesting point of view coming from the guy who on Bill Maher's promoted the idea that the 9/11 terrorists weren't cowards.
MAHER: Not true.
D'SOUZA: Not true. Look at what they did. First of all, you have a whole bunch of guys who are willing to give their life. None of them backed out. All of them slammed themselves into pieces of concrete.
MAHER: Exactly.
D'SOUZA: These are warriors. And we have to realize that the principles of our way of life are in conflict with people in the world. And so -- I mean, I'm all for understanding the sociological causes of this, but we should not blame the victim. Americans shouldn't blame themselves because other people want to bomb them.
from Politically Incorrect, September 2001
So I guess the terrorists were atheists?
Not just a nice try-- plain facts.
the 20th century was the most secular century ever. It was easily the bloodiest as well.
Stalin and Mao killed over 100 million.
Atheism and Communism intertwined for a bloodlust that has gotten far too little examination.
Nietszche's Uberman left behind some bloody footprints in the previous century. I hope they never return.
Whose revisionist history, the author's or yours?
I don't see why people who strongly hold religious beliefs should be upset by the atheist argument against religion: that it causes wars. Of course religious beliefs cause wars - they are the only wars worth fighting! Most religious beliefs go the heart of life - the very home, the shrine, the hearth, the deeply-held core of family life. When that core is attacked by whatever, then it has to be defended - one is fighting for one's heart. If a religion does not cause wars, it ain't a religion worth fighting for.
Modern wars of last century which have caused so much bloodshed were wars about ideas which were supposed to replace religious beliefs. Unfortunately, modern ideologies, all of them, including "liberal democracy", were made by people who increasingly have given up any moral restraints on state and warrior behaviour. The nature of the total state and war has changed the nature of war - that is why they are so bad. And ironically, are the very wars which were less worth fighting for than defending one's religious beliefs.
Blaming atheism for any particular nutcase regime is as absurd as blaming theism for the inquisition or the genocide of the native American’s. Around 100 million were killed in a much less populated world, arguably making "it" the bloodiest period. Neither theists nor atheists ideologies are immune to their share of freaks.
One thing all those genocidal crack pots probably have in common is fanaticism like that posted here, imagining some other broad ideological classification is the root source of all their problems and no sacrifice of others is too high a price to pay to rid the world of it.
It is a stock debating trick to conceptually divide the world into categories to suit one's argument, and then deny one's opponent the right to use the same trick.
Those purporting a moral superiority for atheism do this by first lumping all religions together, then creating a distinction within atheism so that the state atheism of the Soviet Union, Red China, and other Marxist states with oceans of human blood to their discredit somehow don't count, or in the more refined version of the trick count as 'religiously motivate' murderers, since 'Marxism became a religion'.
What they are really arguing for the the purported moral superiority of the refined, urbane, cultured atheists who populate university tea rooms and art galleries in Soho, who have never had their hands on the reigns of power to be in a place to enforce their will on a populace, and ultimately their own moral superiority.
Of course, urbane, cultured social democratic atheism, too, has the blood of millions on its hands: between abortion and the excess malaria deaths due to the DDT ban, it may even have killed more than Soviet Communism.
I think a more telling division, as regards the effect on human affairs, is the division between those who have a moral, religious, or philosophical basis for never defining away the surpassing worth of any human being, and those who do not, whether it is the Biblical anthropology of "come let Us make Man in Our image and likeness," supplemented with either Hillel's or Christ's version of the 'golden rule', or the Buddhist compassion for all beings or some other such basis.
Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and the odd philosophically self-consistent pro-life libertarian atheist, all end up on the right side of that divide. The human-sacrificing Aztecs and Canaanites, the Nazis, Communists, abortion-loving secular 'humanists', and Muslims end up on the wrong side.
As an Orthodox Christian, I have no interest whatsover in defending religion qua religion. Indeed, Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos, whom I greatly respect and admire, has ventured that Orthodox Christianity is not, in fact, a religion--as in religion, Man reaches out for God (or the transcendant), while in Holy Orthodoxy, the activity runs in the opposite direction. If I really must defend some broader turf than the Orthodox Church in a debate about the merits of 'religion', I will take my stand with the first group of my dichotomy, and will claim an equal right to decide what is a relevant distinction to that claimed by atheists who want to lump the martyrs who submitted to death in imitation of Christ with their pagan and Muslim persecutors, while ignoring their atheist persecutors culpability.
Recommend you Google the word "democide" - might prove to be quite enlightening.
I think humans will find any excuse to have a war, that's our nature. The real trick is to make sure your side is always the winning side.
Oh, the irony..........
Period.
It has also killed more in its name the last 100 years than all the others since the beginning of mankind.
The Russian madness, China, Korea, Cambodia, Viet Nam, Cuba, misc. assorted other marxist states......an amazing total. Just staggering.
Islam is a ways behind, but wanting to catch up fast.
Kinda like the author of this article does?
Read the headline, and then lecture ME about "lumping" together.
Asserting it doesn't make it so.
Islam is a ways behind, but wanting to catch up fast.
On this we can agree.
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