The Problem Isn't Religion or Atheism, It's Fanaticisim

Dinesh D'Souza, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, defends organized religion from criticism that links it with violence and wars:

- 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 sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition appears to be about 10,000. Some historians contend that an additional 100,000 died in jail due to malnutrition or illness.

These figures are tragic, and of course population levels were much lower at the time. But even so, they are 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 Inqu/isitor could possibly match. Collectively these atheist tyrants murdered more than 100 million people.

D'Souza's argument is fundamentally the inverse. It is not religion that is the problem, but atheism. I would argue that it isn't either of them -- fanatically taking any creed to its farthest extension to the exclusion of all else predisposes to violence.

But let's discuss his argument a little more. First of all, the reason for the disparity in the numbers of people killed has nothing to do with the creed for which the individuals were fighting. It wasn't that the Crusaders were less motivated to kill than the Red Army; we just have better, quicker ways to kill people.

Second, D'Souza uses some just ridiculous and ahistorical arguments to dissociate religion from culpability.

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. (Emphasis mine.)

I can think of a couple reasons why the Middle Ages didn't produce a Hitler. Hiltler was the product not only of insane racialism and antisemitism but also radical nationalism. Nationalism had not been invented in the Middle Ages. Asking why the Middle Ages produced no Hilter is like asking why the Romans produced no Gandhi. It is just irrelevant. And it skirts the issue that 2,000 years of antisemitism in Europe culminated in the views the Nazis had about Jews.

Third, while he acknowledges that many crimes have been made in the name of religion, he asserts that only crimes have been perpetrated in the name of atheism. He ignores any tendency of secular philosophies towards redemption.

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.

I am amazed that D'Souza would sincerely believe that if we all went back to organized religion violence would somehow magically decrease. For the moment let's put aside the diversity of religions in the world. There are diversities within particular religions that have been more than enough to cause conflict.

Furthermore, his statements reveal the ridiculousness of the entire debate between atheism and religion about the causes of violence. Both religion and atheistic creeds have been used to justify violence, when the urge towards uniformity overcomes the urge towards decency. But both atheistic and religious creeds have made strong arguments for toleration. To deliberately ignore the proponents of nonviolence on both sides of the argument is to create a debate between straw men.

The problem with religion and atheism isn't that they exist or that they naturally push one towards violence. The world is much more complicated than that. The problem is fanaticism: the exultation of one creed to such a degree that every other creed becomes not only fundamentally wrong but a desecration.

Over the last week or so, there has been a big debate on Scienceblogs.com about whether there are two types of atheists -- the militants and the less militant. (Chet summarizes it nicely. I will leave you to find the details.) I don't know whether there are two or fifty kinds of atheists. It frankly doesn't matter to me. What I do know is that any complex creed has the capacity to enforce uniformity -- and I would argue that in this capacity rests its capacity to encourage violence -- AND a capacity to encourage diversity.

Atheism and organized religion were inevitably going to have a thrown down because they deny each other's sacred premises. But that doesn't mean that either of them always makes people more prone to violence. This entire use of this argument is rhetorical -- it is trying to strike a blow against the other side by oversimplifying reality. I don't expect everyone to get a long, but at least acknowledge that the issue is a little more complicated than that.