Pirate's Cove

Why am I not surprised?

Nobody is suggesting that all religious people are violent, intolerant, racist, bigoted, contemptuous of women and so on. It would be absurd to suggest such a thing: just as absurd as to generalize about all atheists. I am not even concerned with statistical generalizations about the majority of religious people (or atheists). My concern here is over whether there is any general reason why religion might be more or less likely to bias individuals towards all those unpleasant things in Christopher Hitchens’s list: to make them more likely to exhibit them than they would have been without religion. I think the answer is yes.

Religion is bad! All religion. Probably most especially those Jooooooos!

Religion changes, for people, the definition of good. Atheists and humanists tend to define good and bad deeds in terms of the welfare and suffering of others. Murder, torture, and cruelty are bad because they cause people to suffer. Most religious people think them bad, too, but some religions (for example the religion of the Taliban) sanction all of them under some circumstances. For non-religious people, the behavior of consenting adults in a private bedroom is the business of nobody else, and is not bad unless it causes suffering – for example by breaking up a happy family. But many religions arrogate to themselves the right to decide that certain kinds of sexual behavior, even if they do no harm to anyone, are wrong.

Isn’t it cute how Dawkins links in the Taliban? No matter how despicable their notions of worshiping God, at least they have some sort of moral center, no matter how twisted and degenerate, and moral guidence, versus those who wing it, and whose notions of propriety and good conduct change with the wind, and tend to blow away like a fart in the wind.

The actions of the Taliban, their vile bullying of women, their sanctimonious hatred of all that might lead to enjoyment, their violence, their ignorant bigotry, their hatred of education, their cruelty, seem to me to be as close to pure evil as anything I can imagine. Yet, by the lights of their own religion they are supremely righteous – really good people.

In essence, what Dawkins is doing is comparing all religions, including the different sects, and putting them all in the same bucket: bad and evil.

It is easy for religious faith, even if it is irrational in itself, to lead a sane and decent person, by rational, logical steps, to do terrible things. There is a logical path from religious faith to evil deeds. There is no logical path from atheism to evil deeds. Of course, many evil deeds are done by individuals who happen to be atheists. But it can never be rational to say that, because of my nonbelief in religion, it would be good to be cruel, to murder, to oppress women, or to perpetrate any of the evils on the Hitchens list.

Dawkins, and the other athiests and religion haters (they aren’t very tolerant, eh?), seem to miss the fact that, religious or not, people do bad things. Religion gives them guidence on how not to, but, people are not perfect. There are plenty of people who are not religious who do terrible things. Does anyone remember the Nazis? How about Russia under communism? North Korea? China? How many millions have blood on their hands in those secular nations?

That picture of the link on the front page should say all that needs to be said about the way the Left thinks about all religion, regardless.