From Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history:
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 Inquisitor could possibly match. Collectively these atheist tyrants murdered more than 100 million people.
Although D’Souza has a relatively good counter to the anti-religion arguments that Dawkins et. al. are advancing, I think he’s missing a larger picture. Dawkins in particular is advocating for atheism over religion certainly, but more that that he is looking for a world where rational analysis and a population guided by their own internal reason are liberated from the constraints placed on them by irrational and subjective dogmas.
Although axis of evil revision 1.5 (revised at the end of the 20th Century to be Hitler-Stalin-Mao, with Mussolini and Hirohito and others removed by a combination of absolution and amnesia) is on the surface a trifecta of religious eradication, the goal of each regime is better understood as attempting to abruptly replace their own culture’s traditional religions with a secular state religion.
It is unfair from this point of view then, to characterize these modern despots as atheist in the operative sense of the word. While they may have sought to eradicate belief in God, they also wished to infuse the state with a mystical quality and god-like properties - Hitler’s Vaterland, and the Marxist Candy Apple Mountains of Communism as practiced in the USSR and China.
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….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.
Here I think D’Souza is right on target, and I wish this meme would get more play in mainstream news analysis. Most of the conflicts that get play as religious conflicts are most definitely economic, historical and cultural rather than religious per se, but the common wisdom is that the conflicts are religious in nature.To tie this back to my first point, framing the conflicts as religious in nature essentially paints them as irrational, and thus suggests from the outset that resolution is close to impossible, because how can we ever reconcile the beliefs of two different religions?
But in reality, most of these conflicts are resolvable in the long term as long as the actual underlying problems are addressed. Unfortunately the hardest things to resolve are historical — when talking to stakeholders in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I’m often dumbfounded by how historical (and thus divergent) the grievances of the various factions are. And if you can’t even get agreement on what the wrongs to be righted are, then there’s a real problem.
But the first step to solving a problem is to analyze it rationally, break it down into it’s components and attempt to find the best strategy to reach a solution. If I may submit, in most cases, an irrational or emotional player will be able to subvert any attempt to find a solution to a social problem, and although the conflicts being discussed are not religious at their core it is the presence of religion and associated emotional pressures that can keep a conflict from being resolved.
Which I believe in a roundabout is the type of argument Mr. Dawkins is advancing in his book.
