Religion and Violence

A common reason given for believing religion is bad is that it has resulted in violence over the years.  But the fact is that similar claims can be made for lack of religion.  So this creates a quandary.  The answer?  It's what all humans have in common: human nature.  Perhaps this supports the biblical claim that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."

The following from a discussion by Alister McGrath and David Helfand, as presented in A Place for Truth: Leading Thinkers Explore Life's Hardest Questions, under "The New Atheists and the Meaning of Life."  McGrath's reference to Dawkins is in the context of The God Delusion.

Alister McGrath states,

. . . Certainly, from my own Northern Ireland situation, I can easily relate to this.  As I was growing up, it seemed self-evident that religion led to violence.  I thought that if we got rid of religion, there would be none of this violence that we saw, for example, in my homeland of Northern Ireland. 

That is what I thought back in the 1960s.  Nowadays, I'm not quite so sure.  Let me try to explain why.  Let me begin by saying there is no doubt that religion can cause violence.  But I don't believe that religion is ether a necessary or a sufficient cause of violence . . . 

. . . I also want to make the point that in the twentieth century, we have seen atheism move from being on the periphery of things to actually taking power in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.  And certainly for me, as I read the history of the twentieth century, atheism also has been guilty of violence and oppression.  

It seems to me, actually, it's not really either religion or antireligion that is the issue.  It may well be there's something about human nature: it inspires us to do great things but also draws us down to do some dreadful things.  In other words, inspiration can cause us to do good but also to do bad things as well.  

Again, I go back to Terry Eagleton's review in the London Review of Books. Professor Dawkins, he says, spends four hundred pages "scientifically" and "impartially" evaluating religion, but not in one of those pages can we find a single good thing to say about it.  It does have its good points, but it also has its bad points, but therefore surely, the agenda ought to be working for reformation, not abolition. 

. . . Suppose Dawkins were to get his way; suppose religion were to be abolished, would that end violence in our societies?  Sociologists will make the point  that it won't because in many ways societies are extremely good about constructing causes for disagreement.  These social constructions could be religious.  They could be gender-based.  They could be class-based.  They could be race-based.  They could be tribal-based.  They could be financially based.  They could be whatever you want, but the issue is that humanity poses a remarkable capacity of generating division and then offering explanations and motivations which move these from mere differentiation to lethal conflicts between people groups.  

So, I wonder if religion were to be abolished whether the violence we see would actually disappear at all.  Certainly, specifically religious violence would, but others would come in very quickly to fill that vacuum.  Dawkins shows us very powerfully that religion can cause things to go wrong, but he tends to present the pathological as if it were the normal.  It seems to me that needs to be challenged.  

I end with one very simple example.  When Iwas studying chemistry at Oxford, one of my set texts was called Reagents for Organic Synthesis by Louis Fieser and Mary Fieser.  It was a long book, and I have to say it was a rather dull book.  I later learned more about Louis Fieser, professor of chemistry at Harvard, a remarkable man who invented synthetic roots to various steroids, to the blood's anticoagulating factor.  He's done a lot to help hemophiliacs.  But back in 1942, he invented something else: Americans were discovering the Japanese were rather deeply entrenched in certain well-defended positions in the Pacific.  A weapon was needed to be able to deal with this.  Fieser came to the rescue and invented napalm.  Now, I could take a very simplistic view and say, Hey, that shows science is evil.  Let's stop it.  

But I wouldn't say that, and none of you would either.  It just brings home to us that that's what human nature is like.  Sometimes, we do great things, sometimes bad things.  Those bad things need to be critiqued, and we need to get rid of them.  But there are still good things there.  I want to say religion is like that.  Let's work to reform it, but actually trying to get rid of it will simply bring in its wake much worse things than Richard Dawkins, I think, allows.