Ah, the fun of ITV. Richard Dawkins (a smashing chap in my opinion) lets go at religion in a 2-part series, The Root of All Evil?. And after all, it’s about time some rational views got aired in this debate. The government is always telling us how it corresponds with faith groups when deciding policy and what-have-you. Yet that group which is generally classified as secular follows Christianity to sit in 2nd. place as a classification of beliefs (or lack of, in this case) in the UK. And we get ignored. Bitter? You bet. The government’s answer? Make highlighting the flaws of religion a crime.
The double standards here are funny. If I believed in a giant rabbit that watches over me then I’d get locked up for my own good (and possibly the rabbit’s). If I believe the rabbit is, in fact, a large misogynistic father figure in the sky then I get consulted about government policy. Likewise, were I to fleece large numbers of people of cash in return for a promise of life-after-death thanks to a handy super-drug I’d be convicted of fraud and probably let free as gaols are overcrowded. Were I to involve religion then I’d get to move to Salt Lake City. Hallelujah.
The standard reply from the religious chaps is that ‘Hitler, Stalin and Mao were nasty chaps’. Firstly, there’s no evidence Hitler was an atheist (he was Christian in the 1920s and certainly theistic to the end), not to mention that the shameful actions of that bastion of moral righteousness the Catholic Church during the war make it clear that the church cared more about Catholics in Germany than Jews in concentration camps. But that’s playing with dodging the bullet anyway – the fallacy is that atheism was somehow to blame for their crimes. The problem here is that atheism requires that we take responsibility for ourselves and our actions, while Christianity offers a mix of threats and opium – God will spank you silly if you’re bad, but if you’re good you get life eternal. Spiffing. Atheism doesn’t require empty threats, but I would argue offers implicit morality – if there’s no after-life you’d better do the best with what you have. The morals tend to come out the same, but whereas one is dogma, which requires no analysis, the other requires thought (which in turn requires education, always a danger to religious control).
And if we must fight fire with fire, the Christians were pretty implicit in the slave trade, which dwarfs the Holocaust as genocide. Likewise with the culls of the Aborigines in Australia. The Indians in Puritan America. Plenty of Christians got their hands dirty in the Holocaust. And you know what, plenty of Christians spoke out against these things and fought to stop them. They existed on both sides – just like Atheists. Obviously the word of God isn’t as unifying as they’d like us to think.
