Is Religion Dangerous?

In the modern era, since the times when it was still dangerous to criticise religion, many atheists thinkers have written books and articles attacking all aspects of religious thought and practice. We can cite for instance David Hume, Karl Marx, Emma Goldman, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, and many others. However, over the last few decades, a new style of anti-religious writing has emerged, by authors such as Richard Dawkins, Cristopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, all of whom have been consulted at length in the preparation of this essay. These writers are concerned that religion nowadays poses as serious threat to the well being and even perhaps the very existence of humanity. We shall, in the following paragraphs examine a number of arguments leading to this conclusion as well as the counter arguments in defense of religion. On a personal level, I think that religion could be dangerous for people from two points of view: the missed opportunity of living in the hope of a better world after death; and the sadness and unhappiness that can result from living a life governed by archaic principles and practices, plagued by guilt, and in fear of cruel eternal punishment. Religions use the promise of a better afterlife to make their adherents accept poor conditions now, and to bow to the authority of those claiming to have some direct and privileged connection with the religion's particular deity, or deities. This is true not only of the many religions affecting the world today, but of those even more numerous dead religions: the Greek pantheon, the Norse gods, the Aztec gods with their thirst for human blood, and so on.

Scientific critics of religion argue that we should all live our lives as if that was all we shall ever have, enjoying each day that is given to us, rather following a philosophy invented by desert nomads who lived thousands of years ago, and who lacked the knowledge and educational level of a contemporary ten year old. Religious people counter this argument by saying that God gives a meaning to your life: after a long period of struggling to achieve the material happiness and the other people's love, He has a place for you in Heaven as a reward for the good things that you have done on earth. "Life is a journey, from here to God" ("What is the meaning of life") I cannot share this view because, for an unbeliever, it is irrational. It is true that science cannot give a meaning to our lives because, it says, we do not have one. The universe is too immense for us to mean something for it but that does not mean that we have to accept it. I do not think that we need a god or a heaven to make sense in this world. Everybody signifies something: teachers are made to pave the students' path to a future career, scientists open people's eyes to the deep beauty of nature and universe, archeologists gives us a better understanding of our past, so on and so forth. Some people argue that humanity has some deep need for spirituality, and that religions satisfy this need. Many people feel that there must be something "out there", something greater than us. Personally, I think that those who make use of this argument are just unbelievers trying to share the spirituality of religious people. In the Western democracies, where religious persecution is a thing of the past, it is believed that religion is nowadays effectively harmless, and seems to help many people feel better about their lives. Plus, it also contributes to cultural cohesion and provides a valueable support for many.

Anti-religionists point out that the concept of hell, common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is a truly horrific idea. The Koran in particular gives frightening and gory details on what is in store for you if you believe the wrong things. Such ideas must do incalculable harm to young impressionable minds. Religions also are greatly criticised for the curious beliefs relating to human sexuality and dietary practices. An extreme example of the former is the barbarous practice of female excision, a clear attempt to control the sexuality of women by religious means. As for restrictive dietary laws, Richard Dawkins in the God Delusion suggests that they may originally have been an attempt by religious leaders to distinguish the tribe from others, and to hamper relations with members of other tribes. As far as the idea of hell is concerned (and in other cases of nonsensical belief), supporters of religion are obliged to hide behind assertions of certain knowledge, arguing that sinners must be punished, and so on. Religious practices are often excused as being part of the tradition that gives the religion much of its strength an legitimacy. Since unbelievers are condemned in advance, their lives have no value, and since their unbelief is seen as a threat to the members of the only "true" faith, they deserve to be killed by the righteous: "Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things that takes religion" (Weinberg quoted in Dennett, Breaking the Spell, p. 279). Their deaths are, after all, only a hastening of the start of their eternal punishment. Such thinking has armed religious fanatics in the past, as in the present, with a extreme cruelty that only the worst of the Nazis could equal. Consider the Spanish conquistadores who would baptise native children just before bashing their brains out on a rock, the unconcern of

Muslim suicide bombers for the innocent lives that they will take, and the numerous atrocities perpetrated in religious conflicts. Religionists counter such arguments by pointing out that such horrible acts are committed by imperfect humans, often extremists, and thus do not reflect on religion in itself. They will often also argue that if people did not believe in a god, civilisation would descend into murder, theft, and rape:
A better interpretation of the claim that religion is necessary for morality is that there wouldn't be a difference between right and wrong if God did not make it so. Nothing would be morally required or prohibited, so everything would be permitted (Anderson, "If God Is Dead...", p. 333)

Believers argue that people will behave virtuously and that they will avoid sin because of the risk of eternal punishment. Nevertheless, to show that the barbarity is still with us today, I shall quote the following report from The New York Times Magazine on the violence that erupted between Hindus and Muslims in India in the winter of 2002:
Mothers were skewered on swords as their children watched. Young women were stripped and raped in broad daylight, then... set on fire. A pregnant woman's belly was slit open, her fetus raised skyward on the tip of a sword and then tossed onto one of the fires that blazed across the city. (Mishra, "The Other Face of Fanaticism", web)

While the excesses of the Catholic Church in the Dark and Middle Ages have now been consigned to the past, and modern Christianity is now mostly "tamed", religious violence is still a very real part of our contemporary world, as witness this list of fairly recent conflicts:
Palestine (Jews v Muslims), the Balkans (orthodox Serbians v Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians v. Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants v. Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims v. Hindus), Sudan (Muslims v. Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims v. Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims v. Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists v. Tamil Hindus),

Indonesia (Muslims v. Timorese Christians), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians v. Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis v. Catholic and Orthodox Armenians). (Harris, The End of Faith, p. 26)

To those who argue that religion causes conflict and wars, religionists will often point out the fact that neither of the two World Wars was fought for religious reasons, and that not all of the conflicts that occur in the world are for religious reasons. They would also insist that Stalin was an atheist, and that Hitler, though baptised a Catholic, was never particularly religious. Returning for the moment to the Middle Ages, we shall consider a strange phenomenon that plagued the Christian Church then, and that that is the combination of flawed philosophy and a corrupt clergy. One of Martin Luther's main criticisms of the Catholic Church was the rampant use by a corrupt clergy of the curious idea of "indulgences" whereby sinners could purchase time off in Purgatory. This weird idea provided an excellent income for many corrupt priests, while of course making the poor even poorer. Although it is true that this corruption occurs today in many different forms and in vrious religions and sects, it would be wrong to accuse all the religious people of it. There is, though, an obvious link from these corrupt priests to the Tele-Evangelists and other Gurus of our time, who take money from naive souls in search of some meaning to their lives. Religionists again will not accept that such problems are due to religion. They argue that corruption occurs in all walks of life, and particularly, for instance, amongst politiocians and civil servants in positions to take bribes. They will say that the fact that some religious sects are led by corrupt and hypocritical people, does not mean that all religions are corrupt. Intolerance seems to be an almost natural characteristic of religion (with the possible exception of Buddhism, and similar meditative philosophies). This

has caused, and still causes, much suffering for those who find themselves on the wrong side of an established religion that also has secular power. Here is what the Bible itself says what one should do about those who worship false gods in one's own family:
If your brother, the son of your father or of your mother, or your son or daughter, or the spouse whom you embrace, or your most intimate friend, tries to secretly seduce you, saying, "Let us go and serve other gods," unknown to you or your ancestors before you, gods of the peoples surrounding you, whether near you or far away, anywhere throughout the world, you must not consent, you must not listen to him; you must show him no pity, you must not spare him or conceal his guilt. No, you must kill him, your hand must strike the first blow in putting him to death and the hands of the rest of the people following. You must stone him to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God... (Deuteronomy, 13:7-11)

The Inquisition was perhaps the embodiment of religious intolerance at its most cruel. The great number of "witches" that were burnt at the stake during the Middle Ages had often done no more than inspire the dislike of a neighbour or relative. Here again, corruption played a part in condemning these pour souls to a horrible death, since the Church had the ingenious idea of sharing the inheritance of the presumed witch with the person who had made the denunciation. In recent times we have seen a religious leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, put a bounty on the head of Salman Rushdie, who had dared to implicitly criticise Islam in his book "The Satanic Verses", and in 2005 the publication of "blasphemous" cartoons depicting Mohammed, resulted in death threats against the Danish author of the drawings (Hitchens, God Is Not Great, p. 28-30). Religionists are once again largely obliged to argue that religion is not responsible for the excesses perpetrated in its name, but that people are in

fact to blame, and that things would be even worse were it not for the civilising effect of religion. Luckily, modern Christians are unlikely to take the verses from Deuteronomy quoted above, as a literal obligation. However, modern-day Islam is in many ways very like medieval Christianity, and as Sam Harris again observes (The End of Faith, p114):
While the Koran merely describes the punishments that await the apostate in the next world (Koran 3:86-91), the hadith is emphatic about the justice that must be meted out in this one: "Whoever changes his religion, kill him". (Harris, The

End of Faith, p. 114) The very real problem for humanity in the coming decades is that people with a medieval frame of thinking might soon dispose of nuclear weapons. In these circumstances, it would not be an exaggeration to fear for the very existence of the human race, since these lunatics, confident of their place in paradise, could easily calculate that the destruction of the world was a small price to pay in order to eliminate the unbelievers. The arguments detailed above show very clearly the basic difference between opponents of religion and its supporters. On the one hand, a multitude of arguments have been put forward to show that religious beliefs are irrational and based on absolutely no evidence. The counter arguments, denying that religion is dangerous, are almost exclusively based on opinion and belief, or simply denial. This incompatibility of attitudes unfortunately characterizes any discussion between atheists and religious people.