First Things has published Anthony Sacramone’s review of Vox Day’s book, The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. It includes:
To take just one of many examples, a common trope among atheists is that religion is the No. 1 cause of wars in history. “If religion were an important element of warmaking, one would expect to find a great deal of text commenting upon it,” Day writes. But you don’t. After reading the great war theorists, from Sun Tzu to Von Clausewitz, Day found pages and pages about perseverance, spies, geometry, inspirational music—but virtually nothing about religion.
As for the nature of the wars themselves, talk about specific: Day found 123 wars that could validly be claimed to have religion at their heart—a grand total of 6.98 percent of all wars fought. “It’s also interesting to note that more than half of these religious wars, sixty-six in all, were waged by Islamic nations,” Day offers as an aside.
About 7% of identifiable wars in history war fought for religious reasons. Most of those were initiated by Muslims. This does not justify any war fought for the purpose of advancing Christianity. But it certainly puts the lie to beliefs that Christianity bears the blame for a large part of the violence in world history.
We might as well add this current item to the point, too: 150 million murdered in the 20th century–by whom?
Hat Tip: One Eternal Day
Thanks for the link, Tom.
As well as debunking that old canard about religion causing most of the wars in history the review also touches upon another subject that came up very briefly here. That is the misuse of the Barna statistics on marriage and divorce rates.
Thanks for that note, Charlie. It looks like an interesting book!
Communists–i.e., secular religionists. Communists have essentially the same mindset as old-school theists, except that they choose the state, rather than God, as their object of worship. The problem is that whole sheep/worshiper/slave mindset. If people would quit blindly following orders (whether they come from “God” or the State), and instead listen to their own moral sensibilities, the world would be a much better place, imo.
What exactly is the problem then, Jordan? Is it belief? Is it authority? Is it lack of one’s one personal sense of what is right or wrong? Is it some kind of blindness? What would be the solution?
I think the root cause of a lot of the evil in this world is our rejection of moral intuition in favor of blindly following a set of rules (whether those rules have been laid out by God or the State).
Take Abraham, for example: Surely, if he had been more in touch with his moral intuition, and less convinced by God’s seemingly arbitrary rules, he would’ve thought, “Hang on, it would be wrong for me to sacrifice my son; and, if God’s really making such an outrageous demand, then he doesn’t deserve to be worshiped.” But, as we all know, Abraham chose blind obedience over moral intuition, and we’re supposed to admire him for it, to aspire to become as faithful and obedient as him! It boggles my mind…
Anyways, to answer your question more directly: The problem, in my view, is that these worship-based worldviews (Communism, Christianity, etc.) teach us to reject our moral intuition whenever it conflicts with demands made by our object of worship. In other words, blind obedience is supposed to take precedence over our innate sense of right and wrong. It should come as no surprise that this mindset has caused all sorts of problems throughout history.
As for my solution: In a word, Humanism. How many people have been killed in the name of Humanism? None, as far as I know, and there’s a good reason for that: Humanists have the audacity to always listen to their moral intuition.
FYI, he provides the book in downloadable formats free of charge on his website.
What’s the address, Jarick? I couldn’t find it. Thanks for the tip, though.
Thanks for the link to the review.
I have made a similar argument to atheists who advance the “religion causes violence and therefore is a poison argument” here. The problem is a social one, not primarily a problem of this or that belief. Jordan is on to something with the pronouncement of any lemming response to any ideology. It is not the belief but the blind acceptance of that belief that causes a myopia and seeks to assimilate difference and thus eliminate it like the Borg in Star Trek. It is the “resistance is futile” policy in any social construct that exacts often undue violence on others. This can be an offensive action of assimilating others to the ideology or a defensive posture that knocks off and condemns any position that is oppositional. This is often the subject of negative utopia or dystopic literature and it all illustrates Kolakowski’s argument in his essay The Death of Utopia which demands a read from anyone who takes a position with this particular argument against theism.
I think that Drew makes a point that persons like Jordan miss completely when they criticize the account of Abraham and Isaac. Belief is not the problem – blind belief is. The Bible never asks for blind belief, and makes a great many references to the importance of discipleship and rationality in our walk of faith.
If that was the very first time that God had ever spoken to, interacted with, or done something for Abraham, then there’d be some reason to criticize his actions. But Abraham willingly did what he did on the basis of his prior experiences with God. His history with God gave him rational reasons to believe God wouldn’t make him do something wrong. Abraham trusted God to make things work out for the good, even though he didn’t understand why.
Abraham’s faith wasn’t blind – it was based in reality. Jordan’s just replacing his own “intuition” – as random and arbitrary as that can be – as the highest authority in the universe. The mindset that nothing should take precedence over out internal “intuition” is the kind of thinking that leads the Stalins and Maos to declare their actions justifiable.
The new atheists never claim religion is the main cause of wars.
The problem is faith. Believing you are right regardless of the evidence. People seem to say “Christianity is different”. You are aware all religions, even mutually exclusive ones claim miracles and divine interaction (India is big on these). Why are your true and theirs false?
The reason it is a problem of belief is that certain religions advocate the killing of nonbelievers- in fact they are the two biggest ones on the planet! Just because people don’t read them that way now, tells you more about the people and less about the religion.
Nice piece about moral intuition, but some people don’t have it and most people don’t have it strong enough. Ever watched people play video games? You can see people mourn the death of characters and even grow uncomfortable with killing their enemies. By contrast if you watch strategy gamers, you’ll find many doing blatently immoral actions without batting an eye. There is an entire strategy in Civ 4 that relies on slave labor and working your population to death, while games like Sword of the Stars have you commit whole scale genocide to expand. So you do need to have rules, but they need to be based on peoples moral intuition. Hey- no one ever said life is easy.
Hi Skinner,
What claims of miraculous interventions do you attribute to Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc?
@ Tom:
http://voxday.blogspot.com/
Not your average Christian blog, mind you.
Thanks again, Jarick.
Here’s a more specific link i found from there: http://irrationalatheist.com/downloads.html
Well, as we all know on the day the president of the fearless leader, current head of the peoples republic of korea was born, birds took flight and sang and the whole natural world rejoiced. Oh, and the rest of the world is sending them aid packages as tribute to their divne ruler. I’d call all that a miracle, wouldn’t you?
Official biographers claim that his birth at Baekdu Mountain was foretold by a swallow, and heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow over the mountain and a new star in the heavens- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Jong-il
Not to mention the countries supreme ruler happens to be a dead man- like the Incans, but with less internal strife. North Korea is an extreme example, but that is only because it is a completely closed society, not because communists are rational.
Hi Skinner,
No.
It would seem by your lack of evidence and selective response (avoiding all the people I mentioned) that probably your reference to miracles and divine interaction was a bit of a red herring.
It seems that the faith of people who kill those in disagreement actually has little or nothing to do with miracles and divine interaction.
Trying to equate Christianity to other religions that also feature miracles does nothing whatsoever to mitigate the point of the post or following comments. It does not make the beliefs the same. And neither is such a belief necessary, or even common, among those who wage war and have killed the most people.
I am in the process of consuming The God Delusion for the first time. So far, I have found a great deal of intellectual snobbery and very little solid reasoning. It is interesting how Professor Dawkins continuously narrows his definition of religion until pretty much all that is left are the Big Three. Moreover, he employs the composition fallacy extensively by producing multiple examples of specific Islamic militancy and leaving the impression that this is a characteristic of all religions.
Nevertheless, I was thoroughly enjoying the book until encountering his “wars in the name of God” argument. Then, my respect for his work plummeted. The simple fact is that wars are chiefly about the control of resources including such things as land, labor, and time. The extent to which “sanctioned by the gods” justification has been used for particular wars has merely been a device for concealing more mercenary motives. If religion were suddently removed from the planet, wars would not suddenly fall out of fashion. Their advocates would just seek other ground on which to support them.
Atheists who point to Northern Ireland should take note of the fact that nowhere outside of that tiny province, where political interests happen to coincide with religious allegiances, have Protestants and Catholics been shooting at each other recently. Moreover, the most horrendous warfare in history has had little or nothing to do with religion.
Kind regards,
Russ
Russ, your post sparked a thought on which I would like your opinion.
Dawkins and his cohort blame religion for many ways, when in fact the real root has usually been something else. You’re right about that.
I wonder if he’s doing the same thing in his books, articles, TV shows, etc. (and the same for Harris and Hitchens). That is to say, they are creating their own wars of religion. Their own beliefs have little enough rational warrant. Some of Dawkins’s most vociferous critics have been fellow atheists, and Harris is a believer in a form of Buddhism. Thus it’s arguable that theirs is a faith position, pitted against another faith position: a war of religion, in which they are the aggressors.
So far it’s been a war of words. But Harris explicitly, and Dawkins implicitly (though quite strongly) have said religion ought to be eliminated. That will not happen just by words–especially if Harris’s version is pursued.
There is a recent song by The Eagles called Hole in the World. It is their 9/11 memorial song. The lyrics of this song employ the same composition fallacy—that a fundamental characteristic of all religion is the fighting of wars over “who will be anointed”. Of course, such assertions are always made without a shred of proof or any meaningful attempt to validate the claim.
I don’t know what the others say that you mentioned, but Dawkins forgets 1) that it always takes two sides to fight a war, 2) one of the two sides could actually be fighting from a defensive “life and death” position that was forced upon them, and 3) that counterattacks, which is basically what the Crusades were, may be a legitimate response to a perceived ongoing threat. Islamists had murdered hundreds of thousands of Christians in the Middle East, across North Africa, and in the Iberian Peninsula before the Crusades were initiated. While I am a critic of the Crusades myself, had they not been fought, Sharia law might have been the foundation of European political philosophy.
My criticism of the Crusades lies not in that they were fought but in how and why. The shameless sack of Constantinople—Christians killing Christians—is inexcusable. Nevertheless, the Crusades were the world’s only chance to rid itself of the scourge of Islam. Instead of fighting a systematic pushback campaign, they fought instead for control of the dubious “prize” of the city of Jerusalem. Pacifists like, apparently, Dawkins seem to believe that the world should simply submit to the biggest bully. It appears to be immoral in his eyes to defend oneself with force when threatened by force.
Kind regards,
Russ