The Violence of Religion?

CAUTION: This post isn't meant to be a "rah-rah" session for Christians who want to bash the rest of the world. My goal is to get us all to think a little bit more.

Over the last few years, much has been said about bloodshed in the world being the fault of "religions" of "the religious." Most recently Richard Dawkins has blamed the violence of our modern world on those who adhere to various world faiths. He seems to imply that those who are prone to religious belief are more likely to commit atrocities (Watch a Dawkins interview )

A couple of things are VERY interesting to me about Dawkins and what he says. First note how he defines faith. He is defining it in order to deliberately bias the word. His assertion that faith is always blind or is the adherence to something in the absence of any evidence is unfair. Of all the definitions of faith listed in the dictionary (which is also not exhaustive) Dawkins narrows in on the one that best suits his own agenda. We all do this, no doubt, just calling him out.

Speaking personally, my faith is NOT totally blind. In fact to disbelieve what I now hold to be true, i would have to close my eyes to many phenomena, coincidences, and open-questions that are a part of what makes me believe.

Of course I also object to the lumping of "faiths" together in one group. To take groups that make mutually exclusive claims and treat them as something of a monolith is fool hearty and not very respectful.

Next, his focus on "evidence" is interesting. While you may be able to present evidence FOR something, how do you present evidence that something does NOT exist? To do so, you'd have to methodologically exclude every possibility of God's existence, who is by nature beyond the basic "testable" senses. You may say that you can't find a lot of evidence FOR God, but you can't logically say that evidence denies God. It's illogical.

It's also interesting because I've recently heard, (sorry i couldn't find a linked reference quickly enough) that Johns Hopkins Institute on Geopolitical studies has declared the 20th century to be the bloodiest century in human history. It numbers 130 MILLION people who have died in this century from tyranny that stems from the manifestations of HUMANISM or NATURALISM, NOT RELIGION.

But here's the "thinking point" (i may have done some rah-rah, sorry!) The thing that Dawkins ignores (and maybe some Christians too) is that PEOPLE ARE BAD. The basis of Christ's teachings are built on this truth. And it appears that in the absence of a true relationship with God, there is even less restraint to human evil. A God-less ideology has not improved our world one bit, in fact it is responsible for the Holocaust (Darwinian natural selection), for the atrocities committed under Lenin and Stalin and their purges (Atheistic zeal). Under Mao and many other bona-fide 100% Godless leaders.

The longer I live, the more I believe that the only thing empirically provable is the deep corruption of humanity, some would call it the depravity of man. And in my reading, there is only one source that is willing to stare that reality in the face and bluntly acknowledge it. Call me crazy, but that makes believing that ONE source, which corresponds to reality most fully, the most logical thing a person could do.