Faith and Evil

(originally posted 10/2/07)

Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and student of Niko Tinbergen, wrote a great piece for the Washington Post's "On Faith" column today. His article is entitled "Logical Path from Religious Beliefs to Evil Deeds" and proposes that atheism cannot be directly linked to various social misdeeds, but devout religion can.

"Religion changes, for people, the definition of good. Atheists and humanists tend to define good and bad deeds in terms of the welfare and suffering of others. Murder, torture, and cruelty are bad because they cause people to suffer. Most religious people think them bad, too, but some religions (for example the religion of the Taliban) sanction all of them under some circumstances. For non-religious people, the behavior of consenting adults in a private bedroom is the business of nobody else, and is not bad unless it causes suffering – for example by breaking up a happy family. But many religions arrogate to themselves the right to decide that certain kinds of sexual behavior, even if they do no harm to anyone, are wrong."

The judgement of God, or gods, has been used as an excuse for causing harm from the very beginnings of human philosophy (ah, impiety as a capital offense) up until the present day (Gen. Peter Pace, the fool who thinks that "God's Law" should rule the military). This can hardly be debated. However, it is pretty easy to throw stones at religion from such a broad and ill-defined area as athiesm. What is the counter-argument going to be? Soviet denial of the existance of gods as an excuse to shut down churches? Fervent believers in the communist/authoritarian regime did this.
Atheism is immune to arguments that it does anything due to its status as a zero point. People can build anything that they want onto atheism, becasue atheism is not anything, it is the lack of something. Lack of belief. One cannot pin blame on nothing.

Atheists are not dangerous for that philosophy alone, but zealots of any stripe are a scary lot.

Sorry for the raggedness of this bit. My mind is kinda all over the place today. Staunton is a pretty nice city, but not as vivacious as I would like. The rent is absurdly cheap, though. heh.