Citizen Columns
Citizen Columns >> Answer (September 26, 2009)
Question
Critics of religion say that it has been the major cause of warfare throughout history. How do you respond to such criticism?
Answer
This is just sheer nonsense. All that is needed to refute this fatuous accusation is a quick look at the actual statistics. In the 20th century alone, the most murderous hundred years of warfare in human history, an estimated 35-40 million soldiers-not counting civilians-died in the twenty biggest wars. And in none of these wars was religion the “major cause.” Unless of course you count atheism as a religion, in which case militantly atheist leaders do account for some of the worst bloodshed (Lenin, Stalin, and Mao for example). And of the bloodiest wars in earlier history the vast majority were fought for land, money, political or ethnic power. These same corrosive human passions are at work even in the few “religious wars” such as the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598), the Thirty Year’s War (1618-1648) and the Muslim Rebellion in China (1855-1877). The same applies to the Crusades, which in terms of sheer loss of life, don’t even make history’s top 20.
There is no doubt that religion can be a dangerous force. It can be abused, twisted and turned into an ideology. But even at its worst, it is just factually wrong to say that religion is the major cause of wars throughout history. David Bentley Hart has just published Atheist Delusions, a brilliant rebuttal to this sort of now popular anti-religious propaganda. It’s not atheism as such that is troubling, he says, but its arrogant evangelists. “There are many forms of atheism that I find more admirable than many forms of Christianity or of religions in general. But atheism that consists entirely in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any other form of fundamentalism.”
John Jillions
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