Religion is Source of Evil

With or without [religion] you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.

--Nobel prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg

The quote is from an article by Richard Dawkins, a biologist at Oxford [picture]. It comes from a Washington Post-Newsweek website called, “On Faith,” which encourages discussion of religion because, as Homer said 3000 years ago, "All men need the gods." For the new elite, faith is a curious phenomenon worthy of study. For believers like me, the elite’s difficulty with faith is a curious phenomenon worthy of study.

Dawkins has more to say about religion:

 Nobody is suggesting that all religious people are violent, intolerant, racist, bigoted, contemptuous of women. . . [It’s just that] religion might . . . make them more likely to exhibit [those tendencies].

 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. . . [S]ome religions (for example the religion of the Taliban) sanction all of them under some circumstances. The actions of the Taliban. . . seem to me to be as close to pure evil as anything I can imagine. Yet, by the lights of their own religion they are supremely righteous – really good people.

 There is a logical path from religious faith to evil deeds. There is no logical path from atheism to evil deeds. . . it can never be rational to say that, because of my nonbelief in religion, it would be good to be cruel, to murder, to oppress women. . .

So there you have it. The Taliban are religious, and by association, all religious people are capable of progressing from “religious faith to evil deeds,” a path no true atheist would follow.

Remarkably inverted logic. Evil stems from religion. What times we live in!