[FairfieldLife] Sam Harris on the religious roots of history's greatest atrocities.

[hyperbolicgeometry]

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from http://www.secularhumanism.org


2. If religion were necessary for morality, there should be some 
evidence that atheists are less moral than believers. 

People of faith regularly allege that atheism is responsible for some 
of the most appalling crimes of the twentieth century. Are atheists 
really less moral than believers? While it is true that the regimes 
of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were irreligious to varying 
degrees, they were not especially rational. In fact, their public 
pronouncements were little more than litanies of delusion—delusions 
about race, economics, national identity, the march of history, or 
the moral dangers of intellectualism. In many respects, religion was 
directly culpable even here. Consider the Holocaust: the anti-
Semitism that built the Nazi crematoria brick by brick was a direct 
inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, Christian 
Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and 
attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the 
faithful. 

While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a 
predominantly secular way, its roots were undoubtedly religious—and 
the explicitly religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued 
throughout the period. (The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood 
libel in its newspapers as late as 1914.) Auschwitz, the Gulag, and 
the killing fields are not examples of what happens when people 
become too critical of unjustified beliefs; on the contrary, these 
horrors testify to the dangers of not thinking critically enough 
about specific secular ideologies. Needless to say, a rational 
argument against religious faith is not an argument for the blind 
embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem that the atheist exposes 
is none other than the problem of dogma itself—of which every 
religion has more than its fair share. I know of no society in 
recorded history that ever suffered because its people became too 
reasonable.

--- End forwarded message ---










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