Is “Religion” Most to Blame for the World’s Violence? Not Even Close

This is well known but some people are impervious to facts. Quoted sections in italics.

"I. Which Group Commits the Most Terrorist Attacks? The Most Suicide Bombings?

In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Sam Harris tries to lump “religion” in with “terror,” pitting the two against “reason.” He opens with this story:

The young man boards the bus as it leaves the terminal. He wears an overcoat. Beneath his overcoat, he is wearing a bomb. His pockets are filled with nails, ball bearings, and rat poison. The bus is crowded and headed for the heart of the city. […] The young man smiles. With the press of a button he destroys himself, the couple at his side, and twenty others on the bus. […] The young man’s parents soon learn of his fate. Although saddened to have lost a son, they feel tremendous pride at his accomplishment. They know that he has gone to heaven and prepared the way for them to follow. He has also sent his victims to hell for eternity. It is a double victory.

At this point, he hasn’t told you the man’s religion (although his inclusion of Heaven and Hell in his story conveniently exonerate atheists). He then asks, rhetorically:

Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easy, “you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it easy,” to guess the young man’s religion?

As I’ve mentioned before, Harris wants you to guess Muslim, an answer he claims is “you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it easy.” But there’s just one problem with this claim, which is that it’s factually incorrect. Worse, Harris knows this, but buries that fact in an endnote:

Some readers may object that the bomber in question is most likely to be a member of the Liberations [sic] Tigers of Tamil Eelam—the Sri Lankan separatist organization that has perpetuated more acts of suicidal terrororism [sic] than any other group.

So if you bet your life on the suicide bomber being a Muslim, chances are, you were wrong.

And the Tamil Tigers aren’t just the deadliest in regards to suicide bombings. They’re the deadliest terrorist group on earth, period. You can check out the numbers for yourself at the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database or Periscope’s summary by group. Since 1975, the Tigers have killed nearly 11,000 people and wounded nearly 11,000 more.

If you’re not familiar with the Tamil Tigers, here’s how the Library of Congress describes them:

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) strongest of Tamil separatist groups, founded in 1972 when Tamil youth espousing a Marxist ideology and an independent Tamil state established a group called the Tamil New Tigers; name changed in 1976.

The University of Chicago’s Robert A. Pape, whom Harris cites in the endnote, is even more direct:
“Religious fanaticism does not explain why the world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a group that adheres to a Marxist/Leninist ideology.” Marxist-Leninist groups are hardly what you’d call “religious.” Here’s what Lenin had to say about religion:

The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism, which has fully taken over the historical traditions of eighteenth-century materialism in France and of Feuerbach (first half of the nineteenth century) in Germany—a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion. […]

Religion is the opium of the people—this dictum by Marx is the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion.[1] Marxism has always regarded all modern religions and churches, and each and every religious organisation, as instruments of bourgeois reaction that serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class.

So the deadliest terrorist group in the world, and the one responsible for the most suicide bombings in history isn’t just a secular group, but one advancing an ideology that is “is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion.”

Nor are the Tamil Tigers an isolated case in this regard. The 25 deadliest terrorist groups in the world are responsible for most of the terror deaths since 1975. And the Tigers are just one of several Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, and Communist groups on that short list. They’re joined by Peru’s Shining Path, El Salvador’s FMLN, Colombia FARC, the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, the Philippines’ New People’s Army, Angola’s UNITA, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), Spain’s Basque Homeland and Freedom (ETA), Colombia’s National Liberation Army (ELN), and Chile’s Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR).

[See also: How Modern Art Led Me to God]

II. Is Religion the Chief Cause of the World’s Violence?

Having seen that the world’s deadliest suicide bombers and the world’s deadliest terrorist group are the Marxist-Leninist Tamil Tigers, what about the world’s deadliest ideologies? Compare the number of killings done in the name of religion to the number of killings done in the name of an anti-religious ideology.

At the top of the list of the twentieth century’s deadliest regimes, you’ll find three anti-religious states: Communist China, the USSR, and Nazi Germany. These three alone were responsible for an estimated 130,000,000 victims, which dwarfs the number of people killed in the name of all religions throughout all of history. And that number doesn’t even take into account the millions killed by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rogue, the Communist North Korean regime, or the Derg (the Ethiopian Communist state, headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam).

Religion isn’t the cause of most of the world’s violence: it’s not even close. In fact, in each of the deadliest states of the twentieth century, we see the same pattern: an aggressive campaign to neutralize or eliminate religious belief (and believers). Ross Douthat pointed this out, using the example of the Soviet Union, in a debate with Bill Maher:

Maher: “Someone once said: to have a normal person commit a horrible act almost never happens without religion. To have people get on a plane and fly it into a building, it had to be religion.”

Douthat: “I think that what’s true is: to get a normal person to commit a crazy act, it does take ideas, right? But those ideas can be secular as well as religious. A lot of normal people …”

Maher: “But mostly, in history, they’ve been religious.”

Douthat: “Not in the twentieth century. Not in the Soviet Union. A lot of dead bodies there, not a lot of Christians… except among the dead bodies.”

Maher: “I would say that’s a secular religion.” (Maher then quickly shut down debate before Douthat could respond.)

In a way, Maher ends up conceding one of Douthat’s points: that secular ideas can be just as deadly religious ones (and in fact, have been many times deadlier). But Douthat’s other point is worth drawing out: religious belief serves not only as a potential motivator for violence, but as a check against state totalitarianism.

For a totalitarian regime, religion is dangerous. As a believer, I recognize that human rights come from God, not the state or social convention. I recognize that there’s an authority higher than the state to Whom both I and the state leadership will someday be accountable.

It’s precisely this sort of belief system that serves as a check on ideology and state authority that made these Soviet and Nazi states so anti-religious: they don’t want you to render unto both God and Caesar. They want you to obey Caesar alone.

That’s one reason that the bloodiest regimes in history have tended to be atheistic and anti-religious. But there may be a second, related point. Maher calls Soviet totalitarianism a “secular religion,” and that’s something of a cop-out. He’s trying to pin all the blame for violence on religion, by labelling all potentially-violent ideas as “religious,” even (as in the case of Soviet Communism) the ideology’s founder and adherents were fiercely anti-religious. This evasion would seem to turn everything, even atheism, into at least a “secular religion.”

But Maher may yet be on to something in referring to these totalitarian systems as a “religion” of sorts. Nazism and Soviet Communism did mimic religions in certain fashions, and did hold themselves out (implicitly and, at times, explicitly) as replacements for religion. That’s because there’s something inescapable about religion. Michael Crichton described the phenomenon like this:

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

At its core, this is a rudimentary point. All of us operate according to our beliefs about the world. Sometimes, we’re conscious of this, sometimes, we’re not, but we do it all the same. And these worldviews are heavily influenced by what we believe, or disbelieve, about religion.

Christianity carries with it beliefs about every human being made in the image of God, and being worthy of dignity and respect, along with the notion that we’ll be held accountable for our evil actions. If we really believe these things, these beliefs can’t help but shape how we interact with the world. And when people stop believing these things, it’s not surprising that something else sweeps in to fill that void. Sometimes, as in Crichton’s talk, that religion-replacement is a movement like environmentalism. Other times, it’s something much darker.

[See also: A Simple, Air-Tight Argument for God’s Existence]

III. Which Religion?

I said in the last point that religion can either motivate you to commit violent acts (as with ISIS) or it can motivate you to resist violence and tyranny (as with the 21 Coptic Christians recently martyred by ISIS). But on the question of whether religion will spur or spurn violence, a lot depends on which religion we’re talking about.

All of this brings me to my last point: the whole question of whether or not “religion” is violent is badly-formed. People don’t believe in “religion.” They believe in a particular religion, and different religions teach different things. Given this, we need to stop pretending that all religions are equally prone to violent extremism, as if a Quaker is as likely as a Wahhabist to be responsible for the next terrorist attack. That idea is both illogical and directly contrary to the empirical data (here again, I’d point you to the Global Terrorism Database or Periscope summary).

Denouncing “religion” for the sins of radical Islam is disingenuous, akin to blaming “politics” for the Holocaust. “Religion” wasn’t to blame, but one particular, violent religious movement, just as the Holocaust was the fault of one particular, violent political movement. In both religion and politics, we’re dealing with sets of ideas — ideas about God, morality, human dignity, and the like — and ideas have consequences. Good ideas tend to have good consequences, while bad ideas tend to have the opposite. Treating all ideas as if they’re equally valid is ridiculous.

[See also: Does Christianity Really Have a “Smart People Problem”?]

That’s why it’s foolish to approach this question in the way that it’s typically formed – whether or not “religion” is to blame – and why it’s wrong to blame all religion for the actions of a few (or one). Using violence done in the name of a particular religion to justify hating all religion is no better than the Daily Beast using violence committed by an irreligious atheist against Muslims as a stick with which to bash Christians."

https://churchpop.com/2015/05/20/is-religion-most-blame-worlds-violence/

 

Yes, political ideologies are responsible for far more deaths. An even bigger one though has nothing to do with politics or religion and is the basis for most genocides and that is power and the attempt to maintain it. It is why Stalin killed so many and why situations like Rwanda happen. You could even argue the holocaust was based on power but that one is a bit tougher. Places like Bosnia though...pure power.

 

Historical myopia...only focusing on the past 100 years. As well as political/ideological bias.

Was the genocide of the Native Americans due to "Marxism"?

And what of the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the massacre of the Huguenots?

 

And the 20th century doesn't count because???

 

Central governments, which are inevitable, tend to expand until they collapse. Mass extermination campaigns may be a late stage survival mechanism for a totalitarian state.

 

Desoto's pigs wiped out the Indians. The worst atrocity during the Crusades only managed to kill 60K.

Religious atrocities are not aimed at the systematic extermination of millions of human beings.

 

The OP slept though history class. WWII alone killed six million Jews, twenty million Russians, four million Germans, ten million Chinese, and eighteen million Europeans.

WWI was about religion too. thirty seven million died in that war.

 

How in hell was WWII about religion? Or WWI?

 

Maoist China and Soviet Russia simply replaced religion with the State, with the same layers of indoctrination and dogma, so as an Atheist I count that as religious even if the religion was ideology but so is Buddhism and Modern Confucianism.

Nazi Germany was religious in fact Hitler never once denounced Jesus as a demigod just his Jewishness saying he was Aryan and died Roman Catholic never excommunicated by the Church. In fact he had many moved to protect religion his aunt was a nun when the local officials tried to close her convent it was Hitler who intervened. He also had the support of the Church both with agreeing to avoid politics and in support of the invasion of Soviet Russia both clear acts which reinforced him. I can go on about Hitler his studies into the occult by the SS, religious trappings of said SS and I can go on. You might disagree with Aryanist Christianity but he was Christian no different than abuses of the various religions to heathens, rivals and others they disagreed with here are five religious nation Empires all Christian who did pretty evil crap backed by the cross - American Empire (native American wars, war with Mexico), British Empire (opium war, invented the concentration camp, aggressive war), Portuguese Empire (started the transatlantic slave trade), Spanish Empire (conquest of much of South America by brutal force, slave trade, inquisition). I will note all strongly Christian either Protestant or Roman Catholic. What made the Hitler version of the faith better or worse than the Roman Catholic Church whom has extensive blood on its hands.

Atheism is small potatoes if one applies it as what is we look at the world and go after examining things there is not enough evidence for divine forces its a conclusion nothing more, it leads me and others to oppose faith but only due to the weak value of it to find the truth over the scientific method. But that's not a political system its epistemological.

 

They can also be a prelude to a totalitarian state and actually may occur anytime power is threatened.

 

Only a totalitarian state can systematically liquidate millions of its own people.

 

WWI was started between the Bosnian Muslims and Serbian Christians. WWII was a continuation of WWI.

While many hoped that World War I would be "the war to end all wars," in actuality, the concluding peace treaty set the stage for World War II.
http://history1900s.about.com/od/worldwari/p/World-War-I.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_Campaign_of_World_War_I

Hitler claimed to be a Christian and sided with the Serbs.
http://www.cuttingedge.org/news/n2266.cfm

Bill Clinton got into the continuing Bosnian/Serbian religious war too.

 

You should read your own links.

 

The cause of the most wars and violence is resources (food, water, land, manpower etc...) Those that want it will try and take it from those who have it and will justify it by any means necessary. Is it coincidence that the places with the most violence tend to be the places that have the most precious resources? As the population grows and resources shrink, wars and violence will increase.

 

Not necessarily, it could also happen during a revolution or a changing of government. The Terror in France comes to mind.

 

Virtually any violent act, whether premeditated or impulsive, individual or group induced, has several 'causes'. It involves a storm of rationales/ motives and underlying stimuli and is both a catalyst and a result. You can't possibly quantify what percentage ought to be attributed to a religion or its influence, because there are too many other influences and motivators that must be discounted.

 

If it weren't for the Bolsheviks, the bloodthirsty theists would have no atheists to point to as being "just as bad as themselves." Of course, an officially atheist government does not instantly make the whole population atheist as well. Russians were still Orthodox Christian under Bolshevik rule, even if the church was officially suppressed and religion discouraged. The Bolsheviks also established something of a state religion, replacing traditional theism with a kind of state worship. Americans have this as well -- we call it patriotism. A number of its adherents even call for others to be killed in its name, say for standing on their sacred symbol, the flag.

Christian history is very bloody, of course. It was for as long as Christians controlled the secular government, in fact. It was when the church was separated from the state and divested of its former powers in this area that the violence finally began to subside. They lost their authority to wage religious warfare, and the Protestant Reformation also began to shift Christian thinking away from secular power, changing the focus skyward, emphasising the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven and Christians not being "of this world," but rather of that imaginary kingdom they believe they will enter after death and resurrection. So, now they're restricted by secular laws in ways they weren't before. Now Christians can expect prison time for killing apostates, like those who go after abortion doctors.

The scary thing is that there are American Christians clambering for control over the government once again. We can expect a return to the Dark Ages if they ever succeed.

 

It does count, but the 20th century only went on for 100 years and the likes of Hitler and Stalin for much less.

The 1000 years of Horror of the Catholic church lasted .. well more than 1000 years.

 

good OP. It is a phony narrative that religion, & ESPECIALLY christianity is the root at all the world's evils. This is promoted mostly by anti christian bigots, who are on a crusade to destroy it. All they talk about is the end of christianity, & how it has brought nothing but pain & suffering for humanity. But the exact opposite is true. Where did the abolitionist movement come from? What is the source of Natural Law, Human Equality, Rational Thought, & the scientific method? The age of reason sprung from the reformation, concurrent with the birth of modern science, Copernicus, et.al. The absurd revisionism of history to promote bigoted smears of propaganda only exposes the irrational hatred that these people have for christianity. Why is that? What makes them hate an ideology that promotes love, peace, & harmony among men?

 

The revolution and the terror certainly killed a lot of aristocrats and eventually most of the revolutionaries. But the guillotine was a slow motion killer compared to more modern methods designed to exterminate millions of ordinary civilians.

 

It's not religion per se, it's faith and greed. People will do evil and irrational things because they believe in irrational ideas, which are usually faith-based. Faith is integral to religion, and is also integral to "secular religions," i.e. nationalism which we're probably prone to due to tribalism in our evolutionary history. And greed, well I probably don't need to convince you on that one.

At the top maybe... not so much in the ranks. "A man will not have himself killed for a half-pence a day, or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him." -Napoleon

 

What "thousand years of horror"? Oh, the one in your head...

 

So to summarize we can prove the goodness of religion by saying that religion is only the second leading cause of human violence.

 

To blame 'religion' for all the evils of humanity is prejudicial & absurd. ..especially if by 'religion' you mean 'Christianity'. Man's inhumanity to man transcends all worldviews. There is not one people group or region or race that is not infected with the malady known as 'humanity'. THAT is the source of war, crime, & injustice, not any specific religion. IMO, this is merely an attempt to take the moral high ground (ironic, since they don't believe in morality) with a groupthink, polemical faction. If you are a christian, you are the source of all the evils in the world. If you are an atheist, you are loving, kind, peaceful & tolerant. Just by joining our group, you will automatically be these things!! You will also be smart, scientific, & absolutely right all the time!! Don't delay! Act Now! Join our merry group of superior thinkers & elite intelligentsia, so you, too, can be wise & perfect & have none of the ills that attend the inferior, stupid humans who believe in fairy tales.

This is a faulty, bigoted view of humanity based on arrogance & elitism. Here are a few of my observations:

1. Everyone has a worldview. You can deflect with definitions, but it does not change the fact that nobody's worldview is Absolute Truth. Our knowledge base is not perfect, & there are many holes & mysteries in life that cannot be explained by pure naturalism. So you can take the high ground, philosophically, and retreat into groupthink to feel superior, but you are just another human being, lost in space, & afraid of the dark. Who are you to smugly believe all of your assumptions & beliefs about the universe are Empirical Reality?

2. Regarding the supernatural, there are 2 possibilities in the universe:
a. There exists a supernatural, metaphysical reality.
b. There does NOT exist a supernatural, metaphysical reality.
These are mostly beliefs, as there is currently no empirical proof of either. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence FOR a metaphysical reality, but it cannot be corroborated scientifically, which some use as an excuse to dismiss it completely.

3. Life & the universe cannot be explained. We do not know HOW we got here, or WHY. These have been nagging questions for millennia, & the quest for the answers to these questions have always been with us. We concoct complex scenarios & speculate about these questions, but we do not know. That is very frustrating to many people, who are not content with mystery in their lives. They seem to have a need to have everything neatly organized into a systematic ideology.

4. The HOW & WHY questions for our existence are addressed in 3 basic ways:
a. Seek for answers & enlightenment
b. Declare the answers dogmatically
c. Ridicule the questions

5. Most religions & philosophies are an attempt at resolving these questions, to bring conciliation to the conflicted human. Some are manipulations by aggressive humans for conquering or controlling others. A very few have 'conquering & controlling others' as a central tenet of their agenda. Islam & Marxism/communism are 2 examples of those conquering worldviews.

6. The political, aggressive nature of man is not necessarily equal to their ideology.. people do not always act upon their beliefs. Sometimes, they act contrary to their professed beliefs.

'Religion' is merely one facet of humanity. MAN is the central problem, & is what religion tries to address, for the most part. To blame religion for the nature of man ignores the basic goal of most religions, to enlighten Man, & get him to aspire to higher values. If anything, religion has been one of the few redeeming qualities of mankind, & have worked against his base, barbaric nature. Far from being the source of mankind's evils, it has been the solution for the collective foibles of humanity.

 

It's probably not even in the top ten. Domestic violence would be at the top probably followed by drugs and alcohol abuse followed by crime and so on. Hell, Mao killed 45 million people in 4 years, which exceeds the entire death toll of wwII. Religion is minor.