Most Atheists are RIGHT: Religion really does cause violence

Having spent two blogs (part 1, part 2) explaining why religion doesn't cause violence, it's time to refute that statement.

More exactly, I'm going to refine it: Religion isn't at the root of violence (evolution is), but religion greatly amplifies violence.

A huge portion of the "laws" laid down in the Bible are, by today's standards, barbaric and primitive. If a priest's daughter becomes a prostitute, the Bible says she should be burned at the stake (Leviticus 21:9). The penalty for blasphemy is death (Leviticus 23:10-24). Adultery, incest, and homosexuality, any of these and more call for the death penalty, often by stoning.

Even people who claim to follow the Bible's laws, and believe the Bible's inerrancy, can't stomach these laws today. We've evolved, we now know better, but the Bible is frozen in time.

Should we accept these millenia-old rules as our laws, just because two thousand years ago, a group of Jewish scholars declared that these were God's own words?

My primary thesis is not wrong, quite the contrary: Violence is part of our genetic makeup (our instincts), and religious memes that support violence are just an example of memetic evolution at work, shaping the religious memeplex to fit well into its environment (our brains).

But we're supposed to be civilized. We're supposed to move beyond our primitive animal instincts that make us fight and kill one another. We've evolved brains that are powerful enough to understand good and evil. We've evolved culture, and empathy, and the concepts of right and wrong. We understand that sometimes the individual has to subjugate his/her own raw desires for the good of the family, the village, or the world.

Unfortunately, some religions are holding us back from these achievements.

Somewhere along the way, a bunch of parables, historical "tall tales," and good advice, got converted into the inerrant Word of God, purportedly correct in every respect and for all time. The Inerrancy Meme, one of the evolved tricks that religion uses to defend itself from criticism, arose in the Jewish culture a few hundred years before the time of Christ. Since then, it's become a huge barrier to progress in human ethics: If we left it to religions that follow the Inerrance Meme, human ethical advancement would be frozen in time forever.

Religion is not the root of violence and war; that distinction goes to evolution, keeping us in keen competition with one another for survival of the fittest. But religion is holding us back, exacerbating and amplifying the worst parts of our animal nature, and preventing us from evolving to the next level of ethical achievement.

Tags: atheism atheist religion morals ethics evolution memes virus christian jew memes memeplex dawkin harris hitchens

Most Atheists are Wrong: Religion doesn't cause all violence (conclusion)

This continues yesterday's blog, in which I explained how a memetic viewpoint clarifies that most morals originate with our instincts, rather than from religious inspiration or philosophical enquiry.

A constant state of tribal fighting, murders, skirmishes, and outright warfare is pretty much the natural state of human beings (where "natural" means what was common over the last few hundred thousand years as humans evolved to our modern form). Jared Diamond, in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Guns, Germs and Steel, describes his experience a typical such tribe, the Fayu of New Guinea, who were in a constant "kaleidoscopically changing pattern of war and shifting alliances with all neighboring hamlets..." While in New Guinea, he witnessed an anthropologist interview women about their husbands:

Woman after woman, when asked to name her husband, named several sequential husbands who had died violent deaths. A typical answer went like this: "My first husband was killed by Elopi raiders. My second husband was killed by a man who wanted me, and who became my third husband. That husband was killed by the brother of my second husband..." Such biographies prove common for so-called gentle tribespeople...

Guns, Germs, and Steel, p 277, copyright © Jared Diamond, 1999

When we discover a behavioral pattern that spans the globe, it's a good bet that our instincts are running the show. Adding to the weight of this theory, anthropologists also find similar behavior in the other great apes that form bands. Although this is not a scientific proof by any stretch of the imagination, I think most anthropologists and behavioral scientists would agree that this pattern of tribal war and murder reflects our instincts.

Thus, we find two key points about religion and morality:

• Most of our morals are really memes that express, in language, knowledge that is hard-wired into our brains, put there by evolution to help us survive.
• Humans are naturally warlike and murderous, again, because it is behavior that helps us survive and procreate.

Yesterday we used the examples of infidelity and child abuse to illustrate how memes that match our instincts are far more likely to survive than memes that are contrary to our instincts. Now we can see that religious memes that encourage warlike behavior are simply reflections of our human instincts. It is our instincts that have caused us to shape religions that advocate warlike behavior.

The logical conclusion from all this is that religion is the "victim" of our instincts. Humans are just doing what we've always done: wage war and murder each other. Modern evolution has equipped us with language, and the "ideosphere" (the meme ecosphere) has evolved memes that support this aggresive behavior.

Tomorrow: Why this is all wrong – religion really does cause harm.

Tags: religion war morals evil atheist atheism christian christianity jew judaism islam muslim philosophy dawkins harris hitchens