From the article:
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Professor Richard Dawkins
06 January 2006
Known as ‘ Darwin’s Rottweiler’, Professor Richard Dawkins relishes
controversy. In his new TV series he explains how religion is a form
of abuse – and why God is man’s most destructive invention ++ Why do
you believe in your God? Because he talks to you inside your head? The
Yorkshire Ripper claimed his murders were ordered by Jesus
Imagine, sang John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no
suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no
Gunpowder Plot, no Kashmir dispute, no Indian partition, no
Israel/Palestine war, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no Northern
Ireland “troubles”. Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no
public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the
crime of showing an inch of it. Imagine no persecutions of the Jews –
no Jews to persecute indeed, for, without religious taboos against
marrying out, the Diaspora would long ago have merged into Europe.
Hitler invoked “My feelings as a Christian” to justify his
anti-Semitism, and he wrote in Mein Kampf: “I believe that I am acting
in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending
myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”
Nevertheless, most such atrocities are not directly motivated by
religion. IRA gunmen didn’t kill Protestants (or vice versa) over
disagreements about transubstantiation or such theological niceties.
The motive was more likely to be tribal vengeance. One of “them”
killed one of “us”. “They” drove “our” great-grandfathers out of
ancestral lands. Grievances are economic and political, not religious;
and vendettas stretch “unto the third and fourth generation of them
that hate me”. Quoting Exodus reminds me, incidentally, that humanists
prefer Gandhi’s version: “An eye for an eye make the whole world
blind.”
But if tribal wars are not about religion, the fact that there are
separate tribes at all frequently is. Some tribes may divide along
racial or linguistic lines, but in Northern Ireland what else is there
but religion? The same applies to Indo-Pakistan, Serbo-Croatia, and
various regions of Indonesia and Africa. Religion is today’s most
divisive label of group identity and hostility. If a social engineer
set out to devise a system for perpetuating our most vicious enmities,
he could find no better formula than sectarian education. The main
point of faith schools is that the children of “our” tribe must be
taught “their own” religion. Since the children of the other tribe are
simultaneously being taught the rival religion with, of course, the
rival version of the vendetta-riven history, the prognosis is all too
predictable.
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Read it at
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/opinion/story.jsp?story=674933
J. Spaceman
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