Some thoughts on the Dawkins paradise.(Religion)(Richard Dawkins )

SINCE SHORTLY AFTER my religious boarding school failed, despite what then appeared to me to be its chaplain's and principal's best efforts, to convert me to atheism, I have been looking, like some Bravo swaggering down the Rialto, for some atheist publication or argument that would be a foeman worthy of my intellectual steel.

Not with a great deal of luck so far. Most recently I came across a passage where Professor of Atheism (or whatever his title is) Richard Dawkins has written of his beautiful dream of a religionless world in which there would be:

 
   No suicide bombers, no 9/11, no Crusades, no witch hunts, no 
   Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestine wars, no 
   Serb/Croat/ Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as 
   "Christ-killers," no northern Ireland "troubles," no shiny-suited 
   bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people ... no 
   Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheading of 
   blasphemers ... 

Hardly testing or stretching one's intellect, is it? But perhaps worthy of a quick demolition job. Let us set aside the elementary philosophical howler known as a "category error" of comparing things such as the Indian partition and the northern Ireland "troubles", or 9/11 and the crusades, as though they were identical (the northern Ireland "troubles", denounced by both Catholic and Protestant religious leaders, were more economic than religious in motivation anyway).

Imagine what an idyllic twentieth century we would have had if Professor Dawkins' Godless world had actually existed! Apparently the only blemishes upon it would have been 100 million killed by militantly atheistic communism on various continents, about 12 million murdered by the anti-religious Nazis (I don't mean killed in battle, I mean murdered), and then the various war casualties, including those of the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, the Chaco War, the Sino-Japanese war (with such high points as the Rape of Nanking, with probably 300,000 murdered there alone), the Second World War, the battle and refugee casualties of Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, various conflicts in Africa and Latin America and a few others. That is a total death toll, at a rough guess, of about 200 million, in conflicts and massacres which were either brought about by the militantly anti-religious and Godless, or at least in which religion played no part.

Go forward to the twenty-first century, and the hundreds of thousands (at least) starving in North Korea and Zimbabwe, and dying in the endemic wars and famines in Africa--religion ain't the reason. As far as aid goes, as often as not it is religious organisations, such as the Order of St John, which are responsible for what aid does get through to those who need it and is used effectively.

Or go back to the nineteenth century--the Taiping Rebellion and the Indian Mutiny were partly, by no means exclusively, religious, but not a great deal else was. Without religious wars we would have been left with, among other things, the militantly atheistic French Revolutionary Terror, the Napoleonic Wars, every other major war in Europe, such as the wars of German and Italian unification, ...