It certainly is true that many horrible things have been done under the cover of religion. The Inquisition springs to mind along with Islamic terrorism and the Catholic-Protestant wars that have raged and influenced European and American politics for centuries. It is also true that many men have used religion as a tool to gain power, no different than nationalism or racism. Having acknowledged that freely, let me also throw some numbers at you: 11,000,000 + people murdered in the Holocaust. Nazism was essentially an secular state religion with nationalism and racism as its creed and Adolf Hitler as its focal point. Over 1,600,000 Cambodians murdered by the Khmer Rouge which officially outlawed religion. More recently we see North Korea, by all accounts of the most repressive nations in the world with barbaric living conditions. Atheistic Cuba is another of the world’s great oppressors of her own people. Communist China has been a repressive nation for decades. Of the highly religious states that are also the most repressive, they are universally Islamic, which should further discredit the blanket condemnation of religion as repressive we cavalierly hear from atheists speakers and authors who profit from their empty rhetoric.
As D’Souza points out, an absence of religion is hardly a recipe for a utopian existence. There is not a more religious developed country in the world than the U.S. and we are the envy of the world. The most horrifying conditions in modern times are most often found in the most secular of developed states, places like the former Soviet Union, communist China, Cuba and North Korea. There is far more danger to liberty and freedom (individually and corporately) from a powerful state than there is from a powerful religion.
There have always been and until Christ returns always will be people who are so power hungry that they will employ any means to obtain and retain power. That is not fatalistic, that is simply reality. While Adolf Hitler clearly had a murderous, irrational hatred for Jews they also provided him with a patsy, someone to focus attention on and help propel his rise to power. As the daily news shows us, human nature hasn’t changed much. There is still plenty of hatred and perversion in the world.
Atheists who point the finger at religion for all of the world ills miss the bigger picture. The Bible gives us the reason for all of the evil and suffering in the world and its cause (sin) and the solution (Christ). The Bible never paints a bucolic picture of life in this world. The difference between the bleak picture of humanity presented in the Bible and the hopeless view of life promoted by Thomas Hobbes of a life that is “poor, nasty, brutish and short” is hope. In spite of all of the talk about “hope” we have endured over the last year or so the reality is that outside of Christ there is no hope in this world and we are forced to endure a Hobbesian existence of pain and suffering, mercifully coming to a swift and probably unpleasant end.
In the end, atheists make a fatal error by blaming God and belief in Him as the cause of all human suffering when in fact it is God alone who provides a way to alleviate and ultimately conquer that suffering. I will concur with the dangers of religion, but I find the dangers of religion to be of eternal consequence rather than temporal. Empty religious expression, whether Islamic or Buddhist or even pseudo-Christian religious expressions, have eternal consequences but in this life it is hard to make a serious argument that the presence of religion worsens human life or that the absence of religion improves it. History itself refutes that claim, sealed with the now empty buildings in places like Auschwitz and in the blood soaked ground of the killing fields in Cambodia.
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