| DevilRising said:
I would say the love of money and extreme greed and averice are the new cause of attrocity worldwide these days. |
What's new about that? It's a very, very old story.
But the saying that good people do good things and evil people do evil things, but for good people to do evil things takes religion... that rings true to me. I don't think it's limited to what we generally think of as "religion", of course. Many secular causes and movements have aspects of religion, chiefly that pressure to shut up and not think or ask questions and to generally do whatever the team demands of them. Communism has more blood on its hands than any other ideology and is virulently anti-religious, yet it behaves exactly like a religion. Psychologically, whether secular or not, it's all functionally the same: everyone who isn't in the group is, at best, dangerously misguided and, at worst, willfully evil.
Where I think Hitchens may have a point is that atheism negates one potential hazard, that of doing things just because "God said so". If the underlying reason that you do good things or refrain from doing evil ones is that you're afraid of what God might do to you if you don't, you're acting out of self-preservation and are not really a moral person. On the other hand, just as atheists are every bit as capable of moral behavior as the religious, they don't really seem any less given to extreme and irrational mass movements than do the religious; in fact, without a faith to focus their energy in less destructive directions, atheists who have a zealous personality type are pretty given to political extremism.
