Criticism of Religion As Being Violent
Tanner asserts that many who have no particular religious beliefs would even argue that violence is a highly likely if not inevitable consequence of the "irrationality" of religious precepts. Similarly, Hector Avalos argues that religions claim "scarce resources" for themselves over and against other groups. Consequently, this may lead to violence because conflicting claims to superiority are based on unverifiable appeals to the supernatural which cannot be adjudicated objectively.
Some general critics of religion and polemics such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins go farther and argue that religions do tremendous harm to society in three ways:
- Religions sometimes use war, violence, and terrorism to promote their religious goals,
- Religious leaders contribute to secular wars and terrorism by endorsing or supporting the violence, and
- Religious fervor is exploited by secular leaders to support war and terrorism.
Amartya Sen adds that political leaders frequently use religious differences to initiate or perpetuate violence:
"Although the wars were ostensibly initiated to counter terrorism, religious differences are stressed just as often by American politicians and pundits as the reasons to continue the violence."
Read more about this topic: Religious Riots
Famous quotes containing the words criticism of, criticism, religion and/or violent:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Every sect is a moral check on its neighbour. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.”
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“It is necessary to turn political crisis into armed crisis by performing violent actions that will force those in power to transform the military situation into a political situation. That will alienate the masses, who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the police and blame them for this state of things.”
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