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.
Read more about this topic: Religious Violence
Famous quotes containing the words criticism, religion and/or violent:
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“The stallion and his mare,
unbridled, with arrow-pattern,
are worked on.
the blue cloth
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of religion and inspiration....”
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“The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)