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 of, criticism, religion and/or violent:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“Magic is the envelopment and coercion of the objective world by the ego; it is a dynamic subjectivism. Religion is the coercion of the ego by gods and spirits who are objectively conceived beings in control of nature and man.”
—Richard Chase (b. 1914)
“They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others. Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)