What About the Atheists?
When Christopher Hitchens observes that, “Religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children,” he is both right and wrong.
Hitchens is right because humankind is sinful and selfish. Indeed, I believe it was G.K. Chesterton who said that the one Christian doctrine that was demonstrably provable, even to casual observers, was the sinfulness and depravity of man. Thus, human expressions of the religious impulse will inevitably produce some religious practices and beliefs that would fit Hitchens’ rather grim description.
Human history is replete with such flawed expressions of religious faith.
However, this would be true of all secular philosophies and ideologies as well. Three of the most heinous and barbaric ideologies, which produced the greatest cruelties and violations of humanity in the 20th century, were fascism, Nazism and communism—all secular.
Comments (297)
