Dawkins' misdiagnosis of Evil

The eminent communicator of science, Richard Dawkins, has very strong opinions on religion. So strong, it seems, that they blind him of the wider perspectives.

He hosted and wrote the TV program 'The Root of All Evil' in which he presents his view that the world would be better of without religion.

In his defense, it should be noted that the title of the program was chosen against his will. Not even Dawkins would hold the foolish belief that all evil can be reduced to religious belief.

Still, Dawkins is dead wrong in his diagnoses about religion as problematic per se.

In the first part of the program, which you will find below, he basically argues, in a modernist fashion, that pretty much all human group based conflict is rooted in religion.

He seems particularly to dislike Christianity and Islam.

I, like Dawkins, consider myself an evolutionist. What is difficult to understand about Dawkins is how he can be so hostile to evolved cultural institutions.

Does he really think that the constructed institutions of modernity do any better?

They do not!

To understand group based conflict in humans we need to take a wider view and it will quickly become clear that religion is not the root cause.

In fact two regimes of the 20th century become very violent and destructive in the attempt to shed of religious morality and restraint. Both the Nazi regime and the Soviet regime appealed to science as justification.

Indeed it was this appeal to the supremacy of science that made it possible to transgress to traditional moral restraints religion puts on behavior.

So science, obviously, is not immune to the kind of politicization we currently see in some big religions.

It is this politicization which is dangerous! Not science or religion in themselves.

If we take a closer look at the resemblances of politicized religion and the Nazi and Soviet regime we will find that what characterizes them all is 'means justifies ends thinking' and the subjugation of the individual to the group.

And here we have it, the real enemy of humanity is not religion as practiced by individuals. No, it is collectivism in all its form.

Whether the 'absolute' to which the individual must surrender is in the form of a politicized God, Nature or some Idol, as we see it in the Hegelian totalitarian state-replaces-god systems of fascism and communism, the result is the same.

Terror.

Anyway. Enjoy the program: