Don't blame God...

In the Toronto Star today I read an article about some guy named Sam Harris who wrote a book called The End of Faith. In it, the author proposes that societies around the world more or less do away with religion entirely. His thesis suggests that then an era of enlightenment and reason may be ushered in where there is much less warfare.

Let me first say that religion has been a cause of all sorts of stupid atrocities. People have done some truly terrible things to each other in the name of religion. In that sense, I can see where Mr. Harris gets his idea. Where I think Mr. Harris is flawed is in his assessment that the evils that have come about in the name of religion are intrinsic to the nature of religion. Put another way, if tomorrow everyone decided to abolish organised religion, I still think that we'd have an abundance of things to fight over. At the same time, even in the absence of organised religion I think that humans have an infinite capacity to invent gods. The Soviets fought under the gods of central planning and command economy. Today the American right sets up the market economy as another sort of god, offer up everything for privatisation and deregulation and the market economy will provide salvation.

It's a cliche but I think Voltaire was on to something with his quote about it being necessary to invent God if he doesn't exist. With our new "gods" and our avarice and vaingloriousness I am quite confident that our human race will remain fully capable of continuing in doing stupid and evil things. Ultimately Harris' thinking is very 19th century in that one of the lessons of the 20th century is that reason is just as open to abuse as religion.