The claim that the world would be more peaceful without religion has been popularised of late by militant evangelical atheists:
“There is a logical path from religious faith to evil deeds. There is no logical path from atheism to evil deeds.”
– Richard Dawkins,
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/...s/2007/10/for_good_people_to_go_evil_thi.html
"A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper reveal that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion. It seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it was written in the stars but because it was written in our [religious] books..."
- Sam Harris,
The End of Faith, p12
Sounds good but as with a lot of fundamentalist rhetoric, it is not supported by facts.
“Encyclopedia of Wars by Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod documents 1763 wars, of which 123 have been classified to involve a religious conflict. So, what atheists have considered to be "most" really amounts to less than 7% of all wars. It is interesting to note that 66 of these 123 wars (more than 50%) involved Islam, which did not even exist as a religion for the first 3,000 years of recorded human warfare.”
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/war_and_religion.html
(Nb: The Encyclopedia of Wars is not exhaustive but the large sample size provides broad representative coverage.)
In other words, excluding Islam, just over 3% of wars were motivated by religion. Or, even including Islam, 93% of wars were not motivated by religion. So what really causes war and its resultant suffering? Probably politics (and the thesis of Rummel in the Democide Project is that of concentrated, absolute power). Consider some facts just from the 20th Century.
Around 180,000,000 people dead through the numerous atrocities. The largest and most numerically fatal were decisively not based on religion unless one argues that their purpose was to wipe out (a) religion.
Germany:
1) The Nazi Holocaust: @ 5 - 6 million Jews (not counting gypsies, homosexuals, euthanasia of some German subgroups, and prisoners of war)
2) World War II: @ 42 million deaths (includes Holocaust) in Europe where guilt lies largely with Hitler (raised Catholic but grew to hate Christianity – Nazi Germany was arguably pagan)
Russia:
1) Civil war: @ 9 million dead (started with the collapse of the monarchy and ended with establishment of a secular socialist govt.)
2) Stalin’s regime: 9 – 50 million deaths (depending on historian) but probably at least 20 million
China:
1) Chinese civil war: @ 2.5 million dead (resulted in establishment of secular socialist govt.)
2) Mao Zedong’s rule after the war: @ 40 million dead
Cambodia:
@ 2 – 3.5 million deaths (depending on historian) under secular socialist Khmer Rouge govt.
Sources:
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/war-1900.htm
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html
There are many, many other atrocities of the century but taking middle-of-the-road numbers, around 116 million deaths resulted from the above mentioned events only. So out of @ 180m deaths from atrocities in the century @ 64% are directly attributable to just these . If we ignore WW2 as a whole and count only the slaughtered Jews then that figure drops to about 44% of deaths through large-scale atrocity in the century attributable to ideologies directly opposed to freedom and religion.
(Nb. I am not arguing that secularism is the direct influence behind these instances of democide.)
Given that (a)
currently somewhere around 84% of the world are religious, and roughly a further 8% are theistic but non-religious, and (b) the low percentage of war/conflict attributable to religion historically where arguably the secular percentage of population may have been even lower, and (c) the massive casualty rate of democide and homocide attributable to overtly secular states in the 20th century....
....I am left to wonder if perhaps religion is a greater inspiration for peace and community than is recognised.