The late and deservedly eminent Professor Lisa Jardine, who died last Sunday (25th October), is reported to have regarded religion as the 'root of all evil'. It's fair to say that many people today agree with her. We are familiar with news reports of the activities of organisations such as the so-called ISIS; and for years we have heard of atrocities committed in the name of religion in many parts of the world. Some of the most intractable political conflicts have some intrinsic connection with religious convictions. It has to be said that, whenever religion presents itself in a fundamentalist guise, it always seems to lead to entrenchment and suffering. The simple reason for this is that fundamentalist religion, divorced from reason as it invariably is, can never conceive of even the merest possibility that it may be wrong or that its impulses might need to be tempered. Jardine's view, in the light of this, appears to be gaining more and more support among observers in the secularised West.
Some of those who support this view say, additionally, that such intractable situations based upon the unreasonableness acknowledged above, are not caused by atheism and secularism. They argue that people are never killed in the name of atheism. Influential commentators such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens have made exactly this point. Even when those who take issue with them by citing the twentieth-century examples of, say, Stalin, Mao, Kim-il-Sung and Pol Pot, the secularists respond by pointing out that the atrocities committed by these individuals were not committed in the name of atheism as such - in the sense of not having been committed in order to advance a secularist philosophy or worldview.
Whilst they may be right, though, it cannot be of no consequence at all that each of these mass-killers rejected religion altogether, believing (it would seem) that morality can be constructed by human-beings without a transcendent reference-point. It's fair to say, I think, that all human attempts to ground and construct a morality without this reference point have failed. The tyrants mentioned above, moreover, would seem to have more in common with their fundamentalist-religious counterparts than might at first seem to be the case - precisely in the sense that they cannot conceive of any possibility that they may be wrong and that their convictions may need to be tempered by reason. Instead, any and all of their actions, however grotesque, are justified by appeal to their over-arching project, in precisely the same kind of way that ISIS, for example, justifies its treatment of 'infidels'.
The idea that, left to its own devices, and with religion ('the root of all evil') banished, humankind would naturally construct a peaceable paradise on earth, is quaint beyond belief.
