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Religion and Violence
Frank R. Zindler

After the devastating massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, Newt Gingrich told a group of Republican women that it and the horrendous situation in Kosovo was due to thirty-five years of “liberalism,” the elimination of school prayer, and the expulsion of “the Creator” from public school classrooms. According to the Washington Times, “The former speaker said one of the biggest mistakes was taking prayer and God out of the classrooms.” The implication was that Madalyn Murray O’Hair was responsible for the shootings by virtue of her Supreme Court triumph, Murray v Curlett, that was intended to abolish forced prayer and Bible reading from America’s public schools.

The truth of the matter, of course, is that there appears to be much more religion in the public schools today than there was in 1963 when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its much-maligned ruling. The Court’s ruling is widely flaunted, and the “wall of separation” crumbles progressively as organized religion captures more and more time and space in our schools. Moreover, all but one of the various school shooters have been certified to be believers of one sort or another who attended religious services. And then, there are the endless polls, emanating from religious polsters such as George Gallup, that claim that church attendance and religious belief are at an all-time high in American history.

Is it possible that that violence in the world is due to too much religion rather than too little?

A simple glance at Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Bosnia, Palestine, the Philippines, Indonesia, Sub-Saharan Africa, or Kashmir shows the religious soil from which the fruits of violence spring and are sustained.

Why should all religions lead to war and violence whenever they gain any degree of power? The answer is simple. Because all religions are false or untestable, they cannot - unlike science - appeal to any external standard as a test of the truth of their claims. When a scientist claims the earth is round, there are many observations which can be performed to test the claim. But when religionists claim their god is one (Allah), or triune (as Big Daddy, Junior, and The Spook), how can their claims be tested? There is no way to appeal to facts to support such nonsense. Either people accept such claims willingly, through weakness of intellect or because of emotional disturbance, or they must be forced to accept them. Only force will work, when facts are absent. This is rendered quite insidious by the ready rationalizations that come to mind in the heads of religious tyrants. The silly sillogism goes something like this:
“To me has been revealed absolute truth. This truth is necessary for salvation of every soul. You do not believe what has been revealed to me. Therefore, you will go to hell after you die, unless you come to believe in my gospel before you die. You refuse to believe my gospel. Because I love you as a human being, I don’t want you to go to hell. I love you so much, I want to help you get to heaven. It pains me to have to hurt you and torture you now, but if that is what it takes to make you see the light and be saved, so be it. A few electrical shocks to the genitals today are nothing compared to an eternity of soldering irons in your ears. Besides, your soul is more important than your body. I’m forcing you only because you refuse to save yourself.”
All religion, I think, if believed strongly enough, must inevitably lead to war and misery. While Atheism does not automatically bring peace to the world, at least it eliminates one major pretext for violence.