A realization

As part of my readings for "Skeptics and Believers" I am reading Christopher Hitchen's "God is not Great." This is much like Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion," a collection of all the horrors he can find executed in the name of religion being used as the single exemplars of religion and then condemning religion and the belief in God based on this extremely biased sample. What created the realization was the constant repetition of "Religion poisons everything."

I suddenly realized that both Hitchens and Dawkins are using exactly the same logic as the gun-grabbers. Gun-grabbers blame the gun not the person pulling the trigger for the damage or death caused by gun-fire. Hitchens and Dawkins blame the religion not the person using it to justify their horrific behavior. Religion is simply a formal or informal statement of beliefs that can be used to justify behavior, and depending on the person using it, the behavior can be either evil or beneficent. Unless, like the Quran, there are explicit directives to perform evil acts, religion and religious doctrine is of itself neither good nor bad. It is the uses to which HUMANS put it that create good or evil.

Of course, in addition to misplacing the blame for the evils done in the name of religion, both these atheists refuse to acknowledge that there is good coming to the world in the name of religion. Then the issue would not be so clear-cut.