The God Delusion is the new book by Richard Dawkins. Readers of Dawkins would already know Dawkins position on religion. Beebs has an interview with Dawkins in it's Newsnight programme. You can watch the video online. Quite interesting. Prospect Magazine has a review which is worth a read if you want to see the kind of reactions that Dawkins evokes in some people.
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A very positive review in the Grauniad
The Grauniad prints an excerpt
From Guardian: "an arcane survival mechanism is operating in grossly distorted circumstances". Worth pondering.
That review in Prospect was pure dreck.
Yet under Stalin almost the entire Orthodox priesthood was exterminated simply for being priests, as were the clergy of other religions and hundreds of thousands of Baptists. Oh, not this nonsense again! Yes, Stalin killed the priesthood. But it was not them being priests, it was that they were an ecclesiastical institution that held political power. Stalin also killed his secular political opposition, even that within his own party. Stalin came from the Czarist tradition that glorified absolute power, i.e., he was far more of a Russian than he was an atheist.
Literally everything in that review is as daft as that. China doesn't allow free speech, French Revolution, Tamil Tigers were suicide bombers too. Nothing of substance, no actual answers to Dawkins' arguments. Like I said, pure dreck. I'm dumber from having read it.
If atheism has to take the hit for Stalin, christianity gets the african slave trade, a centuries long killing spree with a death toll in the hundreds of millions, and the hundred years war, which killed a full third of the population of Europe.
The tamil situation is way, way more complicated than that glib little bit about "marxists in sri lanka" would suggest, too.
I have a certain sympathy for th argument that there is not a precise link between religion (specifically, Islam) and suicide bombing. At any given time, the practice of religion is an artefact of its social, political and historical context. The origins of islamicist suicide bombing were similar to the origins of militant islamicism as a significant force in the middle east: the Iranian regime. (Suicide bombing was an essential tool of an under-equipped Iranian military when faced with Iraqi armour).
Certainly, though, religion is a significant factor in the glorification of suicide bombing as something worthwile in itself, rather than a regretably necessary tactic.
I do have some qualms about Dawkins, though. I don't think he always makes his arguments with sufficient precision. He can't resist the temptation to taunt.