On Reading "The God Delusion" by Dawkins - Chapter 7B

In Chapter 7 of his book Dawkins also rails against religion as a source of conflict.  

One can certainly agree that much conflict has been taken up in the name of religion, orchestrated by evil people manipulating those who did not understand the very faith they fought for.  But then Stalin, and Mao certainly did not require that people understand atheism to fight for them either.  The sad reality is that evil people will always seek to manipulate the majority to their own benefit.   The wise would not then conclude that every government and/or every religion is bad, just because evil people abuse it.  They would conclude that evil exists, that people choose to be evil and that evil is evil no matter where you find it.  Christians recognize that evil as humanity’s problem and call it “sin”.  Dawkins says (and I quote), “The problem’s name is God.”   Lest you think that is enough blasphemy for a single chapter, Dawkins goes on to re-write the ten commandments according to the culture of our day.   That’s hardly necessary.  Richard’s commandments are already being acted upon by the judges of our land and everyone who has an axe to grind against political incorrectness. Nevertheless, I think God does a better job of defining His expectations (than Richard). 

Richard goes on to expound on the wonders of the Zeitgeist, which he defines as the rapid movement of culture.  He believes that this movement (what the last generation called “progress”) is where people draw their morals from, and not from Scripture or from God.  I will agree that the vast majority of people do in fact draw morals from those around them (hey, that sounds familiar…), but that fact means little if anything, because as I’ve already stated, good morals and good behavior do not necessarily mean lack of evil, or for that matter, true good. 

To close the chapter, Dawkins writes at some length to discuss the atheism or lack thereof of both Hilter and Stalin.  He concludes that while Stalin was in fact an atheist, the evidence is not so clear for Hitler.  To me this is irrelevant – it matters not whether they were atheists or devote Catholics or even if they claimed evangelical Christianity as their cause.  Likewise it matters not if they did all their evil acts out of a sense of atheism or a sense of religion.  The point of these two (and countless others) is that they did evil.  As I’ve already pointed out, evil is evil no matter what ‘cause’ it dresses itself up in .  The error of atheism is not that it produces more evil or less evil than religion – the error of atheism is that it cannot provide a solution to evil where and when we find it, nor does it immediately recognize evil when it (atheism) does find it.   For the chilling thing is that when we look carefully, we find it in all of us.