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Would all conflict cease if religion stopped existing? Obviously not.

But religion does add an element, a flash point if you will, that is easily exploited by those who want to make use of it to promote their own ends. And in places in the world where the political situation is unstable, religious differences may exacerbate existing fault lines so that they become the tipping point, pushing a society into chaos.

It is certainly simplistic to maintain that religion is responsible for all the world's ills--a position that Dawkins himself doesn't really appear to hold, in spite of some of his rhetoric. However, it's equally simplistic to turn a blind eye to the harm religious fanaticism can cause and pretend it's always something else that creates the problem.

People's beliefs aren't often a problem, but the actions they justify with those beliefs can be.

George

Niall: " ...if you were to remove religion from the situation, what would happen? Would some other sort of belief system take its place? Would we just replace God with Good? Would people become equally obsessed in following what Goodness directs us to do? Would the philosophies that lead us to decide what constitutes Good and Evil/Bad take over the roles that holy books have taken?

"I'm not arguing that they would, I'm just asking the question."
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I'm going to offer a qualified "no" as my response. I say "qualified" because there are a number of elements at work in this, and I want to be clear about what I am saying.

Although we are accustomed to thinking in terms of "religion," the truth is no such animal exists except as a category. There is no "religion," there are only religions. (David Eller makes this point in an excellent book called Natural Atheism, and I think he is on the right track). Religions differ in their approaches to the entire hierarchy of human belief and in their perceived roles in human societies.

It's also important to distinguish between religions as organizations that often have official or quasi-official status within given societies and the religious sentiments that help some humans find hope in a hopeless world, comfort in times of acute grief or personal anguish and charity in times of need.

The role of religions as "pennies in the fuse boxes" of rational thought most concerns me (and probably most concerns Dawkins). Many religions insist that their gods demand total submission and obedience from their congregants. To be sure, they don't always get it. But the voices of gods sound surprisingly (or maybe not so surprisingly after all) like the voices of men, and when that blind faith is invoked in aid of any political cause it can have frightening repercussions. When the princes of church and state collude to incite the subjects of one state to attack the subjects of another state, it is almost always assumed, and often openly proclaimed, that "God" is on their side.

As an example of what I'm talking about. We know the Crusades were fought for a variety of reasons, and many of those reasons had little or nothing to do with religions. However, religious fervor was indispensable in inciting those who went off to reclaim the Holy Lands. It provided the justification for indulging other, less pious, impulses. Had religions been removed from the equation, something else might have happened, but I submit it would have had an entirely different character.

By the same token, much of the unrest in the world today has little or nothing to do with religions, if one is speaking about underlying causes, but religions are useful tools for those who benefit from the unrest. No tools are quite so effective for inciting a mob as religious or patriotic fervor. Combine the two, as is usually done, and the mixture can be lethal.

Now human beings are quite ingenious and have found all sorts of reasons for visiting death and destruction on one another or trying to control one another, so I think it fatuous to pretend that if we just did away with religions, all the world's ills would disappear. But the voices of men, while they can be seductive, are much easier to counter when they are understood to be entirely human than when they come to us disguised as the voices of gods.

So I would hope that, if we could move away from religions as organized affairs that martial human beings in the "causes" of the divines, we could find better ways of dealing with our very human problems. Maybe we would not, but I think it would be beneficial to make the effort.

On the other hand, I suspect there always will be folks (like my 89-year-old mother) who find great comfort in their religions. It's a sentiment I can appreciate, even though I don't share it. Human beings always will need that sort of balm for the spirit (please note, I mean nothing supernatural here). I find mine in poetry, music, literature, the contemplation of the cosmos and the wonders of science, but I don't begrudge her finding it in a church.

George