Is atheism a peaceful religion ?

“Are you a Christian or Muslim or Hindu or Jew or Buddhist ?” – “None, I am an atheist.” Strangely enough, an atheist identifies himself analogous to being a Christian, a Muslim, or a Hindu !.

One defines something as a religion if it takes a definitive position on the divine and/or the after life and atheism does have one such position – that there is no divine and after life !. Atheism therefore is the position that affirms the non-existence of God and proposes “positive disbelief” rather than a mere suspension of belief. Atheists may not have one single holy book about God, but it does seem to have books about preaching to replace God. And similar to how the faithful try to propagate their religion, atheists too proselytise and in the process congregate, and often stalk and mob their opponents with polemics in the hope of converting the religiously faithful into disbelievers. Hence, the positive disbelief, propagation of that disbelief, and its intolerance to belief systems that differ from it,  appear to me like many – for all functional purposes – a religion.

Dawkins (a man I respect myself on several counts) is but I am sorry to say an unashamed proselytiser. He says in the preface of his book, The God Delusion, that he intends his book for religious readers and his aim is that they will be atheists by the time they finish reading it !. Yet it is not a book of persuasion, but of provocation. Sam Harris a member of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism, in one of his book passage reaches some disturbing conclusions that “some propositions (religious) are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them”. This sounds like exactly the kind of argument put forward by those who ran the inquisition !. We seem to be familiar with religious intolerance, now we have to recognize irreligious intolerance not only among vocalists of atheism but also in atheistic literature world wide.

Interestingly, most atheists tend to argue that religion has no place in a rational, civilized society and that atheism is the proper philosophical standard for human reason. They claim that their philosophy is based purely on secular reason, logic, historically documented facts and the verifiable science. I dare say, that it is a rather disturbingly pompous self-righteous stand to take, much akin to the religious fanatic who claims to hold the key to life and after. To be honest, I have no inherent problem with atheists nor do I have any problem with Christians, Muslims, Jews or Hindus nor the scientologists who seem to have bizzare theories involving aliens. I prefer – you believe what appeals to you , I believe what appeals to me and as long as we are not set to demean the other or slit one another´s throat, there should be no reason why multiple belief systems cannot co-exist.

It is true that religions have often fallen well short of their ideal vision and relied heavily on propaganda, but we must recognize that so have atheism. For instace, most atheists are quite rabid when it comes to attacking religion and claim that religion is the singular most reason of all wars among mankind. However that claim is the most illogical and inaccurate claim there is. The Encyclopedia of Wars authored by Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod documents the history of recorded warfare. From their list of 1763 wars that have been waged over the course of known human history only 123 have been classified to involve a religious cause, accounting for about 6.9 % of all wars and less than 2 %  of all people killed in war. Examples are in plenty. 35 million soldiers and civilians have died in WW I alone as opposed to 1-3 million in the crusades and inquistions put together. Worse, the atheistic communist governments of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong have alone killed 42.6 and 37.8 million people through various means – shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed or worked to death, buried alive, drowned, hung; you name a methodology and it is there. And if one adds people such as Lenin, Tojo and Polpot that number soars even higher. History simply does not support the argument that religion is the major cause of conflict. Wars have always arisen, from territorial disputes, military rivalries, conflicts of ethnicity, and strivings for commercial and economic advantage and religion as a source of war is only a small fraction of it, less than 7 % to be accurate.

I have genuine regard and respect for the agnostics as they are not at war with anyone, whereas atheists are prone to aggressively marauding just about everyone as religious fanatics are. Hence, neither religion nor atheism per se will rid this world of propaganda, intolerance or war, if anything will, then it is “how” we chose to teach religion or atheism.