Dear Reader
It seems to me that the maxim that, too much blood has been spilled in the name of religion, used as a thesis for then opining that this means organized religion is bad, to me is patently false.
One only needs look into the lens of history to see the falsehood. How many people died at the hands of Gilgamesh, and all the other tyrants and invaders that came after him? Perhaps a billion or more human beings. Religion is a poor reflection of that magnitude of carnage. The second world war matched all deaths from religion to date. Including the human sacrifices that the Aztecs, and other Mezzo-American cultures practiced.
The same people who glibly ridicule the religions of the world, using this sophist argument, then proclaim the greatness of the State. Using such spurious arguments as “the government has a legitimate role to play in helping people better their lives.” The best one I have heard in a long time was when Peter Shumlin President of the Vermont Senate said on Vermont public Television that “What the legislature does best is decide what decisions to make for the people.” (This went by without any questions from the moderator… that would have been ‘biased‘.)
If we are to believe that the number of deaths that result from a given human action, i.e. Religion, makes it a bad, then we must also believe that another human action, i.e. Government, is much worse due to the magnitude of deaths resulting from its actions.
To deny the one, denies also the other…
