World Peace Promoted Most by Non Religious
In today’s (January 6,
2015) The Guardian, there is an editorial entitled “If Peace On Earth is Our Goal,
Atheism Might Be the Means to That End” by Adam Lee. It is a great article revealing several results
of various polls on religious societies and non-religious societies throughout
the world. The comments are sufficient
themselves to press their points so I am just going to excerpt quotes from it.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/06/peace-on-earth-atheism?CMP=ema_565
“In America, millennials
are the largest and
least religious generation in the country’s history. The trend toward
secularization in the US mirrors the movement in Europe and
throughout the developed world. And poll after poll have shown that the
nonreligious also lean more progressive and more pacifist on a wide variety of
issues relating to violence: torture, the death penalty, corporal punishment,
military adventurism and more.”
“A Pew poll from 2009,
well before the Senate released its devastating torture report last month,
asked whether torturing suspected terrorists could be justified found that the
non-religious were most opposed to torture, with a combined 55%
saying that it could rarely or never be justified. Gallup has also found that
people with no religious preference are less
supportive of the death penalty than any group of Christians.
The non-religious are also among the
most likely to say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. The
religiously unaffiliated are also less likely than Christians to believe that
the US is superior to all other countries in the world, a
hyper-patriotic attitude that’s hardly conducive to careful reflection about
the use of American military power.”
“Religion’s violent
tendencies also tend to be reflected in its adherents’ personal lives. The
social scientists Christopher Ellison and Darren Sherkat found that
conservative Protestants disproportionately
support the use of corporal punishment, such as spanking or
whipping, for children. The researchers speculate that this stems from
theology: Christians who promote a literal interpretation of the Bible tend to
believe that human nature is inherently evil, and that sin demands severe
punishment. What’s more, the Bible itself (among itsmany other bloody verses)
specifically calls for beating children in verses such asProverbs
13:24. (By contrast, freethinkers like the famous American orator
Robert Ingersoll recognized the cruelty
of corporal punishment as early as 1877.)”
“As long as humanity was
in thrall to the violent morality of religious texts, our societies were
warlike and cruel. As the American revolutionary Thomas Paine said, belief in a
cruel god makes a cruel man. It’s only in the last few decades, as we’ve begun
to cast these beliefs off, that we’re making real moral progress.”
“The influence of the non-religious
shows is also evident on an international scale. The nonprofit group Vision of
Humanity publishes an annual Global Peace
Index, which ranks countries on a broad spectrum of indicators,
including violent crime, incarceration rates, weapon ownership, and military
spending. Sociologist Phil Zuckerman summarizes their results in his new book
Living the Secular Life:”
“...according
to their most recent rankings, among the top ten most peaceful nations on
earth, all are among the least God-believing – in fact, eight
of the ten are specifically among the least theistic nations on earth.
Conversely, of the bottom ten – the least peaceful nations – most of them are
extremely religious.”
The article goes on to say
that not all religious people are violent, and not all non-religious people are
non-violent. But it mentions that
Unitarians and Quakers especially have “played an important role in peace
movements”. The article also mentions
that there are “prominent atheists like Sam Harris and the late Christopher
Hitchens who have been entirely too cavalier about imperialism and military
aggression.”
The article ends with, “But
in general, the trend is that, as the world becomes less religious, we can
expect it to become even more peaceful.”
David Kimball
