We have all testified fiercely and at length on the crimes of religion. It's easy to point to the Holocaust, the Crusades, 9/11, the Inquisition, and the countless other tales of murder, genocide, and war incited by the belief in God and the dogmatic adherence to ancient texts. But these arguments are meaningless. Altogether they amount to nothing but circumstantial, anecdotal, and ad hominem accusations facing off against and endless army of strawmen and no-true-Scotsmen across the field. All of these are concrete and temporary, their victims and perpetrators limited to those in that specific historical context.
The greater crime, the greater cancer religion has wrought is one that touches all men, in all times, and it is much more abstract. It is the reason people, century after bloody century, are able to do these sorts of things to each other and get away with it. It is, as the scholar said, the hijacking of morality. It is the fact that religion has successfully claimed a monopoly on the production and interpretation of right and wrong, of justice, and worst of all, of truth. So much so, that it leads men not only to do these things, but to believe they are right, because religion has changed what that word means. Right no longer means right, it simply means God's will. For something so essential to be balanced on the whim of an invented deity is beyond dangerous - it's criminal. History provides us more than enough empirical evidence for that, but the concept alone should do more to condemn religion in the sight of thinking men than any particular holocaust. Because none of those historical events has opened us to any progress. It is only the principle, not any event, that is simultaneously committed against us all, and makes us all vulnerable at any time, no matter where you live or what your faith. And yet they feel at ease in their conscience about it, and in the public conscience, because religion has straggled that as well.
You say that because I am an atheist, I could not possibly demonstrate integrity, explore truth, or experience love - that these things can only come from God. Why? I could just as easily suggest the opposite. I should ask for evidence of God's love, compared to man's. I should ask where the integrity is in serving that God, as opposed to serving truth. And yet, in a peculiar and hypocritical game of rhetorical acrobatics, religion has riveted itself so thoroughly to all things beyond the concrete that a man can now be accused of religion every time he expresses an abstract thought. You say that because I talk about truth and justice and love, etc, that I must have some religion, that I must call that my religion if nothing else. That because I believe in something, that something must be called God. No. It already has a name, and God means something entirely different.
To attribute love to God is one thing, even to claim God's monopoly on love is philosophically conceivable, but to say the two are one and the same is to grossly misinterpret the nature of both concepts. You could say that God is any number of things - love, life, time, the universe, the conscience - whatever you like. But if that's the case, then you're no longer talking about Yahweh, the God of the Bible. You're talking about something else, and to believe in that thing does not make one a believer in God, only a believer in the thing now being described. To demonstrate the existence of one does not imply the existence of the other, because you've arbitrarily defined the parameters. It is a very poor breed of the ontological argument to suggest that because you define God to be X, and I do not refute the existence of X, that therefore not only does God exist, but also that I am therefore a theist. You have yet to provide any evidence to suggest that X, be it love or life or whatever, is even evidence of God, let alone a manifestation of God himself. You cannot simply define God into existence. Is your god so weakly manifest that you have to change the definition of god in order to find him? Or are you just so arrogant as to lay claim on behalf of your god to things your god had nothing to do with? If you defined God as energy, then you could find him in a lump of coal, but I trust that's not what you're suggesting. But it is only by doing this that one could count Einstein and Spinoza among the theists. And it is only by doing this that you could accuse me of religion.
Mine is a war in the abstract, for the abstract. It is a campaign to take back the things religion stole from us. To take back our dignity as inhabitants of a natural existence, and not subjects of a supernatural creation. We need to loosen religion's strangle-hold on morality and truth in the minds of the people. Because if we can do that, if we can end their crimes of the mind, then we won't have to talk about any more crimes of blood.
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