I have often made the claim that the world would be a better place without religion. This seems to me to be self-evidently true for many reasons, the most immediate one being that religion causes so many deaths. Even the most cursory look at the history of the world would reveal the vast number of wars, deaths, injuries, and other forms of suffering committed by one group of people on another because of religious differences. One does not have to even look at history but just look at the world today.

I sometimes get the response that conflict between people is inevitable and if religions do disappear, that people would find some other issue to fight over. The inference that my critics seem to draw from this is that there is no point trying to get rid of religion because there is some sort of conservation law for conflicts.

This seems to me to be somewhat disingenuous. It is like saying that since we are all going to die of something eventually, there is no point in finding cures for diseases since all that will do is shift the cause of death to something else. But eliminating one disease does not create new diseases and does have the effect of increasing life expectancy.

No one is saying that religion is the only cause of conflict and so we would not expect all conflict to cease if religion disappeared. But it is a major source of conflict and eliminating it would undoubtedly help, just as eliminating or finding cures for some diseases have improved the quality of life immensely.

Steven Pinker argues that despite all the wars and genocide that have occurred fairly recently, there has been a steady decline in violence from Biblical times and that the present era is the least violent in history (via Machines Like Us). He points out that the Bible encourages the most appalling violence and cruelty against others.

While there is obviously no natural conservation law for conflicts, there is one sense in which that idea can be partly salvaged. There is no question that having groups of people fight over things like religion or race or tribe or nationality or other divisive issues diverts them from seeing the more structural causes of their plight such as rule of the oligarchy, by the oligarchy, for the oligarchy. So these conflicts serve the interests of the ruling classes. If religion, one of the easiest of ways of creating conflict, were to disappear, those who benefit from conflict would actively seek to find other ways to ignite strife.

But that still does not imply that we should not seek the elimination of religion. Religious beliefs seem to be the most combustible and the easiest to use to get people to adopt a we/them attitude and to look at people just like them as their enemies. Look at the fights between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland and between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. In both conflicts, both sides share enormous similarities but what should be a unifying glue is easily overcome by their absurd obsession with religious differences.

Nothing seems to fire up people more than the thought that they are fighting for their god and that he will reward them for their murderous acts. Look at how easy it was to incite religious people to brutally murder innocent people in Afghanistan, simply by burning a book halfway around the world. The idea that a powerful god would even need puny humans to avenge his honor is ridiculous on its face and the fact that believers actually think like that shows how religion robs people of basic common sense and encourages irrational thinking.

Taking the divisive tool of religion away would make it harder to foment discord.