When the numbers aren’t on your side, it’s time to try some hypothetical reasoning. Putting on his biggest philosophical hat, Carl Sagan asks how the civilized people of Europe could possibly have condoned witch-burning. His answer: “If we’re absolutely sure that our beliefs are right, and those of others wrong… then the witch mania will recur in its infinite variations.” In other words, it could happen again, and right here in America. But how plausible is this? Carl Sagan believed in evolution, the Big Bang, and lots of other things. I’m sure he was convinced he was absolutely right, and that his enemies the creationists and fundamentalists were absolutely wrong. Even so, Sagan didn’t burn anyone. I believe certain things to be absolutely true, and yet my personal record on witch-burning is exemplary. If you go to Salem today, you’ll see that the witches are thriving. They don’t even bother to employ security when they perform their rituals— indeed, they have become tourist attractions. Clearly Sagan was engaging in a little paranoia.
How about the Thirty Years’ War? This conflict involving the Holy Roman Empire and the Protestant states in Germany lasted from 1618 to 1648. While religious motives were present initially, historians today emphasize that these wars were mainly fueled by political contests of power. The emerging nation-states of Europe were clashing with each other over territory and influence. We can see how political motives overrode religious ones in the role played by Catholic France in the latter phases of the war: concerned about thestrength of the greatest Catholic power in the world, the Holy Roman Empire, French statesman Cardinal Richelieu organized a force made up of Swedes and Frenchmen to help the Protestant side.
Just as in the Thirty Years’ War, many current conflicts that are counted today as “religious wars” are not being fought over religion. This is a point that never seems to get through to atheists like Dawkins and Harris. Dawkins complains about the media’s insistence on describing the conflicts in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and Iraq as “ethnic” rather than religious. But the media is right and Dawkins is wrong. These are ethnic rivalries. Dawkins terms the clash between the Shiites and Sunni in Iraq as “religious cleansing.” Nonsense. Aside from the radicals of al Qaeda, the fight in Iraq is between one group that, in league with the secular despot Saddam Hussein, ruled Iraq for a quarter century, and another group—the Shiite majority— that is now in power. Religion has very little to do with this internecine conflict.
Dawkins gives several other examples, and they all work against him. The Israeli- Palestinian conflict is not, at its core, a religious one. Rather, it arises from disputes over self-determination and land. Hamas and the extreme orthodox parties in Israel may advance theological claims—”God gave us this land” and so forth—but even without these religious motives the conflict would remain essentially the same. But aren’t the Jews fighting for this land because it is holy? No, they are fighting because this is their ancestral land and, after the Holocaust, many Jews have become convinced that they can feel secure only in a country of their own. The people who founded the state of Israel were secular, not religious, Jews. The Palestinian Liberation Organization was from its origin a secular nationalist group.
Ethnic rivalry, not religion, is the source of the tension in the Balkans. Christopher Hitchens gratuitously proposes that the “ethnic cleansing” of the Balkans be called “religious cleansing” even though he admits that “xenophobic nationalism” and territorial aggrandizement rather than religion are the primary motivations for the violence. Moving on to Northern Ireland, Hitchens tells a joke without realizing that it undermines his own argument. A man is walking down a street in Belfast when a gunman leaps out of a doorway, points a gun, and says, “Protestant or Catholic?” The man exclaims, “Neither. I’m an atheist.” To which the gunman replies, “Catholic atheist or Protestant atheist?” The real point of the joke is that it doesn’t matter because religion is not really the issue. In the same vein, the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland aren’t fighting about transubstantiation or some point of religious doctrine. They are fighting over issues of autonomy and over which group gets to rule the country.
