No, I didn't. We would still have mass murders, wars, and violence even if we didn't have any religions. Faith may be used to manipulate people, but it can be anything. The reasons given on why faith is evil can be furthered to many things throughout society. Money and resources are evil. Nationality is evil. Race is evil.
People are lead to believe that their faith is justifying said evil acts, but is it the religion, or the person who is in control? Faith can be dangerous. But you have to have other factors in place before it can present a threat.
But here's the thing: when it comes to actions that affect others (i.e. the things that Dawkins touches on in the OP), if you subject the faith behind them to scrutiny, the good actions are supportable on their own merits, so they can still happen. It's only the bad aspects of faith that would be screened out.
Saying "your religious faith is not enough to justify doing this to me" doesn't stop any good ideas that can be justified on their own merits. It only stops the ones that can't be.
Presence of faith is no more immoral than it's absence. But really that is not what the good professor is discussing here. He is setting up a strawman which he then demolishes.
But that is not how faith works, people don't just have generic 'faith' so that anything goes, faith exists within a community which puts borders around it, a Christian's faith has boundaries, places where they are not supposed to go as does the faith of Muslims, Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians et al.
It's a feedback system. A religious community has boundaries, but those boundaries are the product of the community that came before it, just as the community today will help to form the boundaries for the community of the future.
Religion is an organic thing. It changes and evolves over time, and I've seen no reason to posit a limit to how far it can grow or what form it can change into. For every strange idea I could ever come up with, I can probably find a religion somewhere that believed it (and more importantly, attributed it to some sort of god) at one point or another.
The boundaries of different faiths can change and have changed over time. Religion is not a static thing. Heck - I don't think it's necessarily even a predictable thing. And in the case of every faith you mentioned, it arose in an environment where it itself was beyond the established boundaries of the society that gave birth to it.
A person's faith is generally in something or someone, it is not some nebulous philosophical concept which floats about in the ether looking for a place to land.
Really? Take Christianity: it's history has included everything from extreme self-denial of asceticism and martyrdom up to the extreme self-indulgence of things like the Prosperity Gospel movement. It's covered everything from extreme pacifism to genocidal "holy war". It's had the Shakers who completely eschewed having children and the "Quiverfull" movement who declares that God commands them to have as many children as they can.
When, apparently,
any philosophical idea can be glommed onto the same religious core of a prophet, a set of scriptures, a god, or what-have-you, I don't think we can really say that this core is really guiding people anywhere by itself.
IMO, often, religious faith is a mechanism that allows a person to take
whatever opinion they personally hold and elevate it to a position where it's supposed to be unassailable.
The examples he gives are also flawed, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the 9/11 attack are not simply rooted in faith, they are also rooted firmly in socio-political realities, in the politics of power and revenge.
But they all share the common characteristic that they all fall apart when religious faith is removed from the equation.
Someone who hates religion badly enough will start spewing this garbage. Dawkins does it and now you're doing it.
