Good And Bad Reasons For Believing (Dawkins letter to his daughter)

This is flawed reasoning, while men go to war over religion, they go to war over an assortment of dogma. If religion where eliminated tomorrow, a new dogma would take it's place and the killing started all over again.

I know it is flawed because I was guilty of it. I despised religion for war, but after deep reflection I realized that what I truly despised was human nature. This is hard for an atheist to admit because all their faith is put into humanity. To place the flaw at humanities feet is to admit faith in a flawed pillar.

Blaming religion for war and death is akin to blaming cars (with drunk drivers in them) for death. They are merely a vessel for the actions of humans. How humans use them is a reflection of that humans nature and without religion they would find another outlet for those desires. By blaming religion one is giving credit to the concept of god, for the atrocities instead of just seeing it as a bunch of dumb ass upright primates doing what humans do.

Anything else is holding out false hope that we are more virtuous than that. It is a common falsely held belief by the more intelligent of our species, due to the fact that we reason from our own perspective, those of us with higher reasoning like to hold out hope that the less intelligent will come around, when the reality is their are portions of our species that are only slightly less primal than apes. In some ways more.

The more intelligent project their understanding and their capacities onto the less and are always disappointed when they lack the capacity. This usually turns to blaming some dogma rather than blaming humanity.

I am constantly amazed when I watch the news at the primal nature of much of our fellow humanity, holding out hope of an mass awakening of that portion of humanity is fanciful at best. They lack the capacity to understand the nature of their primal ways. But to blame religion for that nature is to a cop-out at best and delusional.