The third in the series on apologetics at Above Bar Church, Southampton. This one considers the challenge that religion is, in the words of Richard Dawkins, 'one of the world's great evils.

1. Religion is evil!

2. I think that a case can made that faith is one
of the world’s great evils, comparable to the
smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.
Faith, being belief that isn’t based on
evidence, is the principal vice of any religion.
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

3. How common do you think this objection is?
Try and separate out some of the different
aspects: what do people say about:
•Christians/religious people?
?
•The Bible?
•God?

4. what exactly is religion?

5. religious people are
morally inferior

6. narrow about beliefs

7. narrow about lifestyles

8. fanaticism

9. The OT is morally
inferior

10. harsh OT laws

11. religious genocide

12. God is morally inferior

13. hell

14. religious people are
morally inferior

15. I was trying to hit a target that deserved
hitting, and there's no merit in pulling
punches when important issues are at stake.
Anyway, every time I thought I was
overdoing it, up came another scandal about
brutal monks mistreating children in Irish
schools, or sadistic nuns tormenting children
in Scottish orphanages, to name but two that
came up recently. These things do happen.
Philip Pullman

16. Every single religion that has a monotheistic
god ends up by persecuting other people
and killing them because they don’t accept
him. Wherever you look in history, you find
that. It’s still going on.
Philip Pullman

17. Dawkins
17

18. Teaching children that unquestioned faith is
a virtue primes them – given certain other
ingredients that are not hard to come by –
to grow up into potentially lethal weapons
for the future jihads or crusades . . . If
children were taught to question and think
through their beliefs, instead of being taught
the superior virtue of faith without
question, it is a good bet that there would
be no suicide bombers.
The God Delusion
18

19. How would you respond to this?
?

20. religion suicide bombers

21. Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific
impartiality that in a book of almost four
hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself
to concede that a single human benefit has
flowed from religious faith, a view which is
as a priori improbable as it is empirically
false.
Terry Eagleton

22. For every one of these grand tragedies
there are ten thousand acts of personal
kindness and social good that go
unreported. . . . Religion, like all social
institutions of such historic depth and
cultural impact, cannot be reduced to an
unambiguous good or evil.
Michael Shermer
How We Believe: Science, Skepticism and the Search for God

23. which God?

24. The God who dies is the God of the burners
of heretics, the hangers of witches, the pers-
ecutors of Jews, the officials who recently
flogged that poor girl in Nigeria who had the
misfortune to become pregnant after having
been forced to have sex – all these people
claim to know with absolute certainty that
their God wants them to do these things.
Well, I take them at their word, and I say in
response that that God deserves to die.
Philip Pullman

25. It comes from the record of the Inquisition,
persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and
all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the
other side, too, from the Protestants burning
the Catholics. It comes from the insensate
pursuit of innocent and crazy old women,
and from the Puritans in America burning
and hanging the witches – and it comes not
only from the Christian Church but also
from the Taliban. . . .

26. atheist intolerance

27. I do not believe there is an atheist in the
world who would bulldoze Mecca – or
Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame.
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

28. Religion may have a tendency towards
absolutism, but the same tendency in innate
in any human attempt to find or create
meaning, especially when it is challenged.
The key thing here, it seems, is not the ideas
or values, but the dedication, even
fanaticism, of those who follow them.
Alister McGrath

29. Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate
foundation of liberty, conscience, human
rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of
Western civilisation. To this day, we have no
other options. We continue to nourish
ourselves from this source. Everything else is
postmodern chatter.
Jürgen Habermas

30. The OT is morally
inferior

31. harsh OT laws

32. [The Canaanites] were pitilessly driven out
of their homes to make room for the
ungrateful and mutinous children of Israel.
Christopher Hitchens
God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

33. [The OT contains] a warrant for trafficking
in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery,
for bride-price, and for indiscriminate
massacre . . .
Christopher Hitchens
God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

34. How would you respond to this?
?

35. OT law and OT narratives

36. protection for the weak . . . justice for the poor;
impartiality in the courts; generosity at harvest
time and in general economic life; respect for
persons and property, even of an enemy;
sensitivity to the dignity of the debtor; special
care for strangers and immigrants; considerate
treatment of the disabled; prompt payment of
wages . . . sensitivity over articles taken in
pledge; consideration for people in early
marriage, or in bereavement; even care for
animals, domestic and wild, and for fruit trees.
Chris Wright

37. The informed inhabitant of the ancient
Near East would have thought, Quick, get me
to Israel!
Paul Copan

38. religious genocide

39. God can have enough reasons

40. In the fourth generation your descendants
will come back here, for the sin of the
Amorites has not yet reached its full
measure.
Genesis 15:16

41. cities or garrisons?

42. hyperbolic language

43. Do not defile yourselves in any of these
ways, because this is how the nations that I
am going to drive out before you became
defiled.
Leviticus 18:24

44. God’s promises

45. I will make you into a great nation, and I will
bless you; I will make your name great, and
you will be a blessing. I will bless those who
bless you, and whoever curses you I will
curse; and all peoples on earth will be
blessed through you.
Genesis 12:2–3

46. God is God

47. God is morally inferior

48. What makes my jaw drop is that people
today should base their lives on such an
appalling role model as Yahweh – and even
worse, that they should bossily try to force
the same evil monster (whether fact or
fiction) on the rest of us.
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

49. hell

50. Whatever they believe hell is actually like, all
these hell-fire enthusiasts seem to share the
gloating Schadenfreude and complacency of
those who know they are among the saved,
well conveyed by that foremost among
theologians, St Thomas Aquinas, in Summa
Theologica: ‘That the saints may enjoy their
beatitude and the grace of God more
abundantly they are permitted to see the
punishment of the damned in hell.’ Nice man.
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

51. I defy any of my co-religionists to tell me
they do not laugh at the idea of Dawkins
burning in hell.
Ann Coulter

52. How would you respond to this?
?

53. A man can’t be taken to hell, or sent to hell;
you can only get there on your own steam.
C.S. Lewis, The Dark Tower

54. Hell is just a freely chosen identity, based on
something else besides God, going on for
ever.
Tim Keller

55. It’s not a question of God ‘sending’ us to
Hell. In each of us there is something
growing up which will of itself be Hell unless
it is nipped in the bud. The matter is
serious: let us put ourselves in His hands at
once – this very day, this hour.
C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock

56. [Hell] is created when free beings use
(more accurately, abuse) the freedom God
has given them not to embrace him but to
reject him. In so doing, they reject the only
possible source of deep and lasting
happiness, and thereby consign themselves
to frustration, misery and suffering.
Jerry L. Walls
‘How Could God Create Hell?’

57. www.damaris.org
www.culturewatch.org
www.tonywatkins.org
twitter.com/tonywatkins_
facebook.com/tonywatkinspage