Is Religion the Real Danger to Society?

There is a growing movement of non-believers in the world who want to see religion meet it's downfall.  Now, they're not going to bomb churches or protest outside churches in Guy Fawkes masks.....oh wait.....well they're not going to bomb churches anyway.

Most of these people have a live and let live policy as well.  They really don't care what someone believes, just as long as that person doesn't try to force their beliefs (whether it be through direct force or via laws or lobbying) on everyone else.  They all share a fundamental belief that religion causes harm to society.  Looking at the history of religion, they have a point.

Obviously, some religions are much more of a threat to civilization than others.  It seems that every faith goes through it's "wild" phase, where it becomes ruthless, brutal.  Judaism actually chronicled this period in their holy book, where they engaged in a deadly ethnic cleansing campaign against the people living in Canaan because God supposedly "gave" them that land.  It makes me wonder, wouldn't it have been easier for God just to make all those people disappear?  It seems kind of pointless for an all-powerful universe creator to rely on a former slave army to destroy cities one-by-one.  At any rate, running into a Jew back then would have been pretty scary.  However, nowadays Judaism is relatively peaceful.  There's a few militant sects, but nothing out of the ordinary for any other religion.  There are even militant sects of Buddhism.

Then we have Christianity, an offshoot of Judaism.  For the first few hundred years, they were pretty peaceful, and there were a lot of martyrs...then they became the ones in charge.  The middle ages saw a reign of Christian terror filled with Inquisitions and Crusades.  Now, the church has calmed down quite a bit, and fits in pretty good with the modern world.

Right on cue, Islam seems to be going through it's rough phase, and as religions go is probably the most threatening to world peace as a whole.  More violent acts are done in the name of Islam every year than those done for all other religions combined.  There is also an unwillingness among the majority of so-called "moderate" muslims to condemn this violence.  Will Islam "mellow out" if given enough time?  Or will the availability of weapons of mass destruction to such an unstable and violent belief system spell the end for us all?  Only time will tell.

It's understandable to see religion as a threat to peace, but I think those who would see the end of all religion make one mistake: they lump all religions as the same thing, and they're not.  People in Israel don't go to bed at night worrying about those Amish suicide bombers.  Religion comes in all shapes and colors, some of which are completely benign, doing absolutely no harm to society.  Many religions practice good things.  Charities for example are often run by churches.  It's incredibly closed-minded to pronounce a blanket condemnation on all religion.

The real and true threat to any civilized society is absolute thinking.  In other words, the threat is seeing everything on "black" or "white" terms.  Nothing is "absolutely" good or evil, and thinking along those "you're either with us or against us" lines can cause a lot of problems.  It got us into this disastrous war with Iraq, among other things.  Certainly religion can play a part in encouraging this behavior, but it's not unique to any one philosophy.  It's dangerous no matter which God one believes or doesn't believe in.  By putting blanket condemnations on things you don't like, you marginalize them.  Proclaiming something "good" or "evil" stops one from truly evaluating it.  Not even Adolf Hitler was completely evil.

This group of non theists also makes this mistake.  People like Dawkins and Hitchens marginalize religion and give it no redeeming value whatsoever.  I may agree with them on their stance that there (probably) is no God or Gods, but I don't think you can just marginalize the faith of billions away like that.  That line of thinking is just as dangerous as that of the rabid evangelical or the Muslim suicide bomber.  The conflict comes when people come together and have wildly different ideas about good and evil.  The smaller this world gets, the less isolate we become, the more and more we'll have to abandon that kind of thinking, or I fear it could be the end of this civilization.