Faith and Religion.

[Edwardo Piet]

I'd suggest maybe that FAITH is the real, - and bigger - enemy.

I'd say a good example of this is that Stalin did all the evil he did partly because he had a kind of anti-religious faith type delusion. For example - all the thought policing that he did.

I very well know that faith is much, much more common when part of religion, or the religious.

But I'd say considering atleast SOME people are influenced by faith, when they're not religious - whether thats anti-religious faith or not - I'd say that is still significant enough to make faith a bigger enemy than Religion itself, because faith after all, is what drives religion.

You can CERTAINLY be an atheist without faith. But you can't be religious without faith.

And as I said...if even Stalin is the only deeply atheist who was driven by faith, (i'd say he was a pseudo-atheist, not a true atheist) thats enough to show I'd say that the bigger enemy is faith.

Finally I'll repeat: You can CERTAINLY be an atheist without faith. But you can't be religious without faith.

The righteous shall live by faith.

I doubt it.

I think what you're talking about is ideology.

Dawkins said that, "good people do good things, bad people do bad things but it takes religion to make good people do bad things"

He was wrong in two respects ... first of all religion is just a thing (a tool if you like and there are others, not a good one but you get the idea) and it is possible for religion to make bad people do good things; secondly he was wrong because (as you say above) it isn't only religion that has faith (and I don't mean the faith born out of reason and evidence) so do other doctrines such as communism and fascism. People do bad things in the name of ideological beliefs as well ... was Hitler's hatred of the Jews religion based or inspired? Almost certainly, but that can't necessarily be argued for the whole of the Nazi party or its agents but what is certain is that they had faith, faith in their Nazi party, faith in the belief that they were the Aryan super race, faith that they would eventually stand tall and proud and ruling a world.

So Dawkins statement should, IMO, read, "good people do good things, bad people do bad things but it takes an ideology (irrational faith) to make good people do bad things "

Kyu

Well those words weren't Dawkins' originally - he was quoting - and, if I remember correctly - the quote was from Steven Weinberg the American Nobel prize winning Physicist...
Also I'd say this is somewhat a semantic thing; Dawkins has also - (pretty much, I'm paraphrasing here) - said that the 'thought police', anti-religious faith, or any other form of faith is KIND OF a religion in the sense that it controls people like religion.
I guess its just a sort of pseudo-religion.
So I'd say yes its a semantic thing. I'd say faith is what drives religion - and also what drives superstition and a lot of pseudo-science - so I'd say faith is the bigger/real enemy.
Basically: You can't just treat the symptoms, you've got to treat the cause, - the core of the problem.