"In one of his more recent books, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything , the articulate and very interesting atheist and critic of Christianity Christopher Hitchens argues that the entire record of religion--all religion--is toward war, hatred, and strife, whether it is the Protestant-Catholic strife of Belfast in recent decades, or Beirut between peoples of Christian and Muslim heritage, or Belgrade or Baghdad or Bombay. All around the world religion poisons everything. It has to be said that there is some truth to the charge. It is not for nothing that centuries back the Thirty Years' War was at least in substantial measure a war of religion.
The reason that there is some truth to the charge Hitchen levels is that one of the things that religion does--all religion--is treat some issues as matters of staggering importance. Today the current round of dominant terrorists are Muslims, and undoubtedly they would like to see Islamic culture and faith enjoy a bigger share of the world's financial and cultural pie. But what makes their beliefs crushingly important in their own eyes is their conviction that they represent the mind of God himself.
Mind you, it has also been shown by Alister McGrath in his book on atheism that if you do not have religion to transcendentalize things, you end up transcendentalizing something else. In other words, the act of making something out to be of transcendental importance is not exclusively a function of religion. It may be a function of human desire to control. In the twentieth century, the powerful movements of Nazism and Stalinism were not religiously driven. Some in the Nazy party laid claim to their reconstruction of Christianity, but the purpose was to domesticate Christianity and harness its energies. In reality, what drove the two movements--Nazism and Stalinsim--were distinct visions of reality: on the one hand, the transcendentalizing of ethnicity, a sense of intrinsic Aryan superiority, a hate-filled blaming of Jews and of the Treaty of Versailles; on the other hand, a transcendentalizing of the state grounded in Marxist social and economic theory. So it is not as if religion poisons
everything while everything else is good. The century characterized by the greatest bloodshed, the twentieth century, generated most of its violence in movements that were distinctly anti-religious. The world did not lose one-third of the population of Cambodia because of Christianity but because of communism.
Nevertheless, Christianity has had its fanatics. Still, the notion of fanaticism needs to be analyzed. Probably most people think that Christians can be placed on a spectrum between nominalism (Christians in name only) and fanaticism (Christians who are extremely intense about their beliefs and morals). On this scale, we might be most drawn to the middle of the scale, to the nice moderates. The problem is that the scale itself is mischievous. It assumes that Christianity itself is primarily about effort and moral improvement, so that the high-intensity end of the scale is peopled with self-righteous, over-confident, superior, condescending folk who are, at best, terribly off-putting.
Yet that is not what Christianity is about. Where one sees that Christianity is being lived out in a fashion reasonably faithful to the Bible's emphasis on salvation by grace, on what God has done for us in Christ and not on what we have achieved, it ought to change everything. Tim Keller writes,
Belief that you are accepted by God by sheer grace is profoundly humbling. The people who are fanatics,
then, are not so because they are too committed to the gospel, but because they are not committed
enough.
Think of people you consider fanatical. They're overbearing, self-righteous, opinionated, insensitive, and
harsh. Why? It's not because they are too Christian but because they are not Christian enough. They are
fanatically zealous and courageous, but they are not fanatically humble, sensitive, loving, empathetic,
forgiving, or understanding--as Christ was....What strikes us as overly fanatical is actually a failure to be
fully committed to Christ and his gospel.
If you really do drink deeply from what we have been seeing in the Bible and see that ultimately our hope is in God's grace, it changes everything. This is why biblical Christianity has always had within its heritage the capacity to challenge and reform itself: it returns to the grace of God. That is why, however ghastly and defenseless the Crusades were, it is the Christian heritage in the West that has apologized for them countless times. After all, Islam took over the Middle East first with equal bloodthirstiness, and there is no trace in the heritage of Islam of any apology for any of it.
Thus the slavery that was enacted and developed in the West, in which Christians participated, was also eventually destroyed by Christians who were trying to become more biblical and who challenged the entire wretched enterprise. Thomas Sowell analyzes what took place under Wilberforce and other Christian leaders in Great Britain until first the slave trade across the Atlantic and then eventually slavery itself was abolished in the British Empire. He notes that what drove the abolition movement initially were evangelical Christians determined to put a stop to an evil, and eventually enough public opinion was mobilized over successive generations of government officials that the antislavery movement was pushed further and further to its logical conclusion.
Despite revisionist arguments advanced to prove that abolitionists had discovered it was more economical to abolish slavery than to maintain it, the realities were very different. For example, when slavery was finally abolished, the British government undertook to pay all the great sugarcane farmers of Jamaica and elsewhere under the British crown the price of the slaves to free them. The promise was for half the national GDP, and they undertook it not because it was going to save them money but because of Christian influence regarding what is right and wrong. That does not justify in the slightest all the wickedness that was done beforehand, but it does remind us that although the Bible can be used in all kinds of shameful ways, it can ground followers of Jesus so deeply in the sheer grace of God that entire ethical systems are transformed. When you come across what the gospel is genuinely about, it is humbling. It does not make people arrogant. It transforms them."
- D. A. Carson
from: http://www.amazon.com/God-Who-There-Finding-Place/dp/0801013720/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370393681&sr=1-2&keywords=the+god+who+is+there
Carson, D. A. The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place In God's Story. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2010.
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