I have been listening to Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and Douglas Murry debating about Religion, Fact and Morality.

One of the portions of this argument that I find provocative, and there are many, is the idea that human cultures often labor under profoundly deadly fictions. That seems obvious.

I share perspectives with each speaker, but find none of them authoritative. The fundamental questions are deep and thorny. But there’s something that keeps getting left out of the discussion.

The proposition that religion and fundamentalists have produced relatively large atrocities (throughout history) seems mostly unassailable. It’s not the only result, but it’s there, and looks real.

However, never before in history has our species had the capacity to »really wipe out themselves and life on Earth. Over the past mere 100 years, arguably the onset of the modern age of ‘rationality’, endlessly profound atrocities (and perhaps the end of our species and/or the end of the entire envelope of the complexly preserved terrestrial ecologies) emerged not from religion, but from something that resembles it in another costume.

While I cannot state precisely what this strange stuff is, I can point at roots and branches on the tree that are illustrative of its nature and results.

Vectors like ‘economics’ divested of any palpable relation with morality (I would argue that most of our economic theories are little more than religions in disguise), technology (while not intrinsically lethal) and the absolutely bizarre and irredeemable imperatives that have arisen in the wake of discoveries like atomic energy, computers, and mere ‘chemistry’…

So we have ‘new religions’ that are divested of their ‘spiritual’ metaphysics. And these have and continue to cause atrocities that our religious progenitors could only have imagined as apocalyptic. And were incapable of pursuing.

It’s fine if we want to argue about the present and historical problems with religions. I have little issue with that. But to claim that it is »these ways of imagining or enacting our humanity that led to the greatest atrocities in history is patently false.

Because it was impossible, then, to implement atrocity on the scale our non-religious institutions and cultural imperatives do »all day long every day, as they continuously export harm to irreplaceable aspects of our planet and lives… for the sake of what?

Power. Profit. ‘Advancements’ that are anything but an advance. Ideas about the nature of the world and human existence that are not merely unsustainable, but actively, momentously omnicidal.

So if we’re going to have an atrocity comparison, personally, it’s difficult for me to imagine that the real problem is religion. If we could completely eradicate all religion (an absurd idea), we’d still be right where we actually are: in a situation where its seeming competitors have not only failed to rescue us from self-imposed atrocity and horror, but have so embedded it in our common experience… and the future of life on Earth, that there’s no way for me to understand religion as more lethal than mere commerce. Or societies based on ‘consumerism’, which, really, is another word for forms of contagious slavery and atrocity that religion was never bold (or powerful) enough to even resemble, let alone outdo.

And that’s a really serious problem for me, with the arguments of people like Sam and his crew. They’re really angry about historical and modern religious violence and insanity. Good. I think that makes sense. But they fail to properly indict our situation with the other forms of knowledge/ideation that might actually obliterate not merely our species, but most of what remains of life on Earth.

Sam’s arguments won’t mean shit on a dead planet. And it won’t be religion that killed it. In fact, the vector of knowledge that conferred this capacity on our childish species had nothing to do with the divine. It was the produce, not of religion, but of science. Not because science is evil, but because science puts powers in the hands of people and institutions that are deeply invested in using its deliverables to wipe out life and make numbers in machines, instead.

There are forces that act like demons in our populations on all sides of the argument. Yelling ‘the ancients were insane and infected us with nonsense’ doesn’t resolve the problem that the insanity of modernity has vastly surpassed any harm that was even possible for the ancient religions to produce, and continues to do so with great vigor and enthusiasm.

So where, exactly, is the actual threat here?