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If you go to the website of particularly attractive Linux distribution today, you will discover a curious message at the foot of every page:

‘Would you kill for your God? God does not exist! [ Face it! ] [ One more! ]‘

‘Face it!’ provides a link to a documentary by Richard Dawkins entitled, ‘Root of all Evil’ which has been uploaded to YouTube. ‘Once more!’ provides a link to a presentation labelled, ’10 questions that every intelligent Christian must answer’.

It’s probably not the kind of information you expect to find when you’re seeking out a small efficient operating system for an aging laptop, but the makers of Slax appear to be diversifying. Tomas M, chairman of the project, tells us he doesn’t want to start a debate—he purely wants to raise consciousness. Naturally I clicked his links in my quest for enlightenment, and in a flash the following vision dawned on me:

Even if religion were the root of all evil, how does that prove that God does not exist? Another person could claim—unfairly—that science is the root of all evil, for without science there would be no atomic weapons, vacuum bombs, high-energy chemical lasers, cluster bombs or biological warfare. I personally would not make such a claim, for science has served me well over the years of my life, but the potential for atrocious harm is nevertheless there.

When we consider that four million people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo over the past decade in the battle for control of minerals such as colombo-tantalite, which we use to manufacture the capacitors which maintain the flow of current in electronic devices, an observer would be quite entitled to claim—by Dawkins’ standards—that technology is the root of all evil. But does observing that the mobile phones, server farms, laptop computers and mp3 players surrounding us were created at a huge cost to human life prove programming code does not exist? Isn’t it a tenuous link? Indeed it is. Instead we would argue that advances in medical imaging, for example, made possible by advances in chip technology have brought us huge benefits, saving countless lives around the globe. Its harm or benefit is irrelevant (to proving the existence of something).

In any case I just don’t buy the idea that religion is the root of all evil. Dawkins claims that religious extremism is implicated in the world’s most bitter and unending conflicts. Yet World War Two, in which close to fifty million people died, was a series of wars over territory. The victims of the Jewish Holocaust were certainly identified in religious terms, but the perpetrators were extreme nationalists. The bloody war in the Congo which I have already mentioned was largely a conflict over valued resources. Even my elementary education in GCSE level History provides ample evidence that the majority of the wars of the past century were fought for reasons other than religion.

The Belgium-Congo Free State war at the turn of the last century in which 3 million people died was not a religious war, nor was the British-Boer war. Two and a half million people died during the Chinese Revolution of 1911, a further three million died during the two Chinese civil wars of 1928-37 and 1946-49, 38 million during Mao’s Great Leap Forward and 11 million during the Cultural Revolution. Five million died during the Soviet Revolution of 1917-21. Four million people died during the Korean war of 1950-53 and 3 million during the US-Vietnam war. Five hundred thousand people died in the 1971 Pakistan-Bangladesh territorial war. Eight hundred thousand people died during the Nigeria-Biafra civil war of a similar period. The civil wars in Burundi, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Angola, Laos, Mozambique, El-Salvador and Laos in the 1970s concerned territorial control. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan cost 1.3 million lives.

Sometimes religion certainly does play a part in conflict, but it is not the sole precursor. As we have seen, nationalism, territorial expansion, independence struggles, control of resources and political ideology have all played a major role in the conflicts of the past century, and the loss of millions of lives. Even wars often said to have a religious character can be identified as battles over territory or resources on closer inspection.

Yet there is the another side to this still. Why do the naysayers deny the positive contribution of religion to humanity? A key teaching of Christianity is to love your neighbour as yourself—indeed, to love your enemy as yourself—and so we find Christians often at the forefront of charity work in European societies. Christian socialism and philanthropy laid the foundation for many of the social welfare organisations we now take for granted in the United Kingdom, not least the National Health Service. Similarly, Islam emphasises the reward for those who free slaves, who take care of orphans and widows, who spend of their wealth for the poor. This emphasis led to the creation of Waqf trusts which helped establish hospitals and schools in Muslim societies from the seventh century on.

Why are the naysayers unable to acknowledge the contribution of people of faith to our intellectual heritage? Where is the acknowledgement of the contribution of people of faith to science? Where the acknowledgement that Muslim scholars held that the earth is round nine centuries ago? Where the acknowledgement that the Muslims had described the basic principles of Pulmonary Circulation three hundred years before they were first proposed in Europe? And where the acknowledgement of the contribution of people of faith to science today, to the fields of genetics, artificial intelligence, surgery, chemistry and physics?

I had a cursory glance at the ’10 questions that every intelligent Christian must answer’ and it struck me as so totally infantile that I could not watch it to the end. Is this the best they can do to raise consciousness? If I were a Christian, would I truly be swayed by a presentation by someone with a primary school interpretation of my faith, who had failed to notice the nuances of belief between different Christian communities, who completely ignored the reams and reams of discussion by the theologians of my faith? But then, I was raised as an Anglican and we were always taught that the Bible was the work of man inspired by God, that many of the Old Testament stories were metaphor rather than fact; perhaps a fundamentalist Protestant will fall off his chair and find enlightenment. Perhaps.

But perhaps more likely, he will decide that he doesn’t like the Slax distribution after all and will toddle off to download a different flavour of Linux instead. As for me? Well it doesn’t bother me. I just find the way that the disciples of our lord saviour Dawkins promote this message rather patronising. If I wanted preaching to I would have gone to download UbuntuCE.