Harris ignores or disdains other, far more data-driven analyses of religion across history and cultures as imagined worlds that try to find a way through humankind’s logically and empirically unsolvable existential dilemmas, including death, deception, catastrophe, loneliness and inequality; that psychologically attempt to manage the contradictory yearnings, impulses and needs of human nature; and that attempt to maintain lasting cohesion among genetic strangers in the face of constant opportunities for defection and social dissolution. Religion may not be, or no longer be, necessary for any of this. Yet its creative role in getting us out of the caves and begetting civilization is evident (archaeological research by the University of Michigan’s Joyce Marcus and others shows growing ritual complexity predicting the formation of increasingly larger and more complexly organized societies). All that is sacred of course hasn’t stopped us batting one another over the head with clubs. To be sure, the in-group solidarity that religion promotes often exacerbates differences with outside groups which underscore hostility and conflict. But religion does not require war, nor is it responsible for most of history’s violent conflicts and war deaths. In the Encyclopedia of Wars, Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod surveyed nearly one thousand eight hundred violent conflicts throughout history, and less than 10 percent were religious. Religious motives accounted for few of the more than 100–150 million deaths in twentieth-century wars (mostly caused by World Wars I and II, Russia’s and China’s civil wars, along with Stalin’s and Mao’s purges).
