Why Let The Facts or Logical Coherence Get In The Way Of A Satisfying Prejudice?

As I said in passing in a short, impromptu post a few days ago, I increasingly don't listen to the CBC's Sunday Edition because its longtime host Michael Enright can get on my nerves.  That was on my mind because last week was one I opted not to listen.

That's too bad because the piece I wrote about the scummy product of too many elite Catholic schools in the United States could have benefited from his piece about the scandal plagued St. Michael's School, which he went to, which had its own, Canadian problems with jock culture and machismo.  It's a good essay which I certainly would have referenced.  Hockey culture can be as anti-Christian as football, though most of that is not an intrinsic part of the game, as it is in American football.   You could, conceivably, play a game of hockey without any violation of anything in the Gospel or epistles.  Though you can certainly violate those as typically they are in all sports.  But you violate everything up to and including the Golden Rule as soon as you start playing football, violence is an intrinsic part of the game, it is more than slightly and more than intentionally like the Roman gladiatorial spectacles that were eventually banned by Christianity in Rome. The presence of American football at any Catholic or supposedly Christian school is a sign that the moral character of the place is a facade covering moral decay.

But my reason for writing this was in the letters Enright read today, a letter writer who talks about the priest-coach who ran a sadistic sports program, him witnessing the priest kicking a player of Italian heritage and calling him a "yellow wop".  The letter writer said that witnessing that put him off "organized religion".  My question is why didn't it put him off organized sports, especially organized sports in schools, such incidents abound in entirely secular contexts, schools, universities, amateur and professional sports, youth sports (wonder what the guy said about the various sex scandals involving prominent coaches in Canadian Youth Hockey a decade or more back).

It comes the day after I heard a podcast in which the host cites GORE VIDAL! as an expert on the history of the culpability of "single-god religions" in producing the long history of warfare and bloodshed.  That someone could believe Gore Vidal on anything much is a head shaker.  The guy was an admitted pederast whose frequent trips to Thailand, rightly infamous as a center of pedophile sex slavery as well as a long and documented life of cruising, sometimes in company with other celebrity writers and celebrities of not even that accomplishment are well known.  Not to mention that his veracity on matters historical is documented to be spotty and suspected of being ideological if not just a reflection of his prejudices and personal preferences.

This isn't what I was looking for by way of citations on this and I'm still worn out from being sick so I'll just post this:

In his hilarious [I'll break in here to stipulate that I've never found a single thing he did "hilarious"] analysis of The 10 Commandments, George Carlin said to loud applause, “More people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason,” and many take this idea as an historical fact. When I hear someone state that religion has caused most wars, though, I will often and ask the person to name these wars. The response is typically, “Come on! The Crusades, The Inquisition, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, 9/11. Need I name more?”  

Well, yes, we do need to name more, because while clearly there were wars that had religion as the prime cause, an objective look at history reveals that those killed in the name of religion have, in fact, been a tiny fraction in the bloody history of human conflict. In their recently published book, “Encyclopedia of Wars,” authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod document the history of recorded warfare, and from their list of 1763 wars only 123 have been classified to involve a religious cause, accounting for less than 7 percent of all wars and less than 2 percent of all people killed in warfare. While, for example, it is estimated that approximately one to three million people were tragically killed in the Crusades, and perhaps 3,000 in the Inquisition, nearly 35 million soldiers and civilians died in the senseless, and secular, slaughter of World War 1 alone.

History simply does not support the hypothesis that religion is the major cause of conflict. The wars of the ancient world were rarely, if ever, based on religion. These wars were for territorial conquest, to control borders, secure trade routes, or respond to an internal challenge to political authority. In fact, the ancient conquerors, whether Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, or Roman, openly welcomed the religious beliefs of those they conquered, and often added the new gods to their own pantheon. 

Medieval and Renaissance wars were also typically about control and wealth as city-states vied for power, often with the support, but rarely instigation, of the Church. And the Mongol Asian rampage, which is thought to have killed nearly 30 million people, had no religious component whatsoever. 

Most modern wars, including the Napoleonic Campaign, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I, the Russia Revolution, World War II, and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, were not religious in nature or cause. While religious groups have been specifically targeted (most notably in World War II), to claim that religion was the cause is to blame the victim and to misunderstand the perpetrators’ motives, which were nationalistic and ethnic, not religious.

I think the reason that lazy-assed journalists, scribblers, babblers, go to that old saw about religion being to blame for everything is exactly that, they're lazy and they know that it's the easiest accusation in the world to make and, being easy, it will get the universal approval of the bigoted and superficial, risking little in the way of opposition.  And, as it notes in my immediate previous post, its total lack of veracity and documentation will not make the slightest bit of difference, even when the refutation of it is provided.