Everything I ever needed to know in life I learned from South Park

I am a big fan of South Park. In my mind, the perspective of the creators of South Park (Matt Stone and Trey Parker) on every social and political issue of the day is right on the mark, and I proudly identify myself as a “South Park Republican,” which essentially means libertarian. I love South Park because, among other things, Stone and Parker have better understanding of human nature than supposed experts like Richard Dawkins.

Dawkins and his ilk (like Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris) consider religion to be the root of all evil, and envision and advocate for an utopian society where there are no religions and everybody is an atheist. They believe that wars and violence will disappear if we eliminate religion from human society. Dawkins and Co. are wrong on at least two fronts.

First, as I explain in a previous two-part post “Why do we believe in God?” (Part I, Part II), religiosity – belief in higher powers – is likely a byproduct of an evolved psychological mechanism. It means that, most likely, we are evolutionarily designed to believe in God. We believe in God because we are paranoid and being paranoid often saved our lives. Belief in higher powers is part of our innate human nature. So it would be virtually impossible for all of humanity to abandon religion and be entirely atheist. Humans cannot completely abandon belief in higher powers any more than they can completely abandon any other part of innate human nature, such as compassion, love, or intelligence. It’s possible for some, but not for all.

Second, as the two-part South Park episode “Go God Go” brilliantly shows, religion is not the root cause of all the violence in the world but merely an excuse. Just because most of the wars in human history have been predicated on and justified by religion does not mean that, without religion, these wars would not have happened. The true root cause of all human violence is maleness, not religion or anything else that men happen to use as an excuse or cause. Men fight, because they are violent and it is part of male human nature to fight. If you take away religion, men will find another excuse to fight.

In the episode “Go God Go,” Cartman finds himself in a future world where, thanks to Richard Dawkins, everyone is an atheist and there is no religion. Yet there is interminable violence and wars, because different groups of atheist men (and otters) fight each other over what to call themselves. Whether Stone and Parker are consciously aware of it or not, this is most likely what will happen in the world that Dawkins et al. envision. There will still be wars in a completely atheist world without religion. Men will find other reasons to wage wars against each other.

And this is not just cartoon fiction. The current and ongoing civil war in Somalia, which began in 1988 but intensified in January 1991 when the central government of Mohammed Siad Barre fled Mogadishu and put the whole country into the state of nature, has been fought between subclans within the same clan within the same tribe within the same race and the same religion. To those involved in the war, the differences between the subclans (most likely imperceptible to outsiders) are sufficient and meaningful enough to kill each other for. Yet it would be absurd to argue that the existence of subclans is causing the violence or that there would be no war in Somalia if subclans didn’t exist. Men will always find an excuse to fight. Stone and Parker know that, but Dawkins doesn’t.