Once again posted to Reddit and a few others, Richard Dawkins’ reply to “What if you’re wrong?” never seems to quite satisfy how I’d respond to the same question. Here’s his response, which is polite and respectful.

The core of his point is that 1) no one has a monopoly on fiction and 2) people live and die everyday without any one god.

My response would be a little less subdued. If the world basically stopped believing in silly gods tomorrow and I was wrong - we’d wouldn’t care because we simply stopped believing and we’d have no way to reintroduce the religion meme back into our society - why? because we stopped believing. We’d have other issues, such as the destruction of hope, but at least that pesky religious nut-baggage would be gone.

However, if we passed the same logic to say, “Everyone is now X religion” - belief would very much be alive, and as a living entities usually can’t tell one belief from another, and they tend to fight over who’s belief is right, even though they have no proof to justify their claims. The world would be inundated with more genocide than before because the belief structure allows for Machiavellian “End-justifies-the-means” attitudes to pervade.

The whole concept of ethnic cleansing, purity programs, “kill them all and let [the deity of the week] sort them out” is all based on faulty belief structures.

Believing in friends, physics or yourself - those things which are proven to be true - is a virtue. Belief in things because someone or something told you so is not, and the end of that dark path is horrible indeed.