Is religion inherently dangerous? Isn't it the cause of ethnic and sectarian violence around the world? Os Guinness, social critic and popular Christian speaker, founder of the EastWest Institute, gives his take in this brief clip from The Veritas Forum. Watch and then share your thoughts with us!


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For much of the last quarter century, it would have been a safe but sad bet that someone somewhere in the world would be killed every moment in the name of religion. Our secularist friends would jump in immediately and say, "Ah, there you go. Violence, divisiveness, conflict, how religion poisons everything." But of course we know that more people were killed under secularist regimes in the twentieth century than all the western repressions put together. So sadly today we have to say, as we look back, while a hundred million were killed in war, another hundred million under political repression, yet another hundred million were killed in ethnic and sectarian violence.

Now as people look back on those dark years and the witch's brew of ancient hatreds you can see in many parts of the world, a number of lessons were clear. The first was: living with our deep differences, when those differences involve our ultimate beliefs, religious or secularist, is one of the world's great questions. That sounds abstract compared, say, with nuclear proliferation or HIV/AIDS, and yet it underlines so many of the challenges of today and the challenges of the future. A second thing that was clear: this problem of living with our deep differences is being intensified by the emergence of a global public square. - Os Guinness