Slavoj Zizek - On Violence

In trying to think about divine violence lately I disovered Slavoj Zizek's latest offering, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections.

As always, it is a brilliant roller-coaster ride of a book. Zizerk skewers all kinds of lazy thinking in Western culture. He has a severe critique of religion and theism, but he also says this:

Science and religion have changed places: today, science provides the security religion once guaranteed. In a curious inversion, religion is one of the possible place fro which one can deploy critical doubts about today's society. It has become one of the sites of resistance. p. 70

Possibly, but Zizek also argues that only atheists can be truly ethical, because only an atheist will do something because it is right, rather than because it pleases the deity, or to earn a reward. This is an old critique which actually has its basis within the Christian tradition itself (see the 17th century Quietists, for example).