{"id":3471,"date":"2017-11-06T03:48:14","date_gmt":"2017-11-06T00:48:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=3471"},"modified":"2017-11-06T03:48:14","modified_gmt":"2017-11-06T00:48:14","slug":"a-license-to-kill-atheism-and-the-mass-murders-of-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/3471\/a-license-to-kill-atheism-and-the-mass-murders-of-history\/","title":{"rendered":"A License To Kill: Atheism And The Mass Murders Of History"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents<\/a><\/p>\n

Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity<\/a>, at Amazon<\/p>\n

“Without God and the future life? How will man be after that? It means everything is permitted now.” <\/em>\u2014Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov<\/em><\/p>\n

W<\/strong>HILE THEY REGULARLY FAULT RELIGION <\/strong>for its role in promoting conflict and violence, secular writers rarely examine the role of atheism in producing wars and killing. It’s interesting that we routinely hear about how much historical suffering religion has caused, but we seldom hear about how much suffering atheism has caused. Five hundred years after the Inquisition, we are still talking about it, but less than two decades after the collapse of “godless Communism” there is an eerie silence about the mass graves of the Soviet Gulag. Why the absence of accountability? Does atheism mean never having to say you are sorry?<\/p>\n

Atheist writers who take up the question concede that atheists, like religious people, sometimes do terrible things. According to Richard Dawkins, “What matters is … whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does.” In other words, “Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism.” <\/em>Physicist Steven Weinberg concedes that scientific atheism “has made its own contributions to the world’s sorrows” but “where the authority of science has been invoked to justify horrors, it really has been in terms of perversions <\/em>of science.”In this chapter, I want to focus on the really big crimes that have been committed by atheist groups and governments. In the past hundred years or so, the most powerful atheist regimes\u2014Communist Russia, Communist China, and Nazi Germany\u2014have wiped out people in astronomical numbers. Stalin was responsible for around twenty million deaths, produced through mass slayings, forced labor camps, show trials followed by firing squads, population relocation and starvation, and so on. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s authoritative recent study Mao: The Unknown Story <\/em>attributes to Mao Zedong’s regime a staggering seventy million deaths. Some China scholars think Chang and Halliday’s numbers are a bit high, but the authors present convincing evidence that Mao’s atheist regime was the most murderous in world history. Stalin’s and Mao’s killings\u2014unlike those of, say, the Crusades or the Thirty Years’ War\u2014were done in peacetime and were performed on their fellow countrymen. Hitler comes in a distant third with around ten million murders, six million of them Jews.<\/p>\n

So far, I haven’t even counted the assassinations and slayings ordered by other Soviet dictators like Lenin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and so on. Nor have I included a host of “lesser” atheist tyrants: Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, Nicolae Ceausescu, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong-il. Even these “minor league” despots killed a lot of people. Consider Pol Pot, who was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party faction that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Within this four-year period Pol Pot and his revolutionary ideologues engaged in systematic mass relocations and killings that eliminated approximately one-fifth of the Cambodian population, an estimated 1.5 million to 2 million people. In fact, Pol Pot killed a larger percentage of his countrymen than Stalin and Mao killed of theirs.5 Even so, focusing only on the big three\u2014Stalin, Hitler, and Mao\u2014we have to recognize that atheist regimes have in a single century murdered more than one hundred million people.
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\nReligion-inspired killing simply cannot compete with the murders perpetrated by atheist regimes. I recognize that population levels were much lower in the past, and that it’s much easier to kill people today with sophisticated weapons than it was in previous centuries with swords and arrows. Even taking higher population levels into account, atheist violence surpasses religious violence by staggering proportions. Here is a rough calculation. The world’s population rose from around 500 million in 1450 AD to 2.5 billion in 1950, a fivefold increase. Taken together, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the witch burnings killed approximately 200,000 people. Adjusting for the increase in population, that’s the equivalent of one million deaths today. Even so, these deaths caused by Christian rulers over a five-hundred-year period amount to only 1 percent of the deaths caused by Stalin, Hitler and Mao in the space of a few decades.<\/p>\n

Dawkins seems to have deluded himself into thinking that these horrors were not produced on atheism’s behalf. But can anyone seriously deny that Communism was an atheist ideology? Communism calls for the elimination of the exploiting class, it extols violence as a way to social progress, and it calls for using any means necessary to achieve the atheist utopia. Not only was Marx an atheist, but atheism was also a central part of the Marxist doctrine. Atheism became a central component of the Soviet Union’s official ideology, it is still the official doctrine of China, and Stalin and Mao enforced atheist policies by systematically closing churches and murdering priests and religious believers. All Communist regimes have been strongly anti-religious, suggesting that their atheism is intrinsic rather than incidental to their ideology.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Nazism was a secular, anti-religious philosophy that, strangely enough, had alot in common with Communism. While the Communists wanted to empower the proletariat, the Nazis wanted to empower a master race. For the Communists the enemy was the cap- italist class; for the Nazis the enemy was the Jews and other races deemed inferior. The Communists and the Nazis treated the Christian churches as obstacles and enemies. Both groups proclaimed that they were engaging in revolutionary action in order to create a new type of human being and a new social order freed from the shackles of traditional religion and traditional morality.<\/p>\n

In comparing the crimes of religion and the crimes of atheism, it’s important for us to apply a consistent standard. Philosopher Daniel Dennett supplies such a standard in his book Breaking the Spell. <\/em>He proposes that religion be judged by its consequences, or, as the biblical expression has it, “by their fruits ye shall know them:’ Dennett doesn’t particularly care whether these consequences were intended by the founders of the religion or if they represent its highest values. He’s not especially interested in separating the true teachings of religion from its distortions. “It is true that religious fanatics are rarely if ever inspired by, or guided by, the deepest and best tenets in those religious traditions. So what? Al Qaeda and Hamas terrorism is still Islam’s responsibility, and abortion clinic bombing is still Christianity’s responsibility.” This is all very fine. Let’s accept Dennett’s standard. But then by this very same criterion the millions of murders committed by Stalin, Hitler, and Mao\u2014not to mention those of a range of lesser tyrants\u2014are all atheism’s responsibility.<\/p>\n

Alas, Steven Weinberg wants to have it both ways. Weinberg apparently believes that the crimes of religious regimes reflect the true face of religion, while the crimes of atheist regimes represent a distortion of the atheist spirit of rational and scientific inquiry. By Dennett’s standards, this is an evasion. If Christianity has to answer for Torquemada, atheism has to answer for Stalin. By the same token, if the ordinary Christian who has never burned anyone at the stake must bear some responsibility for what other self-styled Christians have done on behalf of religion, then atheists who think of themselves as the kinder, gentler type do not get to absolve themselves for the horrible suffering that their beliefs have caused in recent history. Weinberg is employing a transparent sleight-of-hand that holds Christianity responsible for the evils done in its name, while seeking to exculpate secularism and atheism for the greater crimes perpetrated in theirs.
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\nAlong the same lines, Sam Harris attempts to exonerate atheism by alleging that Stalinism and Maoism were each “little more than a political religion:’ Christopher Hitchens advances a similar line of argument, suggesting that as the Stalinists and Maoists sought to replace religion those ideologies should be considered substitute religions. Should religion now be responsible not only for its crimes but also for the crimes committed by atheists on behalf of atheist ideologies?<\/p>\n

As for Nazism, Harris writes that “the hatred of Jews in Germany… was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity.” Indeed, “the Holocaust marked the culmination of… two hundred years of Christian fulminating against the Jews.” Therefore, “knowingly or not, the Nazis were agents of religion.” Atheist Web sites routinely claim that Hitler was a Christian because he was born Catholic, never publicly renounced his Catholicism, and wrote in Mein Kampf, <\/em>“By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”<\/p>\n

How persuasive are these claims? Hitler was born Catholic just as Stalin was born into the Russian Orthodox Church and Mao was raised as a Buddhist. These facts prove nothing, as many people reject their religious upbringing as these three men did. From anearly age, historian Allan Bullock writes, Hitler “had no time at all for Catholic teaching, regarding it as a religion fit only for slaves and detesting its ethics.”0 How then do we account for Hitler’s claim that in carrying out his anti-Semitic program he was an instrument of divine providence? During his ascent to power, Hitler needed the support of the German people\u2014both the Bavarian Catholics and the Prussian Lutherans\u2014and to secure this he occasionally used rhetoric such as “I am doing the Lord’s work.” To claim that this rhetoric makes Hitler a Christian is to confuse political opportunism with personal conviction. Hitler himself says in Mein Kampf <\/em>that his public statements should be understood as propaganda that bear no relation to the truth but are designed to sway the masses.”<\/p>\n

The Nazi idea of an Aryan Christ who uses the sword to cleanse the earth of the Jews\u2014 what Hitler once called “Positive Christianity”\u2014 was obviously a radical departure from traditional Christian understanding, and was condemned as such by Pope Pius XI at the time. Moreover, Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not religious, it was racial. Jews were targeted not because of their religion\u2014indeed many German Jews were completely secular in their way of life\u2014but because of their racial identity. This was an ethnic and not a religious designation.<\/p>\n

We can see the difference by looking at attitudes toward Jews in medieval Europe. In fifteenth-century Spain, a Jew could escape Christian persecution simply by converting to Christianity. Ferdinand and Isabella did not object to having ethnic Jews in Spain; they objected to the practice of Judaism in what they wanted to be a completely Catholic country. Hitler’s objection to Jews, on the other hand, was not religious. A Jew could not escape Auschwitz by pleading, “I no longer practice Judaism,” “I am an atheist,” or “I have converted to Christianity.” This mattered nothing to Hitler because he believed the Jews were inferior racial stock. His anti-Semitism was secular.<\/p>\n

Hitler’s Table Talk, <\/em>a revealing collection of the Fuhrer’s private opinions assembled by a close aide during the war years, shows Hitler to be rabidly anti-religious. He called Christianity one of the great “scourges” of history, and said of the Germans, “Let’s be the only people who are immunized against this disease.” He promised that “through the peasantry we shall be able to destroy Christianity.” In fact, he blamed the Jews for inventing Christianity. He also condemned Christianity for its opposition to evolution. Hitler reserved special scorn for the Christian values of equality and compassion, which he identified with weakness. Hitler’s leading advisers \u2014 Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich and Bormann\u2014were atheists who hated religion and sought to eradicate its influence in Germany.
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\nSome atheist writers like Christopher Hitchens have sought to push Hitler into the religious camp by pointing to Nazism as a “quasi-pagan phenomenon.” Hitler may have been a polytheist who worshipped the pagan gods, these writers say, but polytheism is still theism. This argument fails to distinguish between ancient paganism and modern paganism. It’s true that Hitler and the Nazis drew heavily on ancient archetypes\u2014mainly Nordic and Teutonic legends\u2014to give their vision a mystical aura. But this was secular mysticism, not religious mysticism. The ancient Germanic peoples truly believed in their pagan gods. Hitler and the Nazis, however, relied on ancient myths in the modern form given to them by Nietzsche and Wagner. For Nietzsche and Wagner, there was no question of the ancient myths being true. Wagner no more believed in the Norse god Wotan than Nietzsche believed in Apollo. For Hitler and the Nazis, the ancient myths were valuablebecause they could give depth and significance to a secular racial conception of the world.<\/p>\n

Historian Richard Evans writes that “the Nazis regarded the churches as the strongest and toughest reservoirs of ideological opposition to the principles they believed in.” Once Hitler and the Nazis came to power, they launched a ruthless drive to subdue and weaken Christian churches in Germany. Evans points out that after 1937 the policies of Hitler’s government became increasingly anti-religious. The Nazis stopped celebrating Christmas, and the Hitler Youth recited a prayer thanking the Fuhrer rather than God for their blessings. Clergy regarded as “troublemakers” were ordered not to preach, hundreds of them were imprisoned, and many were simply murdered. Churches were under constant Gestapo surveillance. The Nazis closed religious schools, forced Christian organizations to disband, dismissed civil servants who were practicing Christians, confiscated church property, and censored religious newspapers. Harris cannot explain how an ideology that Hitler and his associates perceived as a repudiation of Christianity can be portrayed as a “culmination” of Christianity.<\/p>\n

If Nazism represented the culmination of anything, it was that of the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century ideology of social Darwinism. As historian Richard Weikart documents, both Hitler and Himmler were admirers of Darwin and often spoke of their role as enacting a “law of nature” that guaranteed the “elimination of the unfit.” Weikart argues that Hitler himself “drew upon a bountiful fund of social Darwinist thought to construct his own racist philosophy” and concludes that while Darwinism is not a “sufficient” intellectual explanation for Nazism, it is a “necessary” one. Without Darwinism, there might not have been Nazism.<\/p>\n

The Nazis also drew on philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, adapting his atheist philosophy to their crude purposes. Nietzsche’s vision of the abermensch <\/em>and his elevation of a new ethic “beyond good and evil” were avidly embraced by Nazi propagandists. Nietzsche’s “will to power” almost became a Nazi recruitment slogan. I am not for a moment suggesting that Darwin or Nietzsche would have approved of Hitler’s ideas. But Hitler and his henchmen approved of Darwin’s and Nietzsche’s ideas. Sam Harris simply ignores the evidence of the Nazis’ sympathies for Darwin, Nietzsche, and atheism. So what sense can we make of his claim that the leading Nazis were “knowingly or unknow- ingly” agents of religion? Clearly, it is nonsense.<\/p>\n

Some people have expressed bafflement that atheist regimes have produced bloodbaths that no other force in history has matched. Dawkins himself raises the question of how an absence of belief can possibly cause social harm. Little does Dawkins realize that his own deepest beliefs provide a clue to the “final solution.” The atheist killers regarded their cause as so grand and noble that nothing should be allowed to stand in its way. They viewed themselves as acting on behalf of inexorable and incontrovertible forces like science, reason, and progress.
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\nScience? Yes, the Nazis saw themselves promoting the survival of the fittest, in precisely the way evolution has always done. Reason? The Communists saw their project as an institutionalization of the age of reason. Marx was in the Enlightenment tradition of the French Jacobins, who enthroned a goddess of reason in the Cathedral of Notre Dame and then unleashed the Reign of Terror, in which “unreasonable” people\u2014 noblemen, priests, and other representatives of the old order\u2014were sent to the guillotine. And progress? As the Communists and the Nazis always stressed, history was on their side, and therefore their opponents were religious or bourgeois reactionaries who should beeliminated because they were retarding the forward march of society This secular apotheosis of science, reason, and progress\u2014a doctrine that is very much with us today\u2014 is precisely what licensed men to do things to other people in a manner and on a scale that were previously unthinkable.<\/p>\n

A second reason for the horrors of atheist regimes is that they operated without any of the moral restraints that are the product of religion and that, however slightly, held back the bloodthirsty tyrants of the past. Nietzsche saw this coming. Writing in the nineteenth century, he predicted that the next two centuries would be cataclysmic, with wars and violence beyond all imagining.” The death of God, Nietzsche wrote, would result in the total eclipse of all values. Since values no longer came from God, they would now be made up by man. And since man is descended from the animal kingdom\u2014an idea Nietzsche adopted from Darwin\u2014man was likely to embrace the value of the libido dominandi <\/em>(the lust to dominate) that we see everywhere in nature. Superior humans would eliminate inferior ones for the same reason that lions eat antelopes. “Master morality” prevails over “slave morality.” It becomes useless to appeal to pity and compassion and decency any more. That would be like telling lions that they should stop being lions.<\/p>\n

In other words, the atheist bloodbath is the product of a hubristic modern ideology that sees man, not God, as the creator of values. In rejecting God, man becomes scornful of the doctrine of human sinfulness and convinced of the perfectibility of his nature. Man now seeks to displace God and create a secular utopia here on earth. In order to achieve this, the atheist rulers establish total control of society. They invent a form of totalitarianism far more comprehensive than anything that previous rulers attempted: every aspect of life comes under political supervision. Of course if some people\u2014the Jews, the landowners, the unfit, the handicapped, the religious dissidents, and so on\u2014have to be relocated, incarcerated, or liquidated in order to achieve this utopia, this is a price the atheist tyrants have shown themselves quite willing to pay. The old moral codes do not apply, and ordinary atheist functionaries carry out behavior that would make a church inquisitor quake. The atheist regimes, by their actions, confirm the truth of Dostoevsky’s dictum: if God is not, everything is permitted.<\/p>\n

Whatever the cause for why atheist regimes do what they do, the indisputable fact is that all the religions of the world put together have in three thousand years not managed to kill anywhere near the number of people killed in the name of atheism in the past few decades. It’s time to abandon the mindlessly repeated mantra that religious belief has been the main source of human conflict and violence. Atheism, not religion, is responsible for the worst mass murders of history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, at Amazon “Without God and the future life? How will man be after that? It means everything is permitted now.” \u2014Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov WHILE THEY REGULARLY FAULT RELIGION for its role in promoting conflict and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6702,6707],"tags":[7457,564,7458,7459,7460,7461,7284,7462,7463,7464,7465,7288,7466,7467,4902,7468,7378,7469],"class_list":["post-3471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thechrist","category-studies-thechristcontents","tag-astronomical-numbers","tag-atheism","tag-atheist-groups","tag-brothers-karamazov","tag-communist-china","tag-communist-russia","tag-dinesh-d-souza","tag-eerie-silence","tag-evil-things","tag-fyodor-dostoevsky","tag-labor-camps","tag-mass-murders","tag-nazi-germany","tag-perversions-of-science","tag-richard-dawkins","tag-soviet-gulag","tag-steven-weinberg","tag-suffering-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}