Not long ago, a
denizen of one of these internet sites wheeled out the old conservative canard,
to the effect that the worst mass murders and crimes in human history were the
work of atheists: Hitler, Mao, blah blah blah. The more atheists come out of
the shadows, the more we are going to have this flung in our faces. I have
heard this nonsense a number of times, so I decided it was time to stomp this
fallacy dead. This is a lengthy piece, because there are six different ways
that these arguments are just plain stupid. Here’s the short version first.
First, although
Christians claim that Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao were atheist mass
murderers, three of the four actually had firm roots in traditional religion,
and all four of them committed mass murder for political and economic reasons,
not religious reasons – because religion was never a serious threat to any of
them. And all four of them killed a lot of atheists – Hitler bragged about
crushing the atheists. So the phrase “atheist genocide” is a load of hogwash.
Second, the big
mass murders were committed over and over in history by religious people, both
in massive genocides such as the hundred million killed during the Christian
conquest of the Americas, and in religious wars such as the Crusades, and all
the killing over the fate of Israel. And in decades of terrorism. And
inevitably the arch-criminals who committed these acts specified that they were
fulfilling God’s will. Atheists are not inclined to such nonsense.
Third,
religious people commit mass murder because their holy books tell them to.
There is no such atheist book telling atheists to kill in the millions. And
atheists will never follow a book, an author, or a doctrine so blindly that
they will kill for them.
Fourth,
religious people also have a long history of persecuting people short of
murder, a tradition that continues in America today, to include their jihad
against the rights of women and gays. The “militant atheists” preach scary
stuff like tolerance and minding your own business and using your brain.
Fifth, morality
doesn’t come from religion: morality was defined by early human communities
which the monotheistic God People later bragged about exterminating.
Sixth,
religious people have worked tirelessly to retard the forward march of humanity
and oppress anyone who disagrees with them; nonbelievers have been at the
forefront of the march of mankind, in science and philosophy and art and
economics.
So let’s start
with Hitler’s “atheist genocide”.
Hitler was
actually quite religious. He went to a monastery school, sang in the choir, and
as a child pretended to be a priest, even conducting mock ceremonies and making
religious sermons. For quite some time he gave serious thought to becoming a
priest. Although he attacked Christian churches for being insufficiently
anti-Semitic and for interfering with his work, he remained a Catholic all his
life. Hitler believed in God, and specifically he believed in a God active in
men’s lives. He compared the rise of Nazism to the rise of Christianity as a
state religion in ancient Rome. He wanted to unite Germany’s Protestants under
a religious banner that rejected the Jewish roots of Christianity, calling it
“positive Christianity”. As he was collecting is thoughts for the mass of
ideological precepts that would become his core philosophical work, Mein Kampf,
he gave a speech expressing his reverence for Jesus as a man who rejected the
“Jewish poison” – “My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and savior as
a fighter.”
Direct quotes
from the Fuehrer:
“I believe that I am acting in
accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against
the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”
Christian
churches are "essential elements for safeguarding the soul of the German
people."
“We hold the spiritual
forces of Christianity to be indispensable elements in the moral uplift of most
of the German people."
"I believe
in God, and I am convinced that He will not desert 67 million Germans who have
worked so hard to regain their rightful position in the world."
“We have
undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a
few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."
“I am now as
before a Catholic and will always remain so.”
“We were
convinced that the people needs and requires this faith.”
And anyone who
argues the “Hitler = atheist” line, is ignoring the fact that Hitler repeatedly
refuted charges that Nazism was anti-Christian; he lumped in the atheists with
communists and criminals, and rejected nonreligious schooling for children.
When some Nazi members began quitting the church, Hitler ordered his top
lieutenants to remain in the church.
When Hitler
killed people off, it was because he saw them as enemies of the state, not
because of religion. He killed the Jews because he thought they were a
political and economic threat to Germany, and Jews were only a portion of his
target list. He also killed others who were seen as political and social
threats, not religious enemies: other non-German ethnic groups, gypsies,
homosexuals, the mentally handicapped, political opponents. Hitler’s siege of
Leningrad, just by itself, killed almost as many people as the Jewish Holocaust
did, and religion had nothing to do with it. In fact a lot of the people he
killed all along the Russian front – twenty million of them -- were atheists.
And incidentally, anyone who argues that Hitler was a liberal should look at
the millions of liberals, socialists and communists he also killed.
Mao paid lip
service to the Leninist attitude toward religion, but betrayed his true beliefs
in his written works, which were loaded with Confucianist and Taoist ideas. Mao
made little effort to persecute religious believers because religion was not a
big deal in 20th-century China, the way it was in the Christian and
Muslim worlds. There was virtually no religious fervor in China, and Mao didn’t
care about religion. Mao’s great massacres happened in the 1950s and 1960s for
political and economic reasons, not religious reasons – he wanted to
exterminate political threats, and he had no clue how to run an economy. The puny
crackdowns on religion in China only came after the Chinese government had
abandoned Mao’s hardcore Leninist stance, in the last decade or two, and the
government has pursued these crackdowns not for philosophical reasons, but
because the groups involves pose political threats: the Muslims in restless
Xinjiang, the monks in Tibet, the Catholics who answer to a foreign head of
state, and Falun Gong because it got to be too big, too powerful, and too
independent of the state.
Stalin’s
position on religion was entirely dependent on political expediency. He
originally persecuted the Christian churches, but later allowed the church to
be revived as a political organization so as to help with the war effort, and
he also supported Muslim separatists so they could cause trouble for the
Chinese government, which had not yet been taken over by the Communists. Like
Mao, Stalin killed millions for reasons having nothing to do with religion,
mostly because he was wiping out enemies – kulaks, non-Russian minorities, real
or imagined traitors – or because his ignorance of economic reality caused
catastrophic famines.
Pol Pot and the
Khmer Rouge were actually steeped in Buddhist tradition. Pol Pot’s outrages
also had nothing to do with religion: he went after ethnic Vietnamese and
Chinese, and anyone with an education, and anyone who thought Pol Pot’s ideas
were crazy – a long list. And, as was the case in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s
China, a lot of the damage in Cambodia stemmed from the fact that Pol Pot was
clueless no how to run an economy: he wanted to destroy urban Cambodia and drag
the country back to its agrarian roots. And succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest
imaginings.
Now, let’s look
at all of the killing done by religious people, in God’s name, allegedly in
fulfillment of God’s will. Christians did by far the most damage, killing 100
million during the colonization of the Americas, to include God-driven “Manifest
Destiny” as Uncle Sam exterminated the Native Americans. Plus two million dead during the enslavement of Africans by Bible-wielding Europeans. Almost a million in
Rwanda. Thousands in the Phillippines, by the U.S. military. Thousands of
Bosnians and Croats. Thousands in the inquisitions. And so on and so on.
On the Muslim
side, uncounted victims killed in the Islamic invasions following the rise of
Muhammad, spreading from Spain to the Phillippines and from the Balkans to
deepest Africa. One million for the Hazaras, Shia Muslims, in Afghanistan. A
million Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians, killed by the Ottomans. A million in
Bangladesh. A million in Sudan. A hundred thousand Kurds. Religion also played
a part in the Nigerian civil war which killed two million. And of course the
endless waves of Muslim terrorism.
Much of history’s
bloodshed occurred when one side in a conflict clearly had the upper hand
against the other, but plenty of people also died in the more evenly-matched
conflicts. A million in the Crusades. Five million in the Thirty Years’ War
which was driven by religion. Three million in the French religious wars. Two
hundred thousand in the religious wars in Lebanon. Pakistan versus India.
Israel versus the Muslims. The Irish Catholics and Protestants. Sunni versus
Shia.
The key
difference here, is that the mass murders in the name of religion, really were
in the name of religion: there were no murders in the name of atheism. This is
what happens, when you assume that the sins of one alleged atheist can be
imputed to all atheists everywhere, that the crimes of an insane Russian ruler
eighty years ago can be flung in the face of the local atheist kid who drives
the glee club to the old folks’ home. You play that game, and nonbelievers can
do the same thing -- hold your local Baptists and Lutherans responsible for
everything from the Inquisition to Vlad the Impaler. Lumping all adherents of a
belief system into one lump and holding everyone responsible for the offense of
the individuals, has a handy name: bigotry. Dishonest bigotry to boot.
All of this
murder by religious people is unsurprising, given the frankly genocidal nature
of the Bible and the Qur’an. The Qur’an explicitly orders Muslims to declare
war on non-Muslims until they submit to Allah, or die. The Bible states that as
soon as the Israelites freed themselves from enslavement in Egypt and arrive in
the Holy Land, they exterminated all non-Jews through the end of the Torah and
into the Book of Joshua, all with God’s explicit approval. And the sad part is
that historically, it never happened: the Jewish priests who wrote those texts
knew the Israelites hadn’t committed genocide, but they wanted everybody to
think they had. In the eyes of religious people, genocide against unbelievers
is totally okay. All to glorify God.
Needless to
say, there is no atheist book of that kind, telling atheists to take up the
sword and kill all the Christians. If any atheist were to write such a volume,
the other atheists would condemn the book and write off its author as insane.
And no, Das
Kapital and the Communist Manifesto don’t count. They had almost nothing to say
about religion, other than to point out religion as a mere symptom of an
oppressed people, and a form of protest by the poor. Marx, in his writings, did
not call on atheists to kill in the thousands: again, you’re thinking of the
Bible and the Qur’an.
And by the way,
religious communist groups have existed for the entire history of communism, in
part because the way Jesus lived his life, and advised others to live, was
quite close to the communist ideal, the rejection of possessions and wealth.
This wouldn’t be the case if the world’s Marxists were hell-bent on
exterminating religion. Even in the bad old days of the Soviet Union, one third
of the Soviet people believed in God.
When religious
people aren’t abrogating the rights of people they disagree with by killing
them, then they resort to other methods for inflicting upon innocent bystanders
their own quaint views on freedom,
oppression, rights, injustice. The religious people have been working to shove
religious views into politics and law and science and medicine, to take away
the rights of women, gays and lesbians, to chase nonconformists out of our high
schools, to ram their views down everyone else’s throats in the form of
legislation. Throwing bricks at women’s clinics, screaming “God hates fags” at
military funerals, phoning in death threats against liberal legislators,
driving atheist politicians out of the political arena, declaring war on the
Boy Scouts for being insufficiently hateful, peddling fear and hate and
intolerance. They are also working hand in hand with the conservative zealots
who have been working to destroy our economy just to make Obama look bad, take
away union rights, take away voting rights, wreck the workings of Congress,
keep Hispanics as second-class citizens. Around the globe they are killing
atheists across the Muslim world, trying to force European and Latin American
governments to turn Catholic doctrine into law, taking over family law
not only in Muslim countries but even in Israel, and launching riots when
some Danish guy draws a picture of Muhammad. And screaming that anyone who
disagrees with them is declaring war on them.
This of course is not
new. Religion has been a key tool for oppressive rulers over the centuries.
Arguably the most oppressive political system in human civilization, European
feudalism, attacked the most advanced society on earth, Roman Europe, and threw
a blanket of ignorance and armed oppression over it for a thousand years. And
the knights and barons who inflicted this misery upon Europe worked hand in
glove with Christianity. Priests told their flocks that the ruling knights had
every right to oppress them and steal everything that wasn’t nailed down and
rape their daughters, and in return the knights made the priests very rich as
they abjectly betrayed their flocks to glorified slavery. Be good slaves in
this life and sit at the feet of Jesus in the next.
That is the religious
track record on oppression. Atheists? The Jesus people have been trying to
portray atheists as scary militants, which is almost as silly as their other
parallel effort, trying to persuade America that gays are scary sociopaths
hell-bent on raping your son and marrying your dog (or, worse, redecorating
your house – window treatments!). But atheists preach love and tolerance and
reason and logic. They do good charitable work in the world, contrary to what
cheap-shot artist Joe Klein believes, and they don’t hurt anybody or anything.
Oppression is not their thing and never will be.
Christians have also
been arguing that morality only comes from religion and that atheists have no
moral compass. Um, wrong. Human moral values pre-date not only the Christians
but also the Jews. Moral values were developed by the Bronze Age and Iron Age
tribesmen who came before the Jews. The guys who came up with the moral compass
of western civilization, are actually the tribes that the forefathers of the
three monotheistic religions -- Moses and Joshua – were trying to kill off: if
they had succeeded in exterminating not only those tribal peoples but also
their ideas, all of the underpinnings of moral belief in western civilization
could have been wiped out. Therefore, the biggest potential threat to morality
was actually….the people who founded our Abrahamic religions.
Also, as I’ve noted
earlier, the argument that religion is the source and fount of all morality
starts to wobble a bit, when you actually read the Bible. The early books establishing
Biblical morality are wildly uneven, going on and on for pages about all the
animals you can’t eat, and the specifications for the gorgeous temple and the
rich offerings Jews must give to the priests, but saying nothing – nothing! –
about marriage between one and one woman, possibly because the great men of
that day all had multiple wives. And then the book goes on to condone genocide,
and ethnic cleansing, and selling your daughter into slavery, and rape as a war
tactic, and beating uppity women and children to death. Lots of “crimes”
calling for a brutal death by stoning. And then proceeds to describe Biblical
patriarchs who tried to kill their children, repeatedly handed their female
relatives over to others to be raped, and and killed, stole, and cheated, and committed
incest. All with God’s approval. That’s Biblical morality.
So while the Jesus
people have given us centuries of oppression and resisted the forward march of
civilization, what have the nonbelievers given us?
Western civilization,
that’s what. Science, technology, the arts, philosophy, modern economics. People who don’t buy the God stuff
include Zuckerberg and Gates and Buffett. Confucius, Laozi and Kant. The more
intelligent of the Greek philosophers. Clarence Darrow. People who fought for
your rights like Elizabeth Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Betty Friedan, Andrei
Sakharov, and the founder of Planned Parenthood.
People who
don’t buy the Jesus stuff made the original discoveries for DNA, hydrogen, the
Big Bang, the first television tube, the telephone, the transistor, Boolean
algebra, nylon, evolution, subatomic particles, radioactivity, quantum
mechanics, the theory of relativity, holograms, surgical sterilization and
anesthetics, free-market capitalist theory and Ricardian theory, galactic
astronomy, a cholera therapy that saved 50 million lives, the microchip,
statistical analysis, marrow transplants to cure leukemia, cybernetics, the
typhus vaccine, blood transfusion, Pavlovian conditioning, Turing computer
theory, cloning, actuarial theory, and a little thing called the World Wide
Web.
The
nonbelievers include Kafka, Pushkin, Gorky, Keats, Mencken, Nabokov, Mahler,
Munch, Brahms, Chaplin, Copland, O’Neill, Shelley, Dali, Godard, Proust,
Steinbeck, Conrad, Eliot, Maugham, Arthur Miller, Pinter, Sartre, Hemingway,
Ibsen, Twain, Brecht, Chekov, Schubert, Van Gogh, Matisse, Monet, Schumann,
Bergman, Shaw, Vidal, Vonnegut, HG Wells, Virginia Woolf, Berlin, Zola, Frank
Lloyd Wright, and the creators of Sherlock Holmes, the Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo, The Stranger, the Forsytes, Catch-22, Stranger In a Strange Land, Brave
New World, Space Odyssey, Raisin in the Sun, and Frankenstein.
So there you
go. Mass murder, religious warfare, terrorism, oppression and resistance to new
ideas are overwhelmingly the work of the God People, because their Good Books
tell them to do so. Nonbelievers are the thinkers and builders and artists who
move humanity forward. And human morality happens in spite of religion, not
because of it.
1 comment:
The Big Bang idea was originally from a religious person, but i'm sure it was unbelievers who actually went and did the math.
Anyways! Enough with the religious bullying, pathetic excuse for logical reasoning, and the indoctrination of millions of people!
When is this nonsense going to stop?!
Really appreciate you for writing this!
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