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Yet a declared Atheist state is America's largest trading partner and a major source of international investment. Just because Stalin and Mao were atheists, doesn't mean every atheist is dead set on genocide or mass murder.Atheism....do what you want to who you want....no one going to punish you in the end......I can see the appeal.....and the problem........just ask those 100 million people who got in the way of atheists in the 20th century....but since no one is going to hold them to account...I guess that's just another persons "thing"....
But the tradition is there.......and mao is still admired in a lot of circles......
I guess that I am a little confused by this post. Perhaps you are referring to the tradition of atheists killing Christians because they are Christians. Now, I can find hundreds of examples of Christian's killing the ungodly, but I have never heard of an atheist killing a Christian for being godly. Perhaps you can provide a link. And, please, no totalitarian system has made it a policy to kill Christians for being godly. They have killed those that are a danger to their regime, regardless of their religious beliefs.
But they were atheists who murdered people....regardless of the motive......they targeted everyone, not just certain groups which makes them even worse.....if they can be worse.....and yes, communists targeted religion specifically......
I think the families of the victims view America as responsible for the deaths, rather than just one rogue atheist. You need a lot of hate to motivate someone to kill another in cold blood.The police don't want to admit Islamophobia is real. This case is no different than the Islamophobic guy that shot up those kids in Norway. Awful, and unacceptable, and a hate crime (if not terrorism).Here's their patron saint:
Craig Stephen Hicks
I hope this guy rots in jail or worse, I hope he gets the chair but before that I hope he is mounted repeatedly by the biggest, meanest fucker in prison so many times he has to get a colostomy bag.
He walked up to their apartment of this couple, went inside when they let him in and then pulled out a gun and shot them execution style.
The families have a right to be absolutey disgusted with the uber-stupid Chapel Hill police for calling it a parking spot dispute.
And people need to stop saying islam is violent. And wants to take over america. Fanning the flames christians
We do?Me and my buddies will go if they open one in Michigan and we will try to invite people who want to know the truth.
Careful...atheists have a habit of being extremely violent.....especially toward religious people like Jews and Muslims.....and Christians haven't faired well with atheists either......
Always funny to hear such bullshit rhetoric, isn't it? Notice that Billc is not offering any examples or facts.
hitler...atheist, some followers were pagans......12 million murdered not including war dead....
stalin...atheist....murdered 25 million or more....
mao...atheist...murdered 70 million or more....
pol pot...atheist...murdered 3 million?
and castro, che...and the other atheists who killed and enslaved people around the world....
Atheists have nothing holding them back when they decide to murder people......
How many native american and slaves did america murder? How many in Japan ww2? Murderers! Lol
Yet a declared Atheist state is America's largest trading partner and a major source of international investment. Just because Stalin and Mao were atheists, doesn't mean every atheist is dead set on genocide or mass murder.Atheism....do what you want to who you want....no one going to punish you in the end......I can see the appeal.....and the problem........just ask those 100 million people who got in the way of atheists in the 20th century....but since no one is going to hold them to account...I guess that's just another persons "thing"....
But the tradition is there.......and mao is still admired in a lot of circles......
I guess that I am a little confused by this post. Perhaps you are referring to the tradition of atheists killing Christians because they are Christians. Now, I can find hundreds of examples of Christian's killing the ungodly, but I have never heard of an atheist killing a Christian for being godly. Perhaps you can provide a link. And, please, no totalitarian system has made it a policy to kill Christians for being godly. They have killed those that are a danger to their regime, regardless of their religious beliefs.
But they were atheists who murdered people....regardless of the motive......they targeted everyone, not just certain groups which makes them even worse.....if they can be worse.....and yes, communists targeted religion specifically......
Communists officially discouraged religion. they did not set out to kill the religious.
As an atheist, I will take responsibility for other atheists who killed people, just as soon as you take responsibility for Christians killing IN THE NAME OF GOD, for the last 2,000 years.
Onward Christian soldiers.....
Me and my buddies will go if they open one in Michigan and we will try to invite people who want to know the truth.
Sounds great. I may be moving to Austin, Texas. I wonder if they have one there? Years ago when I lived in Austin, Madelyn Murray O'Hair was still alive. We went to her Atheist Center and browsed her library. Awesome!
For anyone who doesn't remember her, she pushed SCOTUS to get prayer out of schools! 1962 or 1963, somewhere in there.
Did you hear we are violent? I'm going to go punch a nun.
No, if we're going to get violent let's get one of those pedophile priests.
I've met many Catholic men who have told me confidentially that they had either been touched by a priest, been approached by a priest or downright violated. Let's not waste our bad reputation on nuns.
I watched a fascinating Frontline video last night, called, "Secrets of the Vatican". Turns out that the last pope's resignation was primarily dues to his inability to deal with the priest pedophile scandals and the Vatican bank money laundering.
Wish I could have seen that. Perfectly plausible. Pope Francis has everybody talking about him instead of the priest problem and money-laundering thing. It was a wise move to put in the Vatican.
We do?Careful...atheists have a habit of being extremely violent.....especially toward religious people like Jews and Muslims.....and Christians haven't faired well with atheists either......
Always funny to hear such bullshit rhetoric, isn't it? Notice that Billc is not offering any examples or facts.
hitler...atheist, some followers were pagans......12 million murdered not including war dead....
stalin...atheist....murdered 25 million or more....
mao...atheist...murdered 70 million or more....
pol pot...atheist...murdered 3 million?
and castro, che...and the other atheists who killed and enslaved people around the world....
Atheists have nothing holding them back when they decide to murder people......
How many native american and slaves did america murder? How many in Japan ww2? Murderers! Lol
American Indian Holocaust
"American Indian Holocaust" is a term used by American Indian activists to bring attention to what they contend is the deliberate mass destruction of American Indian populations following the European arrival in the Americas, a subject which they allege has hitherto received very limited mention in history, partially because most of the deaths happened before European chroniclers arrived to record them.
Estimates of the pre-Columbian population vary widely, though uncontroversial studies place the figure for North, Central and South America at a combined 50 million to 100 million,[1] with scholarly estimates of 2 million[2] to 18 million[3] for North America alone. An estimated 80% to 90% of this population died after the arrival of Europeans,[4] overwhelmingly from factors beyond most human control — e.g., smallpox epidemics[5] — Europeans, especially the Spanish conquistadors, also killed thousands deliberately.
American Indian Holocaust - RationalWiki
We do?Careful...atheists have a habit of being extremely violent.....especially toward religious people like Jews and Muslims.....and Christians haven't faired well with atheists either......
Always funny to hear such bullshit rhetoric, isn't it? Notice that Billc is not offering any examples or facts.
hitler...atheist, some followers were pagans......12 million murdered not including war dead....
stalin...atheist....murdered 25 million or more....
mao...atheist...murdered 70 million or more....
pol pot...atheist...murdered 3 million?
Atheists have nothing holding them back when they decide to murder people......
I knew you'd try to put Nazis on us. Lol.
Yep, I knew he was, too.
The Atheist Atrocities Fallacy – Hitler, Stalin & Pol Pot
The Atheist Atrocities Fallacy 8211 Hitler Stalin Pol Pot Richard Dawkins Foundation
HITLER
“Besides that, I believe one thing: there is a Lord God! And this Lord God creates the peoples.” [1] ~Adolf Hitler
“We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations; we have stamped it out” [2] ~Adolf Hitler
POL POT
Pol Pot, possibly not even an atheist, but almost certainly a Buddhist, believed in the teachings of the Buddha, no matter how perverted his interpretations may or may not have been. His violence, much like the violence of many earlier religionists, wasn’t the result of a lack of belief in a god, whether Zeus, Osiris, Yahweh, or the god-like Buddha of Mahayana Buddhism, but in the megalomaniacal belief that heaven or destiny was guiding him to improve the state of affairs for all those who could be forced to share his misguided utopian delusions. Not only was Pol Pot a Theravada Buddhist, but the soil in which his atrocities were sewn was also very Buddhist.
STALIN
Of these three characters, Stalin was the only confirmed atheist, yet Hitchens thoroughly dealt with the religious nature of Stalin’s dictatorship in a manner that has left religious apologists without sufficient reply. Notwithstanding the fact that Stalin was raised as a Christian under the religious influence of his mother, who enrolled him in seminary school, and that Stalin later took it upon himself to study for the priesthood, as Hitchens and others have pointed out, Stalin merely stepped into a ready-made religious tyranny, constructed by the Russian Orthodox Church and paved with the teachings of St. Paul.
I guess that I am a little confused by this post. Perhaps you are referring to the tradition of atheists killing Christians because they are Christians. Now, I can find hundreds of examples of Christian's killing the ungodly, but I have never heard of an atheist killing a Christian for being godly.
We do?
Always funny to hear such bullshit rhetoric, isn't it? Notice that Billc is not offering any examples or facts.
hitler...atheist, some followers were pagans......12 million murdered not including war dead....
stalin...atheist....murdered 25 million or more....
mao...atheist...murdered 70 million or more....
pol pot...atheist...murdered 3 million?
Atheists have nothing holding them back when they decide to murder people......
I knew you'd try to put Nazis on us. Lol.
Yep, I knew he was, too.
The Atheist Atrocities Fallacy – Hitler, Stalin & Pol Pot
The Atheist Atrocities Fallacy 8211 Hitler Stalin Pol Pot Richard Dawkins Foundation
HITLER
“Besides that, I believe one thing: there is a Lord God! And this Lord God creates the peoples.” [1] ~Adolf Hitler
“We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations; we have stamped it out” [2] ~Adolf Hitler
POL POT
Pol Pot, possibly not even an atheist, but almost certainly a Buddhist, believed in the teachings of the Buddha, no matter how perverted his interpretations may or may not have been. His violence, much like the violence of many earlier religionists, wasn’t the result of a lack of belief in a god, whether Zeus, Osiris, Yahweh, or the god-like Buddha of Mahayana Buddhism, but in the megalomaniacal belief that heaven or destiny was guiding him to improve the state of affairs for all those who could be forced to share his misguided utopian delusions. Not only was Pol Pot a Theravada Buddhist, but the soil in which his atrocities were sewn was also very Buddhist.
STALIN
Of these three characters, Stalin was the only confirmed atheist, yet Hitchens thoroughly dealt with the religious nature of Stalin’s dictatorship in a manner that has left religious apologists without sufficient reply. Notwithstanding the fact that Stalin was raised as a Christian under the religious influence of his mother, who enrolled him in seminary school, and that Stalin later took it upon himself to study for the priesthood, as Hitchens and others have pointed out, Stalin merely stepped into a ready-made religious tyranny, constructed by the Russian Orthodox Church and paved with the teachings of St. Paul.
And I don't doubt a big majority of the mega elite and politicians and kings and Vatican rulers and presidents secretly don't believe in god. What I'm saying is they use religion on us to manipulate us.
Just like we might not be in a holy war with Muslims but religion is one reason the us citizens were OK with killing Iraqis and religion played a part in why christian Germans didn't like Jews.
Yet a declared Atheist state is America's largest trading partner and a major source of international investment. Just because Stalin and Mao were atheists, doesn't mean every atheist is dead set on genocide or mass murder.
But the tradition is there.......and mao is still admired in a lot of circles......
I guess that I am a little confused by this post. Perhaps you are referring to the tradition of atheists killing Christians because they are Christians. Now, I can find hundreds of examples of Christian's killing the ungodly, but I have never heard of an atheist killing a Christian for being godly. Perhaps you can provide a link. And, please, no totalitarian system has made it a policy to kill Christians for being godly. They have killed those that are a danger to their regime, regardless of their religious beliefs.
But they were atheists who murdered people....regardless of the motive......they targeted everyone, not just certain groups which makes them even worse.....if they can be worse.....and yes, communists targeted religion specifically......
Communists officially discouraged religion. they did not set out to kill the religious.
As an atheist, I will take responsibility for other atheists who killed people, just as soon as you take responsibility for Christians killing IN THE NAME OF GOD, for the last 2,000 years.
Onward Christian soldiers.....
again....in more primitive times everyone was killing everyone...and then we became more religious and civilized...and then the atheists came along in the 1930s and started murdering people in modern nation states....to the tune of 100 million people in just 85 years.....quite the achievement......in modern times...not the middle ages, or the old west....but in modern, advanced, civilized societies with universities and modern tech......
Yes....hitler was an atheist...the Germans were non practising Christians...stalin...an atheist....pol pot and atheist.....they were all socialists...pol pot and stalin were communists and hitler a national socialist...the nazis hated christians for what they allegedly did to the mythical "aryans"......
The Russian orthodox church was another authoritarian arm of the government, and Stalin was evil well before he became a communist (or went into the church) and his family were scared of him.I am always curious that stalin was raised in the Church and then rejected it when he became a communist.....but his earliest religious experience, which he rejected, is used to protect his atheism from criticism......
I guess that I am a little confused by this post. Perhaps you are referring to the tradition of atheists killing Christians because they are Christians. Now, I can find hundreds of examples of Christian's killing the ungodly, but I have never heard of an atheist killing a Christian for being godly.
No one kills in the name of atheism Evangelicals Now
No one kills in the name of atheism?
Neil Powell, of City Church, Birmingham, takes issue with Richard Dawkins
An atheist told me recently, ‘No one kills in the name of atheism’. In fact he was so sure he told me twice.
He’s not unique in making such a claim. Richard Dawkins writes in The God Delusion: ‘Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism’.
Dawkins won’t even allow us to think that atheism had any influence on Stalin’s murderous regime. He says: ‘The mature Stalin was scathing about the Russian Orthodox Church, and about religion in general. But there is no evidence that his atheism motivated his brutality’.
Such a conclusion is a luxury on offer only to those with absolutely no grasp of history. The reality is that it is a plain and simple, indeed brutal, fact that over the past 100 years atheism, as an ideology, has been a driving force used directly to plan, organise and carry out the mass murder of millions of people.
We will limit ourselves to a consideration of the way in which state-sponsored atheism has been used to justify the intimidation, torture and killing of those whose only crime was belief in God and who posed no other political or ideological threat.
USSR
Atheism was the ideology that lay behind state-sanctioned killing of Christians in the USSR. Karl Marx famously wrote: ‘Religion … is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness’.
And for Marx that meant the abolition of religion. ‘Of course, in periods when the political state as such is born violently out of civil society, … the state can and must go as far as the abolition of religion, the destruction of religion. But it can do so only in the same way that it proceeds to the abolition of private property, to the maximum, to confiscation, to progressive taxation, just as it goes as far as the abolition of life, the guillotine’.
Interestingly, so indebted to Darwin was Marx that he said of his book: ‘The Origin of Species serves me well as a basis in natural science for the struggle in history’. He actually wrote to Darwin asking if he might dedicate his next book to him. Darwin put his decision to decline down to the sensibilities of his wider family.
Religion targeted
From the very beginnings of the Communist revolution in Russia the state set out to apply the atheism of Marx. Religion was systematically targeted as an enemy of the state, an oppressor of the people. It was something not merely to be discouraged but destroyed.
Lenin said: ‘There can be nothing more abominable than religion’.
Marx’s dogmatic atheism was used as the philosophical justification for the attack on religion beginning with Lenin, continuing under Stalin and maintained right through to the collapse of the Berlin wall. The fact that the attack on religion continued over generations demonstrates that this state-sponsored attack could hardly be blamed on the actions of one individual.
Time magazine summarised the legacy of dogmatic atheism as follows: ‘In the Bolsheviks’ first five years in power, 28 bishops and 1,200 priests were cut down by the red sickle. Stalin greatly accelerated the terror, and by the end of Khrushchev’s rule, liquidations of clergy reached an estimated 50,000. After World War II, fierce but generally less bloody persecution spread into the Ukraine and the new Soviet bloc, affecting millions of Roman Catholics and Protestants as well as Orthodox’.
Two giants’ opinions
Two Russian giants of history come to the same conclusion. Alexander N. Yakovlev was a Soviet politician and historian. He is best known as the author of perestroika and has been called ‘the godfather of glasnost’. It was he whose ideas lay behind Gorbachev’s reform of the Soviet Union. As a member of the Politburo no one can claim a greater insight into the rationale behind the workings of the Soviet Empire. In his authoritative work A century of violence in Soviet Russia he records much of the tyranny of evil committed under dogmatic atheism and he estimated that, ‘Under Stalin’s leadership in the purges of 1937-38, some 100,000 Russian Orthodox priests were executed’.
The Nobel prize-winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote extensively about life in the Soviet Union, having spent 11 years in the Gulag concentration camps. ‘I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution. In the process, I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own towards the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today the main cause of the ruinous revolution that has swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened”.’
When Dawkins comments, ‘I cannot think of any war that has been fought in the name of atheism’, clearly he cannot be aware of the wars within a nation that has led a state to murder on a vast scale its own citizens, all in the name of atheism.
Albania became the world’s first atheist state in 1967. Its leader, Enver Hoxha, systematically sought to wipe faith off the map by banning religion and closing all religious buildings. Young people were encouraged to attack mosques, churches and tekkes and to turn in remaining clergy to the authorities. Clergy who were still alive by 1967 and had survived 20 years of persecution, were killed or sent to hard labour camps. Most mosques had their minarets destroyed, tombstones with any religious symbols were overturned, people caught wearing religious symbols (e.g. crucifixes, medallions of the Qur’an) could be sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.
Much as we might like to think of this as something that we can consign to the history books, the persecution of religion in the name of atheism continues today in China and North Korea.
We must not forget
Paul Johnson described the totalitarian state as ‘the greatest killer of all time’. He goes on: ‘State action had been responsible for the violent or unnatural deaths of some 125 million people during the century’. And the reality is that much of that killing was not politically but religiously motivated.
We would be shocked, horrified and concerned if people had never heard of the gas-chambers of Auschwitz, so surely we owe it to the memory of those who died in the Gulags not to forget them. How is it that the hundreds of thousands of brave men and women killed simply for being believers in God in countries such as the Soviet Union, Albania, China, Cambodia and North Korea are forgotten or at best ignored?
What is at stake?
The problem with the militant atheism propagated by Dawkins et al. is that, in an attempt to blame religion for everything, it has to obscure history to exonerate atheism. For Dawkins to claim that Stalin’s murderous actions were not informed by his atheism is beyond belief and the claim that ‘no one kills in the name of atheism’ flies in the face of all the evidence. Quite simply, atheism was used to justify evil on a massive scale.
Once we understand that neither religion nor atheism stand free from accusation, the question remains what is at work in men and women that leads them to kill in both the name of religion and non-religion? If we can’t simply blame religion, where do we go? The answer can be found in something much more fundamental to the human condition, the darkness that resides in every human heart.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote of how he discovered this very fact in his paper What I learned in the Gulag.
‘It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.’
He's winning back a lot of liberal christians.Me and my buddies will go if they open one in Michigan and we will try to invite people who want to know the truth.
Sounds great. I may be moving to Austin, Texas. I wonder if they have one there? Years ago when I lived in Austin, Madelyn Murray O'Hair was still alive. We went to her Atheist Center and browsed her library. Awesome!
For anyone who doesn't remember her, she pushed SCOTUS to get prayer out of schools! 1962 or 1963, somewhere in there.
Did you hear we are violent? I'm going to go punch a nun.
No, if we're going to get violent let's get one of those pedophile priests.
I've met many Catholic men who have told me confidentially that they had either been touched by a priest, been approached by a priest or downright violated. Let's not waste our bad reputation on nuns.
I watched a fascinating Frontline video last night, called, "Secrets of the Vatican". Turns out that the last pope's resignation was primarily dues to his inability to deal with the priest pedophile scandals and the Vatican bank money laundering.
Wish I could have seen that. Perfectly plausible. Pope Francis has everybody talking about him instead of the priest problem and money-laundering thing. It was a wise move to put in the Vatican.
Always funny to hear such bullshit rhetoric, isn't it? Notice that Billc is not offering any examples or facts.
hitler...atheist, some followers were pagans......12 million murdered not including war dead....
stalin...atheist....murdered 25 million or more....
mao...atheist...murdered 70 million or more....
pol pot...atheist...murdered 3 million?
Atheists have nothing holding them back when they decide to murder people......
I knew you'd try to put Nazis on us. Lol.
Yep, I knew he was, too.
The Atheist Atrocities Fallacy – Hitler, Stalin & Pol Pot
The Atheist Atrocities Fallacy 8211 Hitler Stalin Pol Pot Richard Dawkins Foundation
HITLER
“Besides that, I believe one thing: there is a Lord God! And this Lord God creates the peoples.” [1] ~Adolf Hitler
“We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations; we have stamped it out” [2] ~Adolf Hitler
POL POT
Pol Pot, possibly not even an atheist, but almost certainly a Buddhist, believed in the teachings of the Buddha, no matter how perverted his interpretations may or may not have been. His violence, much like the violence of many earlier religionists, wasn’t the result of a lack of belief in a god, whether Zeus, Osiris, Yahweh, or the god-like Buddha of Mahayana Buddhism, but in the megalomaniacal belief that heaven or destiny was guiding him to improve the state of affairs for all those who could be forced to share his misguided utopian delusions. Not only was Pol Pot a Theravada Buddhist, but the soil in which his atrocities were sewn was also very Buddhist.
STALIN
Of these three characters, Stalin was the only confirmed atheist, yet Hitchens thoroughly dealt with the religious nature of Stalin’s dictatorship in a manner that has left religious apologists without sufficient reply. Notwithstanding the fact that Stalin was raised as a Christian under the religious influence of his mother, who enrolled him in seminary school, and that Stalin later took it upon himself to study for the priesthood, as Hitchens and others have pointed out, Stalin merely stepped into a ready-made religious tyranny, constructed by the Russian Orthodox Church and paved with the teachings of St. Paul.
And I don't doubt a big majority of the mega elite and politicians and kings and Vatican rulers and presidents secretly don't believe in god. What I'm saying is they use religion on us to manipulate us.
Just like we might not be in a holy war with Muslims but religion is one reason the us citizens were OK with killing Iraqis and religion played a part in why christian Germans didn't like Jews.
yeah...who was okay with killing Iraqis....other than the iraqis who were muslim terrorists.......you lefty atheists....you really need to get a grip on reality.....
Yes....hitler was an atheist...the Germans were non practising Christians...stalin...an atheist....pol pot and atheist.....they were all socialists...pol pot and stalin were communists and hitler a national socialist...the nazis hated christians for what they allegedly did to the mythical "aryans"......
See post #58 and follow the link.
It never ceases to amaze me how content the righties are to merely state their opinion without an attempt to corroborate their statements.
Why is that?
I guess that I am a little confused by this post. Perhaps you are referring to the tradition of atheists killing Christians because they are Christians. Now, I can find hundreds of examples of Christian's killing the ungodly, but I have never heard of an atheist killing a Christian for being godly.
No one kills in the name of atheism Evangelicals Now
No one kills in the name of atheism?
Neil Powell, of City Church, Birmingham, takes issue with Richard Dawkins
An atheist told me recently, ‘No one kills in the name of atheism’. In fact he was so sure he told me twice.
He’s not unique in making such a claim. Richard Dawkins writes in The God Delusion: ‘Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism’.
Dawkins won’t even allow us to think that atheism had any influence on Stalin’s murderous regime. He says: ‘The mature Stalin was scathing about the Russian Orthodox Church, and about religion in general. But there is no evidence that his atheism motivated his brutality’.
Such a conclusion is a luxury on offer only to those with absolutely no grasp of history. The reality is that it is a plain and simple, indeed brutal, fact that over the past 100 years atheism, as an ideology, has been a driving force used directly to plan, organise and carry out the mass murder of millions of people.
We will limit ourselves to a consideration of the way in which state-sponsored atheism has been used to justify the intimidation, torture and killing of those whose only crime was belief in God and who posed no other political or ideological threat.
USSR
Atheism was the ideology that lay behind state-sanctioned killing of Christians in the USSR. Karl Marx famously wrote: ‘Religion … is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness’.
And for Marx that meant the abolition of religion. ‘Of course, in periods when the political state as such is born violently out of civil society, … the state can and must go as far as the abolition of religion, the destruction of religion. But it can do so only in the same way that it proceeds to the abolition of private property, to the maximum, to confiscation, to progressive taxation, just as it goes as far as the abolition of life, the guillotine’.
Interestingly, so indebted to Darwin was Marx that he said of his book: ‘The Origin of Species serves me well as a basis in natural science for the struggle in history’. He actually wrote to Darwin asking if he might dedicate his next book to him. Darwin put his decision to decline down to the sensibilities of his wider family.
Religion targeted
From the very beginnings of the Communist revolution in Russia the state set out to apply the atheism of Marx. Religion was systematically targeted as an enemy of the state, an oppressor of the people. It was something not merely to be discouraged but destroyed.
Lenin said: ‘There can be nothing more abominable than religion’.
Marx’s dogmatic atheism was used as the philosophical justification for the attack on religion beginning with Lenin, continuing under Stalin and maintained right through to the collapse of the Berlin wall. The fact that the attack on religion continued over generations demonstrates that this state-sponsored attack could hardly be blamed on the actions of one individual.
Time magazine summarised the legacy of dogmatic atheism as follows: ‘In the Bolsheviks’ first five years in power, 28 bishops and 1,200 priests were cut down by the red sickle. Stalin greatly accelerated the terror, and by the end of Khrushchev’s rule, liquidations of clergy reached an estimated 50,000. After World War II, fierce but generally less bloody persecution spread into the Ukraine and the new Soviet bloc, affecting millions of Roman Catholics and Protestants as well as Orthodox’.
Two giants’ opinions
Two Russian giants of history come to the same conclusion. Alexander N. Yakovlev was a Soviet politician and historian. He is best known as the author of perestroika and has been called ‘the godfather of glasnost’. It was he whose ideas lay behind Gorbachev’s reform of the Soviet Union. As a member of the Politburo no one can claim a greater insight into the rationale behind the workings of the Soviet Empire. In his authoritative work A century of violence in Soviet Russia he records much of the tyranny of evil committed under dogmatic atheism and he estimated that, ‘Under Stalin’s leadership in the purges of 1937-38, some 100,000 Russian Orthodox priests were executed’.
The Nobel prize-winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote extensively about life in the Soviet Union, having spent 11 years in the Gulag concentration camps. ‘I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution. In the process, I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own towards the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today the main cause of the ruinous revolution that has swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened”.’
When Dawkins comments, ‘I cannot think of any war that has been fought in the name of atheism’, clearly he cannot be aware of the wars within a nation that has led a state to murder on a vast scale its own citizens, all in the name of atheism.
Albania became the world’s first atheist state in 1967. Its leader, Enver Hoxha, systematically sought to wipe faith off the map by banning religion and closing all religious buildings. Young people were encouraged to attack mosques, churches and tekkes and to turn in remaining clergy to the authorities. Clergy who were still alive by 1967 and had survived 20 years of persecution, were killed or sent to hard labour camps. Most mosques had their minarets destroyed, tombstones with any religious symbols were overturned, people caught wearing religious symbols (e.g. crucifixes, medallions of the Qur’an) could be sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.
Much as we might like to think of this as something that we can consign to the history books, the persecution of religion in the name of atheism continues today in China and North Korea.
We must not forget
Paul Johnson described the totalitarian state as ‘the greatest killer of all time’. He goes on: ‘State action had been responsible for the violent or unnatural deaths of some 125 million people during the century’. And the reality is that much of that killing was not politically but religiously motivated.
We would be shocked, horrified and concerned if people had never heard of the gas-chambers of Auschwitz, so surely we owe it to the memory of those who died in the Gulags not to forget them. How is it that the hundreds of thousands of brave men and women killed simply for being believers in God in countries such as the Soviet Union, Albania, China, Cambodia and North Korea are forgotten or at best ignored?
What is at stake?
The problem with the militant atheism propagated by Dawkins et al. is that, in an attempt to blame religion for everything, it has to obscure history to exonerate atheism. For Dawkins to claim that Stalin’s murderous actions were not informed by his atheism is beyond belief and the claim that ‘no one kills in the name of atheism’ flies in the face of all the evidence. Quite simply, atheism was used to justify evil on a massive scale.
Once we understand that neither religion nor atheism stand free from accusation, the question remains what is at work in men and women that leads them to kill in both the name of religion and non-religion? If we can’t simply blame religion, where do we go? The answer can be found in something much more fundamental to the human condition, the darkness that resides in every human heart.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote of how he discovered this very fact in his paper What I learned in the Gulag.
‘It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.’
Thanks IceWeasel...great find....
Yes....hitler was an atheist...the Germans were non practising Christians...stalin...an atheist....pol pot and atheist.....they were all socialists...pol pot and stalin were communists and hitler a national socialist...the nazis hated christians for what they allegedly did to the mythical "aryans"......
See post #58 and follow the link.
It never ceases to amaze me how content the righties are to merely state their opinion without an attempt to corroborate their statements.
Why is that?
