atheism is bad
Humanity did more politically motivated killing in the 20th century under atheistic regimes than in the previous 19 centuries combined.
In a conversation stemming from my recent post about the blood lust of the Christian faith, Pastor James Miller made the above shocking statement. Given that this strikes me as something that might be commonly spread around, in order to smear the good name of fine atheistic natural and logical ‘morals’, I thought it would be worth investigating the charge further.
Undoubtedly the ‘atheistic regimes’ referred to include Stalin and Pol Pot, who were responsible for the deaths of an estimated 20 million and 2 million people respectively. The shameful list also includes 10s of millions of deaths under Chairman Mao in China. There’s really no escaping the brutality and horrendous violence exercised by these power-absorbed and empathy-blinkered atheist men. But what is the significance of their atheism? How narrow a definition of ‘politically motivated killing’ do we follow? Aren’t all deaths that result from following the ideologies of individual leaders political?
Theistic Hitler was responsible for the deaths of between 4 and 17 million from his extermination programme alone. Mass murder directed by those of a religious persuasion has continued through the 20th century in Nigeria (1-3 million), Rwanda (1 million), Afghanistan (1 to 2 million) and all over the world.
These huge murder rates are clearly much higher from the 20th century onwards due to the increase in global population, the increasingly organised nature of society, and technological advances in terms of transport and weapons. It goes without saying that such vast numbers of deaths couldn’t have been achieved in previous centuries.
Well, not exactly. Between 20 and 100 million people are estimated to have died as a result of the religiously-motivated Taiping Rebellion in 19th century China, the medieval Mongol Conquests killed 30 to 60 million people, around 5 million died as a result of the Napoleonic Wars, the 15th century French Wars of Religion killed 3 million people, and the Crusades resulted in the region of 2 million deaths. (very useful tables found in Wikipedia)
Coming back to the original quote, I’m not going to add up all the numbers, because I’m lazy, and a quick glance tells me that the ‘atheistic regimes’ haven’t done a whole lot more killing that the good religious folks. I’ve come to the conclusion, as many a person before me, that there is always a space for an ideological nutter to come along and incite enough irrational fear and hatred in their fellow human beings to commit acts of all too common, yet unimaginable, violence. Religion, or lack thereof, tells you nothing about the ‘moral standards’ or logical thinking abilities of the individuals involved.
Besides, this sort of accusation against atheists is a bit rich coming from Christians, whose chosen deity clearly relishes in and, unfortunately, promotes acts of vengeful genocide:
When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you may nations…then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.
Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.
It would be a bit silly to ‘like’ this, but thanks for posting it.
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Thanks for reading!
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Pastor Miller is an assclown extraordinaire… Perhaps the finest out there. He won’t engage. He doesn’t have the courage or the wits to do that. His method is to throw down a stupid line then scurry away under the rock where he hides, presumably thinking he’d struck a mortal blow to rationalism.
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Yes, he scurried off from the last post in the middle of our friendly chat. I wonder if he’ll pop up for this one with some clever Christian insight that will heap shame on my shoddily researched work. Shouldn’t be hard! 😉
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On thorough and deep research- reading a bit of the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler%27s_religious_views – I don’t think Hitler could be called Christian. Second century rejections of the Old Testament were at the time identified as heresy, outside Christianity, and Hitler called it “Jewish rubbish”. If he were Deist, that means that he did not believe in God taking an active part in the world, but creating then retreating. The theist believes in a God who is involved.
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Thanks Clare, I guess you realised somewhere along the line I’m not much into “thorough and deep research” (no time, and I figure if I say anything glaringly idiotic I’ll be corrected) but I did actually read that very link before I posted! I personally think it’s still fair to go as far as calling him a Christian, he’s consistent enough in referencing the Christian god, even if it’s not any brand other Christians agree with. Christianity is all about individual interpretation as far as I can see. But to avoid that potential discussion, I thought it would be more straight-forward to call him a theist. Apparently not …
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I do not think it is fair to say Hitler was a deist. He did believe (or presented himself as believing), that a god was interfering in the affairs of the world. He clearly stated on several occasion, that a voice of god had told him to become a politician. His antisemitism was inherrent to both Catholical and Lutheran religious traditions in Germany. In his very inauguration speech he told people, that the measures to restrict individual rights of the citizens are taken, because the German society needs to defend both of these Churches from the godless socialists.
On the other hand, Hitler’s personal beliefs are not even an issue as such, rather how he could manipulate people to believe and ultimately to act in the most horrible ways and draw credit to his crazy bigoted, racistic ideology from the traditional religious conservatism of the German Christians.
As for the insight of the quote from pastor Miller, it seems obvious what he intends people should think about the matter, but in the light of history it only leaves one question open: How did these atheistic regimes achieve such numbers of destruction, when religious ones could not. I mean, it is not like the religious demagogues and regimes have not tried to kill people en masse. Were the religious regimes simply so inneficient according to pastor Miller? No doubt the good pastor believes his own lies about the numbers, but has he lost his sense of logic also? I suppose his own personal beliefs are not an issue as such, rather how he can manipulate people to believe and ultimately act on those beliefs.
Violetwisp, your research was exellent in my opinion. It was magnificent of you to provide the point about the Taiping rebellion. For those who do not know about non-western history it was the first Christian movement in China, the leader of wich claimed to be the second coming of Christ.
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Thanks Raut! I’m very pleased to have some strong historical input on this one. Do you think it’s fair to call Hitler a Christian? Or do you think theist is as far as we can go? You’re right anyway that the fact that he motivated so many other cultural and practising Christians to take part in genocides is a big part of the issue.
I hope Miller comes back to comment, but I think the facts were too much for him. 🙂
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Oh, I definately think Hitler was a Christian. To me anyone who percieves themselves as Christians are Christians. How could I not take their word for it? Christianity has been defined by so many different sects that to an outsider it is impossible to know wich sect follows the original ideology. Rather it seems that if there was an original ideology by Jesus, I have never observed a Christian sect that lived by that ideology. Or have you ever run into a sect of Christians who have sold all their property and given the money to the poor? Jesus seemed very keen on his followers to do this.
Religions are all ecclestical in nature. People cherry pick from them what they want and most of the old ones are built on what people in past eras picked and chose. Hitler depicted himself as a protector of Christian culture and the Aryan race. Neither of these ideals have much evidence to back them up as having any truth value to them, but we have no reason to think Hitler himself did not believe in his own propaganda. On the contrary. He soundly believed in his and in the German cultural moral superiority and justified by that the horrendous deeds he and his culprits and the German nation as such did. To the bitter end many Nazies Hitler included were ready to die for their ideology that they believed true, even in the face of ultmate and total defeat. And today decades after there still are people who are convinced by the Nazi ideology, even thought if there ever was an ideology, that could be proven wrong by military defeat, it was Nazism.
Some of Hitlers closest followers were mystics fascinated by the occult and ancient Germanic mythology, but they mixed it up with all sorts of Christian mythology and idealisms of their day. The entire “National Socialistic” movement was very much a protest movement, that got power by marshalling the malcontent of the people during an economical crisis and the fears of the common German Christians by appealing in their desire for conservative values. It moulded itself as it went along, but the support for the Nazi regime came all along from the common Christian – both Catholic and Lutheran – middle class families of Germany. It could not have risen to such fame and power without echoing their values.
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Are you a professional historian or are you just one of those people who knows everything? 🙂
“have you ever run into a sect of Christians who have sold all their property and given the money to the poor? Jesus seemed very keen on his followers to do this.” Nice idea for a post!
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The etymology of the word “amateur” is derived from French meaning a person who literally loves what she/he does. An amateur has passion for what interrests him/her. 🙂 A professional is a person who gets paid for what they do for living.
I have studied archaeology in the University of Helsinki and I am well aware of the scientific methodology and integrity in historical research. However, even though I would say, I have a lot of theoretical knowledge of a bunch of stuff, I am only a proletarian labourer who is interrested in many things.
Learning about stuff leads only to the realization of how little one actually knows, but I do have strong opinions about stuff I have researched into.
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You are right. Religion, or lack of it has nothing to say about the moral standard or other activities related to human justice.
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Yes, it’s an easy accusation to throw around but I think on closer inspection it doesn’t actually make any sense. Thanks for commenting!
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Welcome! 🙂
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I clucking hate quotes like this and the arseholes who spew out this nonsense are frontline candidates for frontal lobotomy.
The insidious and rather grubby religious people who espouse crap like this do so merely to cover their own arses, a finger pointing tit for tat that is so effin Christian turns my guts.
“Oh well because we ONLY murdered x million we aren;t as bad as atheists who murdered xyz million.”
Well, ‘scuse me for being a party pooper, but didn’t His Nibbs the Numero Uno Dickwad, Yahweh his good ole self do the whole effin alphabet and wipe out the entire planet save for an ancient old boat builder and his soon to be incestuous family?
I cannot honestly think of any non religious regime that established a pogrom simply because they were atheists. You never heard any one of these farking despotic maniacs,Stalin,Mao etc EVER chant, ” A non-God Wills It!”
The Ark’s ultimate insult….
Silly People.
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What a beautiful rant! “Yahweh his good ole self do the whole effin alphabet and wipe out the entire planet save for an ancient old boat builder and his soon to be incestuous family?” I’ll save this quote for when I next need the ultimate retort. 🙂
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See, who says I cant make a girl go weak at the knees, right?
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Oh, I forgot to mention the photo.
Good shot..made me think of Jeff Goldblum immediately.
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Totally! (showing my age there) It’s generally repulsive and disgustingly hairy, but very has very pretty wings and cool colours.
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Great post! My very first post here on WordPress concerned the very morality arguments in question here. I came down on the side that the problem is not one of atheists or theists, but fanatics on either side. Any time you are so sure you are right about something you could never know enough about to know you are right, then you will more than likely resort to such arguments as, “Kill any who disagree.”
Sincerely,
Julien Haller
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Thanks! Yes, that’s a good point. There’s also the problem of the tendency of power to form blinkers for those who have it – they really seem to lose sight of their fallibility.
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