For good people to do evil doesn't require only religion, or any religion, but simply one of its key elements: belief without evidence--in other words, faith. And that kind of faith is seen not just in religion, but in any authoritarian ideology that puts dogma above truth and frowns on diseent. This was precisely the case in the totalitarian regimes of Maoist China and Stalinist Russia, whose excesses are often (and wrongly) blamed on atheism. — Faith Versus Fact - Jerry A. Coyne - Viking Publishers, 2015; Pgs. 220
Although it was not fully successful in its mission, the Soviet-led antireligious campaign might have had some lasting effects, as the proportion of atheists and nonreligious in post-Soviet societies remains quite high even in the absence of scientific atheist propaganda and coercion.
In the midst of gaining power, the Bolsheviks began an antireligious campaign seeking to disestablish influential religions like Eastern Orthodoxy, to nationalize all church property, and to transfer responsibility in providing public services (such as birth, marriage, and death registration) from church to state organizations. Seeing religion as antithetical to the modern project of socialist political and economic development, revolutionary leaders thought it necessary to disentangle religious institutions from the state and to create conditions in which religion was deemed irrelevant to society's members.
The timing for an antireligious campaign seemed ripe in the late tsarist regime as an increasing portion of the population, especially in Russia, was disenchanted with the close role the Russian Orthodox Church bore with the state. ... Thus, even though the Soviet regime would be the first regime ever to devise a campaign promoting atheism, a general skepticism (at least with regard to the Russian Orthodox Church) was already present at the eve of the revolution. ... Seeking immediate separation, the newly established Bolshevik leaders provoked an antireligous campaign that often involved violent, coercive actions. This initial campaign was followed by a relatively calm period (although intimidation tactics and arrests of clerics continued), which focused on propaganda and socialization. ... The conflicts during the Civil War era, however, were eventually seen as counterproductive to the cause of establishing an atheist socialist society. Thus, most of the 1920s witnessed a shift from directly coercive measures to gradual measures to socialize citizens as atheists.
In 1925, the Party established the Soviet League of the Militant Godless (or, Militant Atheists) to organize a systematic program against religion. ... The League of the Militant Godless was conceived as an association of volunteers who were committed to promoting "scientific materialism" through eductional activities like lectures, reading circles, and promotional materials. The League's creation symbolized the Bolshevik regime's attempts to shift the antireligious campaign away from coercion to socialization. However, this shift toward a more passive antireligious campaign was not supported unanimously. — Atheism and Secularity (Vol. 2) - Edited by Phil Zuckerman - Praeger, 2010 - Pgs. 46-47
A fundamental tenet of Marxism-Leninism is that religion will ultimately disappear. If it began to seem unlikely to do so, the authorities would naturally adopt measures to promote its disappearance, since its continued presence was a rebuke to the claims of the ideology. The above impulse was reinforced when the system developed into full totalitarianism (in the USSR, from the late 1920s): the internal compulsion of such a system demanded the liquidation of any social institution (not just religious) which was not under its complete control. — Religious Policy in the Soviet Union - Edited by Sabrina Petra Ramet - Cambridge University Press, 1993 - Pgs. 4
If God defines what is good and what is evil, then those who follow God's commands are morally justified to commit similar atrocities. History shows the result: holy wars, burning of heretics, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Years' War, the English Civil War, witch hunts, cultural genocide, brutal conquests of the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans, ethnic cleansing, slavery, colonialist tyranny, and pogroms against the Jews eventually leading to the Holocaust.
Theists try to counter all this by pointing to the mass-murdering atheists of the twentieth century: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Nicolae Ceausescu, Enver Hoxha, and Kim Jong-Il, as if this somehow justifies the religious mass murders that they can hardly deny. Hitler is usually included in the litany, but he was a Catholic. Indeed, the Cathollic Church never excommunicated a single Nazi, but in 2010 it excommunicated nun Margaret McBride for allowing an abortion that was necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman suffering from pulmonary hypertension.
Religion scholar Hector Avalos has studied documents from the Stalin era that only recently became available. He points out that there is no documented statement in which Stalin justified his actions by saying something such as, "I don't believe in God, therefore I am committing violent act X." On the other hand, in all the examples we saw above of terrorists associated with some religion, you can find direct statements of the form, "God wants X, therefore I am committing violent act Y." Avalos says, "We cannot find any direct evidence that Stalin's own personal agenda killed because of atheism."
Now you might argue that while Stalin did not kill in the name of atheism, his godlessness failed to provide any restraint on his behavior. But then, neither has godliness provided much restraint to the murderers of history.
Avalos does not deny that Stalin committed many antireligious acts. But the predominant acts of violence committed dring the period 1932-39, called the Great Purge, or the Great Terror, were clearly political in nature. Religion played a minor role. If a church went along, it was left alone. If it objected, it was persecuted along with everybody else who refused to cooperate. — God and the Folly of Faith - Victor J. Stenger - Prometheus Books, 2012 - Pgs. 254-255
Neither religious belief nor religous disbelief is a guarantee of good behavior. Incentives like greed, power, anger, resentment, fear, or desperation can overwhelm the moral incentives listed earlier in the previous section, which can make an atheist or a believer behave badly.
Still, plenty of people in both camps spend an enormous amount of energy trying to paint the other side as immoral by using the bad behavior of famous monsters--dictators or criminals drunk on greed, power, anger, and all the rest--as an indictment of everyone who shares the monster's religious (or nonreligious) label.
But using the horrendous acts of Grand Inquisitor Torquemada, or Adolf Hitler, or Fred Phelps to draw conclusions about the average Ned Flanders Christian is a stretch. Likewise, thinking that Idi Amin or Osama bin Laden are any reflection on the moral character of my Muslim neighbors ignores all the other variables that made the famous monsters what they were.
The same applies to Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and other atheists with immoral behavior to answer for. Like the religious villains, their actions say more about unchecked power than about their opinions of gods. And drawing conclusions about what it means to be an everyday atheist from Stalin is as silly as doubting the ethics of a passing Quaker because Torquemada lost his moral compass. — Atheism For Dummies - Dale McGowan, PhD. - John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd., 2013 - Pgs. 257
"Hitler and Stalin were atheists. What have you got to say about that?" The question comes up after just about every public lecture that I ever give on the subject of religion ... It is put in a truculent way, indignantly freighted with two assumptions: not only (1) were Stalin and Hitler atheists, but (2) they did their terrible deeds because they were atheists ... assumption (2) is false. ... What matters is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does.
Individual atheists may do evil things but they don't do evil things in the name of atheism. Stalin and Hitler did extremely evil things, in the name of, respectively, dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism... — The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins - Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008 - Pgs. 278; 315-316
To view atheism as a way of life, whether beneficial or harmful, is false and misleading. Just as the failure to believe in magic elves does not entail a code of living or a set of principles, so the failure to believe in a god does not imply any specific philosophical system. From the mere fact that a person is an atheist, one cannot infer that this person subscribes to any particular positive beliefs. One's positive convictions are quite distinct from the subject of atheism. ... The practice of linking atheism with a set of beliefs, especially moral and political beliefs, allows the theist to lump atheists together under a common banner, with the implication that one atheist agrees with the beliefs of another atheist. And here we have the ever popular "guilt by association." Since communists are notoriously atheistic, argue some theists, there must be some connection between atheism and communism.
The implication here is that communism is somehow a logical outgrowth of atheism, so the atheist is left to defend himself against the charge of latent communism. This irrational and grossly unfair practice of linking atheism with communism is losing popularity and is rarely encountered any longer except among political conservatives. But the same basic technique is sometimes used by the religious philosopher in his attempt to discredit atheism. — Atheism: The Case Against God - George H. Smith - Prometheus Books, 2010 - Pgs. 21-22
While most theists accept that religion has resulted in much unnecessary suffering and history, they argue that atheists, notably Stalin, Mao and Hitler, killed more people in the twentieth century alone than were killed for religious reasons in all the previous centuries put together. ... [Religious Studies Professor Hector Avalos] found no evidence that Stalin killed because of atheism. Rather, the data indicate that Stalin's genocide was driven by the politics of forced collectivization. — The New Atheism - Victor J. Stenger - Prometheus Books Pgs. 115-116
Myth 27: Many Atrocities Have Been Committed in the Name of Atheism
This sort of claim is often made by theists. (Several are named, including McGrath) ... Isn't it interesting that the list of evil-doers always seems to begin with Hitler followed by Stalin and Pol Pot--sometimes with Mao Zedong added for good measure? ... It's standard operating procedure for Christian apologists. ... Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were actually atheists, but they acted in the name of their positive belief systems, not in the name of a liberal critique of religion. ... Other dictatorships that committed their share of atrocities were certainly not driven by atheism. For example, Franco's Spain was controlled by an expressly Catholic idology. Similar comments could be made about other fascist movements and dictatorships, most notably Ustashi in Croatia. ... the Soviet Union was undeniably an atheist state, and the same applies to Maoist China and to Pol Pot's fanatical Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the 1970s. That does not, however, show that the atrocities committed by these totalitarian dictatorships were the result of atheist beliefs, carried out in the name of atheism, or caused primarily by the atheistic aspects of the relevant forms of communism. ... Can we find any grain of truth in this myth? Yes. There were persecutions of churches ... however, Stalin and other communist leaders were more concerned with the political influence that organized churches could exercise than with the substance of any particular beliefs, or with an insistence that their populations renounce belief in God. The Soviet regime viewed the churches and their leaders as political rivals that had to be neutralized for it to succeed in its goals. ... Similar comments can be made about the regime of Mao Zedong. ... A similar pattern of utter ruthlessness, combined with attempted economic transformation on an apocalyptic scale can be seen in the conduct of the Khmer Rouge regime ... While we do not doubt that religious people were often targeted as enemies of all these regimes' grandiose plans, this was usually because churches and other religious authorities (such as those related to Confucian tradition in China) were seen as actual or potential sources of resistence. ... None of this followed from mere atheism, and instead far more comprehensive political and economic ideologies were relied upon. — 50 Great Myths About Atheism - Russell Blackford, Udo Schüklenk - John Wiley & Sons, 2013 - Pgs. 147-149
Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot possessed a complete hatred of anyone opposed to their communist ideals. Those who dared to challenge communism were simply removed. They were atheists, certainly, but like most atheists this fact meant little to them. That they did not believe in God was something that they had in common, but equally all three men had dark hair. Nobody is suggesting that hair colour has fuelled their genocidal tendencies. The driving force for their persecution of religion was communism. It was also the driving force for their persecution of all land-owners, political opponents, intellectuals, and dissenters. Their motivation was not atheism, it was communism. — The Atheists Are Revolting! - Nick Gisburne - Lulu Press, 2007 - Pgs. 140
Before we can proceed, it is critically important to realize that the entire "debate" in Western civilization about atheism and religion has been conducted in religious, and more specifically theistic, terms. Two gross, and false, assumptions have driven this debate. The first is that religion, and more specifically theism, is the default position: most people are religious/theists, and atheism is the exception: something not only to be explained but to be opposed. The second is that religion is theism, and therefore atheism is "a-religion" and "anti-religion." [...] humans are not "natural theists"; that is why it takes so many years of teaching and indoctrination, so much institutional weight, so much colonization of experience, to instill the concept of theism. Humans are natural atheists -- not in the sense of attacking god(s) but in the sense of lacking god(s). No newborn human has any ideas about, let alone any "beliefs in," god(s) -- or for that matter, any other religious entities. [...] No human is born a theist. Humans are born without any god-concepts. Humans are natural atheists. [...] The second and more pernicious source of error is the attribution of "belief" to atheists, sometimes literally the insistence that atheism is a belief. Theists certainly, and atheists occasionally too, will say that atheism is a belief -- the belief that god(s) does (do) not exist. This is a familiar and seductive way of thinking, since "belief" is such a ubiquitous and powerful concept. Surely, Christians argue, belief is universal and essential to religion; still more, religion is only one kind of belief. Theists often go so far as to call science a belief-system, to equate all knowledge with belief. [...] The relevant point for current purposes is that absence of belief, even active rejection of a belief, is not itself a belief. [...] Atheism, as we have established, is not a "belief" that there is no such thing as god(s) but a default or a reasoned lack of any such belief. — Atheism and Secularity (Vol. 1) - Edited by Phil Zuckerman - Praeger, 2010 - Pgs. 1-8
First of all, there is no such thing as state-imposed atheism. A state can ban religion, but it cannot ban atheism because it is not a belief, a faith, a set of doctrines or dogmas and cannot be imposed on anybody. Atheism is an absence of belief, and you cannot ban something that does not exist. I have heard the argument so many times from believers who think that atheism is a belief. They compare it to a religion. They say it takes faith. They accuse us of hating god. Believers really need to find another line of fire, as all of these arguments only serve to make them look like complete idiots, which is unnecessary, as many believers are otherwise intelligent individuals. This chapter, however, will deal with the claims about Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mass Murder and Broken Relationships. We'll start with the people mentioned, and, as far as I'm aware, none of them said "I don't believe in god, therefore I will slaughter lots of innocent people". ...
Joseph Stalin was raised to be a Catholic Priest and I remain curious as to why his Christianity is shoved aside in all these arguments. Yes, there is no way to get around the fact that in his early career, Stalin made a vast effort to rid Russia of religion, but that had nothing to do with atheism. It was the only way he knew to seize power of the country.
For generations the entire populace of Russia had been taught that the head of state was supposed to be close to god. At the time in question, the head of the church in Russia was a tyrant. The Russians were already disposed to servility and all Stalin did was exploit these two facts, and place himself in the position of god. Once Stalin was firmly seated in office, he revived the Russian Orthodox Church in order to intensify patriotic support for the war effort. Stalin was part of a council convened to elected a new church Patriarch. Then the Russian theological schools were opened, and thousands of churches began to function. Even the Moscow Theological Academy Seminary was re-opened, after being closed since 1918.
So, while Stalin was no peach, he was not exactly what you would call a died-in-the-wool atheist. He was more a secular minded religious opportunist, which is a personal character trait. He did not use atheism to gain control, but religious principles that were modified to fit his own, sick and twisted method of revolution. — A Voice Of Reason In An Unreasonable World – The Rise Of Atheism On Planet Earth - Al Stefanelli - UAF Publishers, 2011 - Pgs. 230-234
ATHEIST REGIMES
The first ever officially declared atheist nation in the world was Albania under the role of communist dictator Enver Hoxha ... The former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was also explicitly atheistic ... Finally, we must acknowledge North Korea, one of the worst nations on earth today in just about all respects ... North Korea maintains a state sanctioned and enforced atheism, with the only 'religion' permissible being the worship of the dictator. ... there is no question that some of the worst regimes of the twentieth and twenty first centuries have been explicitly atheistic. But perhaps atheism isn't the main problem. Maybe totalitarianism is. After all, some of the world's worst tyrannical, corrupt, and bloody regimes during the same time period have also been explicitly theistic ... we know that when power is held undemocratically, the result will always be negative. Fascism, totalitarianism, communism--all such forms of national dominance have been based on might and repression, rather than freedom and liberty. ... [Gregory S. Paul's] research has consistently shown that the correlation still holds: the least theistic democracies fare better on nearly all indicators of social well-being than the more theistic democracies. ... This fact renders suspect any proclamation that theism is a necessary element or condition of societal well being, and it renders manifestly false the argument that atheism is somehow detrimental to society. — The Oxford Handbook of Atheism - edited by Stephen Bullivant, Michael Ruse - Oxford University Press, 2014 - Pgs. 506-508
Finally, people use the Stalin/Hitler card in an attempt to argue that the worst dictatorships in recent times have had atheists at their helm (Hitler was more likely a deist if not a theist). However, even granting this argument's assumption, these men didn't act like they did because they were atheists. That is, their nonbelief in a deity didn't dictate particular actions they took. (This would be akin to arguing that Pol Pot—who was a bad man—didn't believe in leprechauns, you don't believe in leprechauns, therefore you're as bad as Pol Pot.) Their systems were horrific precisely because they resembled faith-based systems where suspending warrant for belief is required (as is the wholesale adoption of an ideology, like Communism, Nazism, Fascism, etc.). — Manual for Creating Atheists - Peter Boghossian - Pitchstone Publishing, 2013 - Pgs. 164
... a crucially important matter when looking at any country in terms of its religiosity: is it a dictatorship or a democracy? When religion is repressed by a dictator—that is, when a nonelected cabal or individual fascist takes over a country and attempts to forcibly abolish belief in God—such a country cannot be assumed to be truly void of religion. When we are dealing with a situation of governmentally forced atheism, what we might call "coercive" or "imposed" atheism, we cannot assume the people themselves have actually lost their faith in God. — Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment - Phil Zuckerman - NYU Press, 2008 - Pgs. 21-22
Is there any evidence at all, anywhere, that morality needs religion, that atheists are simply bad human beings who treat their fellow man worse than religious people do? If so, where is the evidence? The almost invariable answer to this question one receives from religious stalwarts is a specious one, so specious that those Christian writers who peddle it are either very misinformed or deliberately lying. They cite the horrors of Hitler and Stalin, claiming both were atheists. But where is the evidence that Hitler, an altar boy as a Catholic youth, later became an atheist? The definite weight of the evidence is that he did not. ... less than nine months before he killed himself in his Berlin bunker, he proclaimed that his miraculous survival from the previous day's attempt on his life "only confirmed my conviction that Almighty God has called me to lead the German people to victory." ... The anti-atheists feel they have their strongest case against atheism in Stalin, an avowed atheist. Being a Marxist and communist, of course he was an atheist. But everyone knows that in the movement toward communism led by Lenin and a young Stalin in Russia and resulting in the Russian Revolution of 1917, atheism was but an ancillary tenet to the main engine behind the movement--the redistribution of wealth through a class struggle that would bring about the collapse of capitalism. And Stalin was simply a brutal dictator who wanted total control over the physical and economic lives of all Russians, their religious belief being way, way down the list ... the tyranny of Hitler and Stalin, as well as Mao Zedong, had nothing to do with religion. To say that Stalin was evil because he was an atheist is to say that people who are atheists are likely to be evil, a preposterous suggestion. — Divinity of Doubt: The God Question - Vincent Bugliosi - Vanguard Press, 2013 - Pgs. 226-229
A challenge for understanding secularist activism includes the question of how to conceptually categorize such diverse subgroups in terms of a "collective identity" or "collective interest." ... As one atheist author noted, "atheism is not itself an ideology; there is no such thing as an "atheist mindset" or an "atheist movement." Atheism per se hasn't inspired and doesn't lead to anything in particular because it is an effect—not a cause—and there are countless reasons for a person to not believe in God, ranging from vicious to innocent to noble. The newborn baby lacks a belief in God, as does the Postmodern Nihilist, the Communist, and the Objectivist—but each for entirely different reasons having dramatically different implications. So lumping all of these together under the "atheist" label as if that were a meaningful connection is profoundly confused. — Atheist Awakening - Richard Cimino and Christopher Smith - Oxford University Press, 2014 - Pgs. 104-105
As Kolakowski argued: "the despotic form of government, and in particular the persecution of religion, derives not from the atheistic but from the totalitarian nature of communism, which makes it act as if structurally driven to eradicate all forms of collective life and all aspects of culture not imposed by the state." The distinction is a critical one. It is not atheism as a philosophy, says Kolakowski, but totalitarianism as a system, "without regard to its ideological costume—racist, communist, or religious—that today poses the gravest danger to Christian values and culture." — The Church and the Left - Adam Michnik - University of Chicago Press, 1993 - Pgs. 251-252
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