In reference to my Imagine post about an atheist group’s "Imagine No Religion" display with a picture of the Twin Towers John Gibson sent me this graphic he created.
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Now as to whether Hitler was an atheist I would consider debatable. The case can be certain made for his being influenced by occult racist theories developed by Theosophy and mixed with German Paganism.
But the others pictured were all avowed atheists. Atheist apologists like to bring up the fact that Stalin once went to seminary as if this set the stage for the massacres, purges, and famines and killing enough people to make Hitler look tame by contrast. Stalin though went to seminary not because he felt he had a priestly vocation, but because of the lack of locally available university education.
The question I would have for atheists is why should Stalin have changed any aspect of his life? He lived to be a 74 in a life of luxury where he was able to dictate to others to give him whatever he wanted. If this life is all there is then why not take everything by force if you are able? A lot of atheist morality is tied to the idea that you accept a framework of socially developed morality to help you get along in life. That these socially developed moralities are culturally dependent and thus can change. That morality is totally subjective. So why should Stalin have followed these subjective moralities when he became top dog despite them. He didn’t "go along to get along" which is what culturally developed morality is all about. From Stalin’s subjective view he saw that what he did worked and in a material only world there are only material pleasures which he had a plenty.
I had also found it interesting that the atheist group wanted to tie it’s message to 9/11. At first glance you might think this makes a kind of sense since you would think that suicide bombers are going to be motivated by religious thought to be willing to die for a cause. Though the truth is that atheists are also quite willing to kill themselves in suicide attacks. Just look at the cases of the Columbine killers, the shooter responsible for the Virginia Tech massacre, and pretty much everybody behind school shootings. Instead of dying for bad theology these killers seemed mostly to be willing to die for publicity.
But when you believe there is really no law outside yourself besides what you willingly shackle yourself with to go through life it is not surprising that this can lead to a view where human life is cheapened. Morality at this level is a consequence management view of morality. It is not about absolute rights or wrongs, but if I do this am I willing to accept probable consequences for a given action. During my conversion I started to realize that my own high moral view was built on a foundation of straw and could not backed up by a materialistic world view. I took a lot for granted that was actually borrowed from religious thought such as the idea of personhood and absolutes when it came to morality.
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Good point about atheism being no deterrent to the wanton destruction of human life.
I’d like atheists to provide one example of a person who was evil before becoming and atheist, who became a better person as their decision to stop believing in God. It just doesn’t seem to happen, does it?
hello Jeff —
I recognize Stalin and Hitler and Mao, but who’s in the upper right?
Dylan:
That’s Mao in the upper right. Pol Pot is the bottom left.
Thanks, Amy!
Wasn’t it the infamous Friedrich Nietzsche who predicted that the 20th century would be one of the most brutally violent ever because of the collective realization that “God is dead”?
He imagined a world without religion and it wasn’t the rosy world that John Lennon sang about. Though some have argued (hat tip to Oboe Jones) that Pol Pot gave the world exactly what John Lennon asked for. Puts a different spin on “Imagine” playing at the end of “the Killings Fields”…
The Nazis were by no means religious. They were the apotheosis of nihilism.
By the way, areas in Germany where the percentage of Christians is especially low are also more likely to be most affected by Neo-Nazi violence. So much for “Imagine no religion”.
“The Nazis were by no means religious.”
Really, now? So why did they go to Tibet searching for directions on how to find Atlantis to trace their heritage back to the superhumans they believed they were?
Why did they burn torches and sacrifices for the first men to die for their cause, claiming they had gone on to become supermen of the underworld?
Sounds like an occult religion to me. You just want to shovel him off since you can’t deny events like the Crusades and the Inquisition.
Also, remaining in good moral standing because you fear god is a pretty poor excuse to be a good person. I don’t rob, maim and kill people because it’s a trait that runs in the species that makes us just not want to. We are social creatures by evolution so upholding good social standing is important to our survival.
Many totalitarist systems rise to delete the pre-existing religious substrate. So, ironically, many victims of those systems are victims of own religion.
You don’t seem to understand the concept of atheist versus the concept of religion (I’m talking about theistic religion, mostly). Religion has tenants, dogma, rules to follow. Atheism has one: No God. Atheism is not the hatred of religion, it is not the absolute nihilistic view of humanity, it is simply the absence of a belief in a god. You cannot tie actions, good or bad, to atheism because it is physically impossible to say “I do not believe in x, therefore I exercise y.” There is nothing there to justify y with. In religion, there is dogma that can be used a justification for things like suicide bombings, attacks on abortion clinics, and letting children die by refusing medical treatment because you can say “I believe in x, therefore I accept the dogma from x, therefore I will perform action y.” I wouldn’t say that atheism has made anyone a “better” or “worse” person by moral standards, but I would definitely say that being an atheist encourages rational thought and reason.
Also, the claim that Hitler was an atheist is just absurd. Granted, the claim that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. is not. They were atheists, sure. But they were also communists. In communism, the “god” is the state. The reason that they eliminated religion was because religion had a philosophical stranglehold on their societies and they saw it as threatening. But if you want to try and credit atheism or secularism with the murders by communist rulers, the total death count still comes to around negative 750 Million. Norman Borlaugh, a secular free-thinker, is credited with saving a billion lives through his Green Revolution which quadrupled farm production and provided food for a vast majority of people in places like Africa and India.
It is ridiculous to think that just because someone is an atheist then atheism should be accredited with their actions, just like it is ridiculous to think that a bearded guy who kills someone is killing them because they are bearded. Atheist who harm Christians do it because they hate Christianity. Atheism is no way sufficient, and not even really necessary, to be accounted for someone’s actions in the way that religion is.
The problem here is that your requirement for blaming atheism for something is simply for the leader to be an atheist.
This is pretty ridiculous when you think about it. If we follow that logic, Christianity is to blame for the Iraq war, ah, and the war in Vietnam ..and so on.
Unless you can make a case for that these things happened BECAUSE they were atheists, it’s a petty argument.
Like a lot of other people have said, these people did not do what they did because of being atheists.
If they were religious they most likely would have done the exact same things because their actions were based on factors completely different than religion. However, the attack on the twin towers, the crusades, and the inquisition were all committed directly because of religion and faith.
Also, Hitler was definitely not an atheist.
He was a very religious catholic, and was good friends with the pope at the time