Saw this over at Kip’s and couldn’t resist chiming in.
The inevitable, even clichéd, response on the part of
theists to this litany of woes is to ask: what about Hitler and Stalin?
Yes, the question resorts to the hackneyed rhetorical ploy of et tu
quoque (Latin for “So’s your old man”). But at least the question’s
inevitability forces the atheist to show his hand. Thus Dawkins lamely
avers that Hitler did believe in God (of sorts) and, hey, Stalin
attended an Orthodox seminary in his youth! If that retort seems a tad
desperate, England’s most pious unbeliever concludes with this wan
distinction: “Stalin was an atheist and Hitler probably wasn’t, but
even if he was, the bottom line of the Stalin/Hitler debating point is
very simple. Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do
evil things in the name of atheism.” So it’s not atheism that’s the
problem, only atheists!
Once and for all, can we put this in the same category of ridiculousness as Kirk Cameron calling the banana an "atheist’s nightmare," or that the human eye could not possibly have evolved?
Here again we approach something akin to the mental blockage
otherwise known as irreducible complexity, which—when boiled down to
gravy—isn’t all that complex. It’s tempting here to apply one of the
common corollaries to Godwin’s law: that, in any debate or discourse, whoever mentions the Nazis or Hitler first "loses" the argument.
But that seems almost too easy. Especially when it’s even easier to debunk this with just a little thought.
It doesn’t matter
whether Hitler or Stalin were atheists, because their being atheists
had little to do with what earned them their infamous places in
history. You see, while an atheist doesn’t believe in a god or god, an
atheist can believe any number of other things. (Some may, for
example, practice a non-theistic brand of Buddhism.) And some of those
beliefs, while not theistic, may not be reality-based or supported by
so much as a mustard seed of evidence.
Kind of like… Well, to be honest, Sam Harris put it much better than I can.
Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.
People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The
problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too
critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like
religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give
rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of
religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields
were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious
dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma
run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered
because its people became too reasonable.
And again, in "The Myth of Secular Moral Chaos."
People of faith regularly allege that atheism is
responsible for some of the most appalling crimes of the twentieth
century. Are atheists really less moral than believers? While it is
true that the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were
irreligious to varying degrees, they were not especially rational.
In fact, their public pronouncements were little more than litanies of
delusion—delusions about race, economics, national identity, the march
of history, or the moral dangers of intellectualism. In many respects,
religion was directly culpable even here. Consider the Holocaust: the
anti-Semitism that built the Nazi crematoria brick by brick was a
direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, Christian
Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and
attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the
faithful.
But to get to that point, you have to be willing to continue
thinking beyond the "Well, Hitler and Stalin were atheists, so there
you have it," argument. You have to continue thinking to consider that
Hitler was also a Nazi and Stalin was also a Communist, and that both
were the "supreme leaders" of their respective political movements.
(Supreme beings, if you will, within their spheres of influence.) You
have to continue thinking, to get to the point of considering how much
movements like Communism or Nazism encourage critical thinking and
questioning authority, compared to how much they relied on
unquestioning acceptance of their tenets and unquestioning obedience to
authority.
Well, you have to continue thinking, period.
When you have to believe something in order to get
into heaven, and you will spend all of in hell if you don’t believe it
or if you believe anything else, at some point you stop asking
questions. You have to, if you don’t want to go to hell.It is as though you are standing in a room, and at the other end of
that room is the gate to hell. You arm is outstretched, and in your
hand is the key to that gate. Every question asked and answered by
scientific inquiry is a step that takes you closer to that gate. Ask
one question, and you take a step closer. Answer another one and you
take another step. Keep asking and you’re walking across the room.
Before you know it, the key is in the lock, and one more question may
turn the key.But not only must you stop asking questions, but you must stop
others from asking questions if you believe in a “designer” that
punishes entire cities and entire nations for tolerating disbelief.
Because every step they take, every inquiry, every question asked takes
them towards that gate that must stay locked, not just to keep out
what’s on the other side, but because if the gate is ever opened, only
one thing can be worse than what it unleashes, and that’s if it
unleashes nothing at all.At least if the very foundations of your reality depends on that
gate staying closed and what you say is on the other side of it staying
what you say it is and where you say it is.
You have to stop asking questions, which means you have to stop thinking, even if that means you end up ignoring broad swaths of history, not knowing whether the earth is round, and—ironically enough, considering the comparisons above—becoming an apologist for the Inquisition.
Crossposted from The Republic of T.
