Recently, in a series of responses to a post over on First State Politics about (of all things, Mitt Romney's speech on religion) the topic turned toward belief in general, and blogger disbelief asked,
The question annoys me, for a variety of reasons. Sam Harris, Dennis Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, and others in the new "Flying spaghetti monsters" cadre of aggressive atheists love to think about it as one of their unanswerable questions. They particularly enjoy gulling people who might answer, "Hitler" into rising to the bait, and have a penchant for telling anyone who talks about either the Soviet Union or the Peoples' Republic of China that they don't have a clue. (Of course none of the individuals I just mentioned happens to be an historian, but hey--when you're an ideologue of any stripe you're always right, aren't you?)
So I took a shot at answering it when dis posed it, executing much the same error in judgment that you might make in actually inviting a team of young Jehovah's Witnesses past your front door to discuss the Bible. Predictably, several people could not resist trotting out the best atheist talking points, and when I didn't immediately buy them (in fact had the temerity to back up my answers) the resulting charges were--to say the least--passionate.
Dana Garrett in particular accused me first of "a historical distortion and a shallow reading of what occurred" when I opined that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union did in fact oppress religious peoples and often did so (and said so) based purely on the fact that they were religious.
When I suggested that one of his points actually covered the same ground as period Soviet propaganda, he recoiled and rather than answering the assertion told me, "That is not only false but highly offensive since you are suggesting that I am peddling a CP line and have sympathy with the oppression of these people. What a cheap shot! You are red-baiting me!!" (Note: such was not my intention, and I immediately apologized.)
When I mentioned the fact that you don't find strong atheist/ideological groups in control of states or large movements "until you reach the point in history that you have darwinist naturalism mixed with industrial-state marxism," Dana retorted with the following:
Now, let me state the following in terms as clear as possible: I don't always agree with Dana's POV, but I have a lot of respect for his work, until he simply and completely loses it.
It would be impossible (I think) for anyone who has read any of my work on this blog to place me in that category (try it, Dana, you might be surprised). But that's more or less secondary to the need to provide a rational answer to this ridiculous "talking point" answer of intellectually shallow atheists like Dawkins or Harris. That's right--intellectually shallow. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Michael Shermer prove their ignorance of both religion AND historical methodology pretty much every time they write on the subject. Dennis Dennett is far more literate, but far too often chooses to cherry-pick his data and ignore information that might contradict him.
So let's take a look at my thesis:
The fact that you do not find any arguable examples of "any significant atheist or agnostic group who tortured and killed in the name of their belief" is due primarily to the fact that
(A) such groups as have developed that reached the point of inflluence to be able to oppress anybody only did so in the 20th Century, and those are (in the opinion of atheists at least) arguably ambiguous cases--so
If no such atheist/agnostic groups have appeared with the potential to oppress anyone, then the rhetorical question is meaningless.
(B) Such groups could not appear until the combination of two intellectual movements--Darwinist naturalism and industrial Marxism--made possible a "saleable" ideology that at least included atheism as one of its tenets (if not always as one of its decisive tenets).
Paul Kurtz, publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer and editor of Science and Religion, Are They Compatible? observes (p. 15) that,
Physicist (specifically a researcher in quantum gravitation) Lee Smolin notes in his article "Darwinism All the Way Down" that the theory of evolution as espoused by Darwin was a critical intellectual breakthrough necessary to build a coherent non-theistic or atheistic world-view:
Neither Kurtz nor Smolin (nor Dawkins, Harris etc etc etc) are, in Dana's words, "merely mouthing commonplace inane hackneyed smears against non-believers and evolutionists"--they ARE non-believers and evolutionists who see strong evidence that prior to the development of Darwinist naturalism (Hume and Spinoza notwithstanding) it was not practical within Western Civilization to develop an overarching atheist worldview that answered all the same questions that religion purports to answer. Darwinist naturalism is one pre-requisite of an atheist world view capable of attaining the power to oppress.
Historian Arnold Toynbee, in his remarkable book An Historian’s Approach to Religion, agreed in 1956 that it required the Scientific Revolution (especially including and perhaps culminating in Darwin) for a non-religious worldview ever to challenge the religious for dominance:
Skeptic and veteran public foe of religious fundamentalism and intelligent design Michael Shermer, in How We Believe (p. 35), agrees that
In other words, other than in America (and that qualifies as only a partial example), prior to the 20th Century religion was always a primary institution of social control--and therefore atheism was not.
But NONE OF THIS means that I am saying, as Dana would have you believe, that "People who believe in evolution are somehow thereby necessarily on some ideological scale with mass murders?" any more than I would be comparing Albert Einstein to policy makers who seriously contemplate the use of nuclear weapons just because his theoretical groundwork was necessary (although not sufficient) to give them the weapon in the first place.
Next, contemplate industrial Leninist/Stalinist Marxism and its Asian agrarian/industrializing cousin under Mao. "Religion is the opiate of the masses," Marx (or at least Engels, transliterating his notes) is famous for declaiming, by which the generally accepted interpretation is that religion and especially church structures are used to keep the proletariat too dumb and happy to realize that they were being victimized. It was no accident in the 19th Century that opium became Marx's metaphor with the frenzied opium trade in China going on at the time. For the world revolution to take place, religion and the state both had to "wither away." What Marx saw as an evolutionary process (pun intended), Lenin, Stalin, and Mao planned to help along. All resistance to the socialist revolution was to be crushed, through force whenever (and sometimes even before) argument failed.
The Russian communists as agitators and radicals before the revolution in 1917 saw the Russian Orthodox Church as needing to be taken down both because (A) it supported the social structure that supported Czarist Russia; and (B) it was a key religious element in society that ultimately would have to be ended before the true socialist (and avowedly atheistic) paradise could be achieved. That such a policy was implemented both incrementally and inconsistently is not an argument that atheism did not form a core value for Communist leaders, any more than Stalin's temporary retreat to "Socialism in One Country" meant that he had given up forever ideas of establishing a world socialist state.
Of course both Russian Orthodox Christians and Russian Jews managed in many cases to keep worshipping, although their religious beliefs denied them access to high government posts, their most beautiful worship spaces were often converted into "Museums of Atheism," and during both the Greater and Lesser Terrors just the fact that the accused was religious often automatically lengthened a prison sentence or tilted that sentence into a death sentence. For particularly chilling aspects of religious-related persecution in the name of Marxist atheism the best English-language source is The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939-1953 by Michael Parrish (1996), one of the first works to be grounded in material from the Soviet archives.
Evolutionary psychologist Stephen Pinker is aware that the mass murders under Marxism and their relation to the upheavals created by Darwinist naturalism and innatist ("blank slate") views of human nature are exceptionally problematical and do not deserve to be dismissed out of hand. In his The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (pp. 155-157) he notes,
This has thus far been a long (and, I am sure, tedious, for the one or two people still reading it) response to the original question: "Can anyone think of any significant atheist or agnostic group who tortured and killed in the name of their belief?"
A more valuable question might be: "Can anyone think of any significant atheist or agnostic group that achieved power and then did NOT torture or kill in the name of their belief, just like all those religious folks before them?"
Human beings in organized societies show a remarkable propensity to do awful things to each other. Religion is often (but certainly not exclusively) the cause of many of them. No one, however, has yet successfully made the case--based on genuine historical evidence--that human beings in organized societies ABSENT ALL RELIGION would be any less bloodthirsty. Such incomplete evidence as we have in Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist societies, however imperfect it may be, does not give cause for optimism.
The increasing secularization of Western Europe MAY or MAY NOT prove to be a relevant piece of data to be added into the mix. We just don't know yet.
But all optimistic atheists who see their world view as the salvation of mankind from human cruelty had best remember that followers of Jesus and the Buddha both started with the same expectation, and we can see how that all worked out.
Can anyone think of any significant atheist or agnostic group who tortured and killed in the name of their belief?
The question annoys me, for a variety of reasons. Sam Harris, Dennis Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, and others in the new "Flying spaghetti monsters" cadre of aggressive atheists love to think about it as one of their unanswerable questions. They particularly enjoy gulling people who might answer, "Hitler" into rising to the bait, and have a penchant for telling anyone who talks about either the Soviet Union or the Peoples' Republic of China that they don't have a clue. (Of course none of the individuals I just mentioned happens to be an historian, but hey--when you're an ideologue of any stripe you're always right, aren't you?)
So I took a shot at answering it when dis posed it, executing much the same error in judgment that you might make in actually inviting a team of young Jehovah's Witnesses past your front door to discuss the Bible. Predictably, several people could not resist trotting out the best atheist talking points, and when I didn't immediately buy them (in fact had the temerity to back up my answers) the resulting charges were--to say the least--passionate.
Dana Garrett in particular accused me first of "a historical distortion and a shallow reading of what occurred" when I opined that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union did in fact oppress religious peoples and often did so (and said so) based purely on the fact that they were religious.
When I suggested that one of his points actually covered the same ground as period Soviet propaganda, he recoiled and rather than answering the assertion told me, "That is not only false but highly offensive since you are suggesting that I am peddling a CP line and have sympathy with the oppression of these people. What a cheap shot! You are red-baiting me!!" (Note: such was not my intention, and I immediately apologized.)
When I mentioned the fact that you don't find strong atheist/ideological groups in control of states or large movements "until you reach the point in history that you have darwinist naturalism mixed with industrial-state marxism," Dana retorted with the following:
“darwinist naturalism” Oh, please, this cant is just a right-wing smear on evolution. People who believe in evolution are somehow thereby necessarily on some ideological scale with mass murders? PLEASE! You don’t know what you are talking about. You are merely mouthing commonplace inane hackneyed smears against non-believers and evolutionists. All non-historical cheap shots.
Now, let me state the following in terms as clear as possible: I don't always agree with Dana's POV, but I have a lot of respect for his work, until he simply and completely loses it.
It would be impossible (I think) for anyone who has read any of my work on this blog to place me in that category (try it, Dana, you might be surprised). But that's more or less secondary to the need to provide a rational answer to this ridiculous "talking point" answer of intellectually shallow atheists like Dawkins or Harris. That's right--intellectually shallow. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Michael Shermer prove their ignorance of both religion AND historical methodology pretty much every time they write on the subject. Dennis Dennett is far more literate, but far too often chooses to cherry-pick his data and ignore information that might contradict him.
So let's take a look at my thesis:
The fact that you do not find any arguable examples of "any significant atheist or agnostic group who tortured and killed in the name of their belief" is due primarily to the fact that
(A) such groups as have developed that reached the point of inflluence to be able to oppress anybody only did so in the 20th Century, and those are (in the opinion of atheists at least) arguably ambiguous cases--so
If no such atheist/agnostic groups have appeared with the potential to oppress anyone, then the rhetorical question is meaningless.
(B) Such groups could not appear until the combination of two intellectual movements--Darwinist naturalism and industrial Marxism--made possible a "saleable" ideology that at least included atheism as one of its tenets (if not always as one of its decisive tenets).
Paul Kurtz, publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer and editor of Science and Religion, Are They Compatible? observes (p. 15) that,
“In the nineteenth century Darwinism precipitated an intense battle between religion and science; for it overthrew the classical view that there were fixed species; and it postulated natural causes for the evolution of life, including the descent of the human species from other primates.
Physicist (specifically a researcher in quantum gravitation) Lee Smolin notes in his article "Darwinism All the Way Down" that the theory of evolution as espoused by Darwin was a critical intellectual breakthrough necessary to build a coherent non-theistic or atheistic world-view:
Darwin’s revolution does more than push the role of the creator to one side: It undermines the whole philosophical and conceptual framework in which Western thought has operated, within which the more true a statement is, the more it is supposed to be about a transcendent and timeless realm rather than the contingent and fleeting reality we experience. Darwin’s great discovery undermines this, because it offers us a rational and testable explanation for how the laws of nature may have arisen, which then requires us to see the laws as mutable and time-bound.
Neither Kurtz nor Smolin (nor Dawkins, Harris etc etc etc) are, in Dana's words, "merely mouthing commonplace inane hackneyed smears against non-believers and evolutionists"--they ARE non-believers and evolutionists who see strong evidence that prior to the development of Darwinist naturalism (Hume and Spinoza notwithstanding) it was not practical within Western Civilization to develop an overarching atheist worldview that answered all the same questions that religion purports to answer. Darwinist naturalism is one pre-requisite of an atheist world view capable of attaining the power to oppress.
Historian Arnold Toynbee, in his remarkable book An Historian’s Approach to Religion, agreed in 1956 that it required the Scientific Revolution (especially including and perhaps culminating in Darwin) for a non-religious worldview ever to challenge the religious for dominance:
[The scientific] outburst in the seventeenth century was a double victory over the two time-honored authorities that were then competing for Western Man’s allegiance [Christianity and Hellenism], and the consequent enthronement of Experiment in place of Authority, and of Technology in place of Religion, was a morally as well as intellectually revolutionary act..... [W]e may glance at the motives that moved seventeenth-century Western Man thus deliberately to transfer his treasure to Technology from Religion.
The prime motive was a horror at the wickedness and destructiveness of religious fanaticism....
A second motive for the seventeenth-century Western spiritual revolution was a recognition of the psychological truth that Western Man would not be able to emancipate himself from a hitherto obsessive interest in militant controversial religion unless he could provide himself with a psychological equivalent of comparable potency, and he turned to Technology to perform this social service for him.
Skeptic and veteran public foe of religious fundamentalism and intelligent design Michael Shermer, in How We Believe (p. 35), agrees that
With the exception of the American experiment of separating church and state, politics and religion have always been tightly interdigitated. The reason has to do with the even more important role that religion has played in the development of morality. That is, in addition to the sanction of political power, religion has also served as an institution of social order and behavior control.
In other words, other than in America (and that qualifies as only a partial example), prior to the 20th Century religion was always a primary institution of social control--and therefore atheism was not.
But NONE OF THIS means that I am saying, as Dana would have you believe, that "People who believe in evolution are somehow thereby necessarily on some ideological scale with mass murders?" any more than I would be comparing Albert Einstein to policy makers who seriously contemplate the use of nuclear weapons just because his theoretical groundwork was necessary (although not sufficient) to give them the weapon in the first place.
Next, contemplate industrial Leninist/Stalinist Marxism and its Asian agrarian/industrializing cousin under Mao. "Religion is the opiate of the masses," Marx (or at least Engels, transliterating his notes) is famous for declaiming, by which the generally accepted interpretation is that religion and especially church structures are used to keep the proletariat too dumb and happy to realize that they were being victimized. It was no accident in the 19th Century that opium became Marx's metaphor with the frenzied opium trade in China going on at the time. For the world revolution to take place, religion and the state both had to "wither away." What Marx saw as an evolutionary process (pun intended), Lenin, Stalin, and Mao planned to help along. All resistance to the socialist revolution was to be crushed, through force whenever (and sometimes even before) argument failed.
The Russian communists as agitators and radicals before the revolution in 1917 saw the Russian Orthodox Church as needing to be taken down both because (A) it supported the social structure that supported Czarist Russia; and (B) it was a key religious element in society that ultimately would have to be ended before the true socialist (and avowedly atheistic) paradise could be achieved. That such a policy was implemented both incrementally and inconsistently is not an argument that atheism did not form a core value for Communist leaders, any more than Stalin's temporary retreat to "Socialism in One Country" meant that he had given up forever ideas of establishing a world socialist state.
Of course both Russian Orthodox Christians and Russian Jews managed in many cases to keep worshipping, although their religious beliefs denied them access to high government posts, their most beautiful worship spaces were often converted into "Museums of Atheism," and during both the Greater and Lesser Terrors just the fact that the accused was religious often automatically lengthened a prison sentence or tilted that sentence into a death sentence. For particularly chilling aspects of religious-related persecution in the name of Marxist atheism the best English-language source is The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939-1953 by Michael Parrish (1996), one of the first works to be grounded in material from the Soviet archives.
Evolutionary psychologist Stephen Pinker is aware that the mass murders under Marxism and their relation to the upheavals created by Darwinist naturalism and innatist ("blank slate") views of human nature are exceptionally problematical and do not deserve to be dismissed out of hand. In his The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (pp. 155-157) he notes,
The Nazi Holocaust was a singular event that changed attitudes toward countless political and scientific topics. But it was not the only ideologically inspired holocaust in the twentieth century, and intellectuals are only beginning to assimilate the lessons of the others: the mass killings in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and other totalitarian states carried out in the name of Marxism. The opening of Soviet archives and the release of data and memoirs on the Chinese and Cambodian revolutions are forcing a reevaluation of the consequences of ideology as wrenching as that following World War II. Historians are currently debating whether the Communists’ mass executions, forced marches, slave labor, and man-made famines led to one hundred million deaths or ‘only’ twenty-five million. They are debating whether these atrocities are morally worse than the Nazi Holocaust or ‘only’ the equivalent....
The new realization that government-sponsored mass murder can come from an anti-innatist belief system as easily as an innatist one upends the postwar understanding that biological approaches to behavior are uniquely sinister. An accurate appraisal of the cause of state genocides must look for beliefs common to Nazism and Marxism that launched them on their parallel trajectories, and for the beliefs specific to Marxism that led to the unique atrocities committed in its name. A new wave of historians and philosophers is doing exactly that.
This has thus far been a long (and, I am sure, tedious, for the one or two people still reading it) response to the original question: "Can anyone think of any significant atheist or agnostic group who tortured and killed in the name of their belief?"
A more valuable question might be: "Can anyone think of any significant atheist or agnostic group that achieved power and then did NOT torture or kill in the name of their belief, just like all those religious folks before them?"
Human beings in organized societies show a remarkable propensity to do awful things to each other. Religion is often (but certainly not exclusively) the cause of many of them. No one, however, has yet successfully made the case--based on genuine historical evidence--that human beings in organized societies ABSENT ALL RELIGION would be any less bloodthirsty. Such incomplete evidence as we have in Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist societies, however imperfect it may be, does not give cause for optimism.
The increasing secularization of Western Europe MAY or MAY NOT prove to be a relevant piece of data to be added into the mix. We just don't know yet.
But all optimistic atheists who see their world view as the salvation of mankind from human cruelty had best remember that followers of Jesus and the Buddha both started with the same expectation, and we can see how that all worked out.
Comments
i don't believe in god.
it seems quite unfair to put words in my mouth.