My fellow heathens,
We all know them. We hear them from friends of friends, read them in web forums, laugh at them in YouTube videos of earnest evangelicals. They’re the killer arguments against atheism that, like Randi’s unsinkable rubber ducky, will bob right back up no matter how many times you push them down. Wouldn’t we all be murderers and rapists without a god telling us what to do? Do you really think a world without religion would produce wonders like the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel? Religion gives my life so much meaning, it just must be true!
The most offensive and ridiculous of these canards is unfortunately also the most common: “Stalin and the Nazis were atheists! See what that atheistic amorality leads to?” Like so many other religious claims, this one lacks consistency with both logic and reality. Frustratingly, it’s very difficult to point this out in a pithy and straightforward way. You could take the historical evidence route, and get bogged down in a futile argument over some boring quote that may or may not be attributable to Hitler’s butler’s frau’s sister’s nephew. Alternatively, you could try and point out that guilt by association is generally considered a logical fallacy. Aside from the implied acceptance of Hitler’s atheism, the downside of the second approach is that theists are almost by definition blind to their own logical inconsistencies.
This leaves the rhetorical appr
oach. Given limited time or interest in the argument, we will so often succumb to the temptation of making a verbal stab which seems on the surface to address the question sufficiently that the conversation will move on to less muddy terrain. For the Nazi-Stalin question, the rhetorical response goes something like this: “Well, if you think about it, Nazism and Marxism were really a kind of religion. Hitler’s ideology was based on unscientific ideas like Social Darwinism, and Stalin used Russians’ deep cultural religiosity as the substrate for a cult of personality. So really, they were not atheistic regimes.” I don’t have the time to search through YouTube clips for evidence of this, but I have heard both Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris give versions of this rebuttal on many occasions, and would not be surprised if Christopher Hitchens has too.
As much as I sympathise with their frustration at having to face Nazi-Stalin over and over again, I just can’t agree with the response. There are a lot of ideologies in the world, and a lot of them are wrong. In fact, because so many of them are mutually exclusive, every one of us is forced to disagree with the vast majority of them. When we reject an ideology, we are doing so because the ideology contains objectively false premises, embodies values that we do not share, or most often a combination of the two. Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens reject religious ideologies because they hold the existence of a god to be objectively extremely unlikely, and the three men hold a variety of values which clash with those embodied by many religions.
There are also ideologies which are wrong but are not religions. I reject Marxism because I believe its core economic premises to be objectively false, and because Marxist values clash with my high regard for freedom. Hitchens has famously rejected Trotskyism for no doubt more scholarly and sophisticated reasons. I’m sure that Dawkins and Harris too have rejected non-religious ideologies; neither seems a likely Lysenkoist, for example. Clearly, they accept that it is possible for an ideology to be wrong without it being necessarily a religion. It’s just so much easier, when faced with the desire to move quickly past the worn Nazi-Stalin issue, to denounce fascism and Stalinism as religions and move on.
I think this approach is wrong. I think it is wrong because it is historically awkward. Certainly, there were strong devotional threads in the relationships between Hitler or Stalin and their respective peoples – but this can be said of many other ideologies with a single group or person at their core. Certainly, demonetization of an outgroup were features of both evil regimes – but again, few ideologies past or present are willing to grant more than grudging tolerance of non-members. The parallels between fascism/Stalinism and religion are both strained and unnecessary. We have a reasonable working definition of religion, and a common sense idea of which ideologies fall into that category. Trying to force the stigma of ‘religion’ onto Hitler or Stalin, whatever their personal beliefs actually were, is futile when they are both condemned a millionfold already by genocide and war and human suffering.
I think this approach is wrong for a pragmatic reason, too. Communist regimes like their yoked masses to see the world as a war between themselves and the oppressive West. Similarly, the religious would like us to think that our personal beliefs about invisible friends in the sky are the sides we take in the globally important struggle. It simply ain’t so. As I have already pointed out, religions are but a minor nook in the vast cathedral of wrongheaded ideas. Religions have and have had an enormous influence on all human societies. This does not mean that we, as atheists, should define ourselves by them any more then we define ourselves as non-Lysenkoists. We needlessly dignify religion when we pretend that Stalin can only be condemned if we first disclaim his atheism.
When we try and distance ourselves from evil in this way we are automatically adopting a defensive position against what is really just an appeal to the absurd. “Hitler was an atheist? Who cares! Do I look genocidal to you?” Let your opponent take the debate from there to the relationship between religion and morality, if they want. Put the onus on them to show that not having a telepathic connection with the creator of the universe makes you an immoral person. Don’t fret about the religious audience who really will accept this as sensible; you were never going to change their minds anyway. Just don’t elevate religion to the position of universal moral discriminant. The religious are your uncle who still tries to frame every world event in cold war terms: the planet has moved on, but he hasn’t. The religious are the twenty-one year old woman who still sees the people around her through the lens of high school cliques and alliances: she is only capturing a small part of the wider social picture. The next time a theist tries to link atheism to Hitler, or Stalin, or whatever, give them the reply they deserve: gentle ridicule and an prod towards more substantive issues.
I would appreciate it.
IMAGE CREDIT: “Godly Sunrise in Reykjavik” by Stuck In Customs under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence
