The Problem of Bad Atheists Etc.

UPDATE: A commenter points out that for some odd reason, I don't discuss anti-semitism (and its long historical legacy in Germany and Austria) when discussing the Holocaust. This was because German Nationalism was deeply anti-semitic so I felt when discussing one, I was discussing the other, it's important to remember that German Nationalists did not consider German Jews to be Germans, but rather to be Jews. This is because of the deeply racist nature of German Nationalism at the time... and, it should probably be noted, of nationalism in general, whether it be Right Wing parties in Scandinavia or Zionsim.

Thought I'd leap right into the secularist-religious debate that gets me riled up the most, what David Aikman called "The Problem of Bad Atheists", which is interrelated with the idea of "if your ethics and morals don't come from religion, where do they come from?" a question that is almost always asked rhetorically. I usually get to a point where I'm like "If I have to hear about Hitler and Stalin as a way of invalidated atheism one more f*ing time..." I'm pretty sure religious people get tired of being hit over the head with The Crusades and the Inquisition and global terrorism as if those are the inevitable end points of their belief systems.

This is because both sides are engaging in an intellectually dishonest mode of argument that has taken over many discussions in our public sphere today: comparing the worst of one system with the best of another. A great example of this is Michael Moore's Sicko which, while entertaining and informative, is totally intellectually lazy and somewhat dishonest. He makes one really smart move at the beginning of the movie-- covering people with health insurance and showing the flaws and dishonesty of the health insurance system rather than showing people without health insurance. But there's still a really strong case to be made taking the best of US Health Care and comparing it to Single Payer systems elsewhere (amongst other things, the best of US Health Care isn't an option for most people etc.). This is the case that Ezra Klein has been making on his blog for the last year, and it's a stronger case because it is comparing gourmet apples to gourmet oranges.

But anyway, that's a little beside the point. I want to address the Atheism = Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao argument a bit. The way this argument usually goes is this:

(1) There are these bad atheists (Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao). They had atheistic governmental systems, and combined did far more harm than religious people have ever done (just look at the body count).

(2) This is not to say that all atheists are like this. Of course not, there are plenty of great Atheists.

(3) But atheism leads inexorably to death camps because without God, where does moral order come from?

There's more nuance in the argument most of the time, but that's what it boils down to. I want to address it in a few ways.

First off, it's important to note that Hitler's purported "atheism" is in dispute. But even assuming he were an atheist, can the atheism of these four Very Bad Men be blamed for their actions?

I don't believe so, for a number of reasons. The crimes against humanity that these four men led didn't exist in a vacuum. Correlation is not causation. Stalin didn't wake up one day and decide that since God didn't exist, he should institute the Gulag. Stalin was a secular leader who sought absolute power and destroyed any threats to that. Religion was a big threat to that, so was any office who got too accomplished at his Court. It's far easier to make a case that the Holocaust was the inevitable end-product of nationalism (which had a rich-- and richly violent-- tradition in Germany) rather than atheism (which had neither). Hitler's theoretical forbears were Austrian Nationalists and racists in pre-WWI Vienna like Georg Ritten Von Schonerer and Karl Luger (both Christians) along with Nietzche.

Hitler also did not create the Holocaust on his own, nor was he the sole person to carry it out. The genocide happened because a lot of people (including religion people) participated in it. To give one example: Pope Pius XII who, amongst other things, didn't do anything to stop 1,000 Jews from being deported from Rome to Birkenau in 1943, where all but 15 of them were gassed and gave tacit permission to the euthanization campaign in hospitals that predated the extermination of the Jews (for some more on this, and the Catholic Church's complicated WWII legacy, check out Mak, Geert, In Europe pages 515-518). Pius XII didn't want to anger the Germans because he viewed the Communists as the real threat to his power.

Anyway, my point is that these things are complicated... was Stalin motivated by his atheism or his hostility to anything that might rival his own power? (Certainly his executions of his own high ranking officers had to do with the latter not the former). Stalin certainly used atheism as a way of justifying the Gulag in a way that Hitler didn't use atheism in justifying the Holocaust... About Mao and Pol Pot I do not feel anywhere near remotely qualified to talk about, but if anyone in the comments was to address these two, please, have at it.

So... yes... it's complex... Which brings us back to another point... one of the reasons why its hard to pin the blame on atheism is that it's not a belief system. All it denotes is someone not believing in God. It does NOT denote militant hatred of organized religion. That's a totally separate thing. Which is why we must come to... without God, all else is chaos or the Positive Social Control theory of religion.

But religious texts endorses all sorts of things that religious people would find abhorrent. Take slavery, which is endorsed (but regulated) in both the Old and New Testaments in the Bible or the treatment of women outlined in the Koran. By our present day standards, they're barbaric. But this is the thing, in many ways for their own time, there was a certain amount of progressivism involved. The Old Testament didn't outlaw slaves, but it did regulate their treatment. The Koran's rules for inheritance for women etc. were way better than the existing system governing the treatment of women at their time.

Human morals and ethics evolve over time in ways that we probably don't fully understand, but they have certainly changed since the time the Bible was written. So what do believers do? Well, fundamentalists try to insist on a literal following of their ur-texts and liberals and moderates pick and choose which ones to follow and which ones to leave behind, leading to intra-faith debates about how strict one should be. On this debate I (obviously) side with the liberals and moderates. Even fundamentalists cherry pick which parts of their texts to follow. No one in America is going to argue for stoning disobedient children to death, even while they point to the Bible's strictures against homosexuality. And fundamentalist Christians' way of getting around this-- claiming Jesus repudiated parts of The Law they don't like when he did no such thing-- is specious at best, intellectually dishonest at worst.

And those of us who don't believe are part of this evolving too. I guess what I'm trying to say is... It is possible that once you no longer believe in God or follow a religion, you are opening yourself to certain lines of moral and ethical and philosophical inquiry that could go horribly, horribly awry and turn you into an amoral sociopath. But it is also true that if you believe in God and follow a religion you are opening yourself up to a different line of moral, ethical and philosophical inquiry (What of this do I follow? and why? and how?) that can also turn you into an amoral sociopath.

Anti-religious and anti-atheist zealots want to point to the amoral sociopaths and use them as stand ins for the entire population, but it doesn't work that way. Religion has been used to justify horrible things, but it didn't Cause them it was the justification for them. And in the very recent past, atheism was used to justify some horrible unspeakable crimes. But what we should fight against in the enshrinement of power in one individual that allowed the Gulag to happen (which is amongst the reasons why I oppose the Papal hierarchy and am an anti-monarchist), we should oppose the virulent nationalism that enabled the Holocaust (which is one of the reasons why I am for relaxing our immigration rules and am not a Zionist), opposing colonialism (which is why I opposed the war in Iraq) etc. rather than the window dressing that's been used to justify all of the above.

Here is a concern that I as an atheist have about organized religion in general and keep in mind my goal here is not to offend but to speak honestly about my starting point in thinking about religion. I worry (particularly in more dogmatic faiths) about power structures. I worry about power structures which enable human beings to speak for god creating a system where people outsource their moral reasoning to others. And I worry about what happens when that happens. At the same time, I also recognize that individuals have some amount of choice in the matter, which is why I bristle at the depiction of religious people as mindless sheep....