Atheists... Your life is pointless

How about the Crusades and the Inquisition?

... SO where does that leave us? ...

A singing Eunuch, he said, earns more

You obviously didn't read what I wrote.

Skeptoid #76 November 27, 2007 Podcast transcript | Listen |
Hide that Bible in your pocket as the guard hustles you down the snowy road on your way to eventual death in Stalin's Gulag, for today's subject is the debate over whether more people throughout history have been killed in the name of religion, or in the name of atheism.

Atheist authors like Christopher Hitchens, Michael Shermer, and Sam Harris are always debating religious authors like Dinesh D'Souza, William Dembski, and Alister McGrath about whether or not God exists, or whether or not religion is good for the world. And, as predictably as the sun rises, these debates nearly always devolve into the argument of which side is responsible for the greatest death toll throughout history. Which is a more terrible killer: religious fundamentalism, or the lack of religion?

Christians charge that the most killing in history has come from modern atheist regimes. Adolf Hitler led Germany during World War II when he executed six million Jews in the Holocaust, three million Poles, three million Russian prisoners of war, and as many as eight million others throughout Europe. Joseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Soviet Union following the Russian Revolution until his death after World War II. Between 10 and 20 million Soviets and German prisoners of war died under his regime, depending on how many famine victims you count, from Gulags, execution, and forced resettlement. Mao Zedong, who led China for more than a quarter of a century following World War II, created the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution programs which collectively killed unknown tens of millions of Chinese, most of them in public executions and violent clashes. Pol Pot led the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during the 1970's, when as many as 2 million Cambodians, or as much as 20% of the population, died from execution, disease and starvation.

History is full of uncounted massacres by armies carrying a religious banner, though most such episodes were in ancient times with much less efficient killing technology and microscopically smaller populations. The number of religious exterminations of entire villages throughout history is innumerable, though most had body counts only in the hundreds or thousands. Alexander the Great is estimated to have executed a million. 11th century Crusades killed half a million Jews and Muslims. Genghis Khan's massacres of entire populations of cities probably totaled a million. The Aztecs once slaughtered 100,000 prisoners over four days. An unknown number, probably in the millions, died in the Devil's Wind action in Colonial India. Up to four million Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims died in post-Colonial India. The Ottoman Empire massacred two million Armenians over the years. Franco's Spanish Civil War killed a hundred thousand. A million have died in Rwanda, half a million in Darfur. And Christian vs. Muslim violence has obviously dominated our headlines for a decade, totaling somewhere in seven figures.

So who has been the worst throughout history: atheist regimes or religious regimes? Obviously the big numbers come from the 20th century superpowers (China, Russia, Germany) so the answer depends on how you classify those. And this is where the meat of these debates is usually found, splitting hairs on which regime is atheist, which is merely secular, which is non-Christian and thus fair game to be called atheist. Hitchens points out that Stalin's government had all the trappings of religion, including Orwell's totalitarian theocracy, and thus it's merely a play on words to say that it was not religious. Pol Pot was raised a Buddhist monk who grew up to execute Buddhist monks, along with anyone else he could lay his hands on. Whole books have been written on the occult underpinnings of Nazi Germany, the symbology of the Norse gods, to say nothing of the claims that Hitler was a Christian, Hitler was a Jew, and his own writings expressing the kinship he felt with the Muslims.

A favorite counterpoint raised by Christian debaters is that these despots practiced Social Darwinism and were thus atheists by definition. In summary, the winner of these debates is the one who can convince the other that the big 20th century genocidal maniacs were motivated either by religion or by a desire to destroy religion. The entire debate is the logical fallacy of the excluded middle. Here's the thing. If you write a book called God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, you sell a lot of books. If you write a book called What's So Great About Christianity on the evils of atheism, you also sell a lot of books. If you say that neither extremist viewpoint makes any sense, you end up doing a podcast and working as a greeter at Wal-Mart directing customers to the section where they sell Hitchens and D'Souza books.

The truth is less incisive, it's less inflammatory, it raises no ire, and it draws no audience. And that truth, as I've said time and time again, is that people are people. No matter what segment of society you look at, you'll find good people and you'll find bad people. You'll even find, as has been said, that the line between good and evil cuts through every human heart. Certainly there are people in the news who kill in the name of religion, but just because they kill in the name of religion doesn't really mean they kill because of religion. The Islamic militants who cut off Nick Berg's head are not nice men who would have otherwise been his best friend, if it weren't for their religious convictions forcing them into this grievous act. They are base murderers, and they should be punished accordingly, I don't care whether they go to church or not.

Killers don't really kill because of their religion. Neither does a lack of religious convictions cause one to run wild in the streets with a bloody axe and a torch. Religion is a convenient banner for many to carry, but there are plenty of other banners available as well, and if it wasn't religion, they'd do their deeds under some other justification, if they care to even have one. The real reason they do their evil deeds is that they're human. Humans are very smart, very capable; and when we want something, we generally find some way to get it, even if that means killing someone or committing genocide.

1) The quote you provided doesn't use "Christian" as a derogatory term.

If the only thing keeping you from murdering, raping, and thieving is a belief in a god, then you are dangerous and morally fragile. The statement I agreed with targets an individual that NEEDS the existence of god for them to behave morally.

3) Christians are not a minority.

Why does Huck Finn need to be written down?

Social behaviors don't need to be written down. We learn most from practice, not having them read to us or us researching them.

It's a cultural artifact, nothing more. We vote on Tuesdays in the USA, even though the reason for voting on Tuesday is completely irrelevant in modern times. Some traditions continue with no good reason at all.

I am very aware of this fact. It doesn't not alter my point. Do you believe that it does, or were you simply offering up that info as fun trivia?

I remember you saying this, but I'm making sure that the point is understood from both directions. If you are saying (and I agree) that an Atheist can find a useful message in the Bible even if they don't believe in it, then you must also acknowledge that the believer in the bible must additionally be able to appreciate the same message in the Bible as a work of fiction. In the end, the message doesn't grant validity to the claim of the god, only the validity of the message itself. A believer can't use the Bible's message as follows: You agree with this message? Well then you must believe in the Bible's accuracy.

The inborn an innate desire is to form tribes/groups/communities. That is the part you're missing. It is not that one group finds conflict with another, it is that we are instinctively drawn to form groups in the first place. Our nature is to be in a a group, and to be functional in that group. That is how we survive and thrive. We have to learn selfishness, that is not our nature.

How about symbiotic relationships between different species? You know small bird pick food out from between the teeth of some crocodile's teeth?

That's not human nature as we have been using "nature" and instinct. you're moving the goalpost Spendi. A history class is not a class on human nature, but human actions. What is it that we see in the event of murdering, raping, and thieving? We see humans rise up to intervene and socially condemn said actions. You're dozing off in history class precious.

Say that in North India, the Philippines, or Iran. Your claim that this is a Christian world, is demonstrably false. It's you who is taking the luxury of declaration from the comfort of your armchair, or in your case a barstool.

Utter spendi nonsense. A nutjob of Hindu influence would be getting the same dose from me if it was them giving their brand of nonsense in your absence.

Mere examples of killing in the name of Jesus, regardless of timelines.

Sorry Aidean but all true believers are not completely sane and given that true believers had a long and sad history of murdering others in the name of their faith we all have some concern about such people.

A google news search will find true believers in god killing each others in wholesale lots at this very moment in one area of the world or another.

It's frightening.

I think it's the Christian god that said that exact behavior is acceptable.

I'm not here to sort out your inconsistency though.

I think reasonable Christians can look in their Bible and see it's rules for taking the wives of your fallen foes are a heinous and traumatic act of perversion.

What you're calling Christian morals weren't even created by Christians. Your moral structure is a kaleidescope of social concepts from older civilizations. Christianity offers no superior or notably unique model of morals.

I certainly have the right to pick and choose my own moral code. It has nothing to do with Christians. What's your point? You pick and choose to. If you didn't, you'd be stoning children at the gate of your city for talking back.

It was said to be a honor to be on Nixon's enemy list.

Killing and stealing is as much part of "human nature" as the wish to rise above it is.
Organized religion merely attempts to remove the element of spirituality, in which morals have meaning, from man and put it in a higher authority. Our sins are our own, but our good deeds are sanctioned by ideals of divinity. A holy man is a man who has abandoned his humanity and sacrificed himself to these ideals completely.

It is this very alienation of the human spirit that enables horrible acts in the name of religion. It is robbing man of his fullfilment, holding it up as something to be worshipped rather than strived for. It's frightening.

Here's a question more to the point: How many Atheists kill for the advancement of Atheism?

People kill for whatever reason. Pol Pot was an atheist, but was he killing because he was an atheist? History gives us plenty of examples of people killing and specifically citing their religion as their justification/rationalization. We don't have to speculate.

I don't think that being religious will make you a murderer, but in the face of the argument about atheists and their morals, I'm certainly going to reject the notion that a Christian or any other religious person is less likely to murder people than an atheist.

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Killing in the name of?
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