It has not escaped the attention of religious commentators that some of the most murderous regimes in history took atheism as their official state policy on religion. Specifically, these states are: the Soviet Union under Stalin, China under Mao Zedong, and Cambodia under Pol Pot.
Obviously, the implication is that atheism has bad consequences - and so, even if there isn't a God, we should continue to pretend that there is, for the good of everyone. But this argument doesn't really hold up under scrutiny. These states were totalitarian regimes. Mass murder is one of the things that can happen in such regimes. I would be much more worried if democratic nations showed a tendency to become murderous when the people lose their religious faith. That doesn't seem to be the case. Society has not collapsed in countries like the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Latvia, Estonia, Sweden, and the Czech Republic, where less than 40% of people are willing to affirm the statement "I believe there is a God" - though a high number of people affirm instead some vague claptrap like "I believe there is some sort of spirit or life force", so it's hard to know exactly what they think. At any rate, it's obvious that in a lot of European nations, and unlike in America, religion plays little or no part in most people's lives. Yet these countries haven't descended into slaughter, and are either less violent or about equally violent with the United States, where the vast majority are believers.
(I'd really like to ask people who think there's a link between atheism and homicide, why aren't America's murder figures much better than Western Europe's?)
In addition, one should not imagine that religion provides some sort of shield against a country going genocidal. Above, I listed some totalitarian states that were explicitly atheistic. Conspicuous by its absence from that list is Germany under Hitler. Hitler's own religious views are uncertain, but the official religion of the Third Reich was something called "Positive Christianity". This surely indicates that a totalitarian regime that is accepting of religion can slide into genocide in the very same way as a totalitarian regime that is hostile to religion. Again we see that the problem is not a country's attitude to religion, but rather the fact that it's a totalitarian dictatorship.
Written: 2008-05-28
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