The History of Atheism

In the first years of the 21st century, momentous events occurring around the
world once more made it clear that religious belief can lead to vast and terrible
evils. These atrocities scarcely need me to recount them: the smoke of the
burning Twin Towers, the vicious sectarian bloodletting that has burst out along
religious lines in Iraq, the barbaric and regressive human-rights violations of
authoritarian theocracies around the world, the ongoing (though largely
unreported) campaign of religiously motivated terrorism toward family-planning
clinics, the continuing vicious discrimination and persecution waged against gays
and other minorities, the opposition to personal liberty in all its forms, the
apocalypse fanatics who cheer the end of the world and actively fight against
peace efforts in the Middle East and elsewhere, and many more tragic examples.
Plainly, if humanity was less religious, many of these evils would have been
lessened or prevented entirely.

And yet, there are some who would assert that atheism, if widely adopted, would
lead to even worse outcomes. The defenders of religion never tire of bringing up
the communist regimes of the 20th century - Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao
Zedong's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and others - and the dreadful crimes of
which they were guilty: murderous mass purges, harsh treatment of dissenters,
widespread violation of human rights, and the deaths of innocent millions.
Religious apologists inevitably blame these crimes on the official atheism of
Marxist regimes, arguing that the communists' lack of belief in God severed the
moral restraints that hold us all together and directly resulted in the devaluation
of human life and mass bloodshed that followed. The argument concludes that
for all its faults, only belief in God can provide a reason for us to treat each other
with dignity, and that if atheism were ever to become widespread, more crimes
like those of the communist countries would be the certain result.
So that there can be no mistake, I will state that I deplore the crimes of
communist regimes as much as any reasonable person does. In this essay, I will
not attempt to downplay or excuse them. But, as I will hope to show, it is not
atheism that bears the blame for them. However misguided or evil the
communists' actions were, they do not reflect on today's nonbelievers, nor do
they offer any evidence of what would happen if the humanistic atheism I and
others advocate were to come to prominence.

Without a doubt, the crimes of professed communist regimes were terrible. But it
is important not to lose sight of what caused them. This is the first major
misconception: that the communists attempted to understand the world through
reason and science rather than faith, and that this was the error that caused the
crimes they committed. Communism was categorically not a reason- or
evidence-based view of the world. Quite the contrary, it was a dogmatic, anti-
rational ideology every bit the equal of fundamentalist religion, where certain
propositions were taken on faith and were not allowed to be debated or
questioned. Although the communists congratulated themselves for their
liberation from superstitious thinking, in reality they had not escaped dogma; they
had merely transferred their dogmatic beliefs from the tenets of religion to an
equally rigid and inflexible set of political beliefs.

One of the best examples of this is the Soviet approach to agriculture. During the
1930s, an ideologue named Trofim Lysenko, who knew next to nothing about
science but did know the right Marxist code words, convinced Stalin and the
Soviet government that the newly discovered science of genetics (or as Lysenko
called it, "Mendelism-Weissmanism-Morganism") was "bourgeois" and had to be
rejected because it contradicted Marxist ideology. Lysenko's own views on plant
breeding were distinctly Lamarckian, advocating the inheritance of acquired
characteristics, along with a generous helping of sheer crack pottery and other
miscellaneous nonsense. Despite Lysenko's boasts about how his methods
could produce extra harvests each year, Lysenkoism was an utter failure in
practice; but because it was held to be in accord with communist principles of
dialectical materialism, it was made an official dogma of the USSR, and criticism
of it was not permitted. Genuine Soviet scientists who criticized Lysenkoism,
such as the great biologist Nikolai Vavilov, were publicly defamed, fired,
forbidden to do research, and in some cases even imprisoned or killed. Vavilov,
in particular, was sent to a Siberian gulag for his opposition to Lysenko and died
in prison. The result of all this was decreased agricultural production, mass
famine, possibly thousands of deaths from starvation, and a Russian state that to
this day severely lags the West in genetic research.

Other communist regimes shared this irrational ideology and deep hostility
toward intellectualism. Another example was the Cultural Revolution of
communist China, an anarchic series of purges organized and carried out by the
country's then leader, Mao Zedong. As Encarta says about this period,
"Scientists and other intellectuals were singled out for special victimization;
hundreds of thousands were beaten, robbed, publicly humiliated, and
condemned to menial labor on farms far from their home." For an almost ten-year
period, the country's educational system was shut down almost completely. Pol
Pot's genocidal and bloodthirsty Khmer Rouge regime went even farther than
China, specifically targeting for extermination doctors, teachers, professionals -
anyone who was suspected of being an intellectual or having an education, even
going so far as to attack people with eyeglasses.

Cases like these show that the communists' error was not atheism, but rather a
fierce and rigid adherence to their own beliefs, coupled with a murderous hostility
toward those who would question or doubt them. Such irrational elevation of
dogma over free thought and human life is always destructive, no matter the
specific principles being held dogmatically. Many apologetic arguments heard on
this topic are attacks on the straw-man claim that atheism makes people
intrinsically better than theists, or incapable of committing such crimes. But no
atheist I am aware of has ever claimed this. Indeed, our very point is that morality
is not causally linked to religious belief in any reliable way. There are good
theists and bad theists, good atheists and bad atheists. The mere fact of whether
a person believes in God says nothing, one way or the other, about how they
treat others. Instead, the key question is what moral code that person follows and
whether it emphasizes compassion and individual liberty over the necessity of
making everyone conform to a certain rigid set of rules, or vice versa.

Certainly, atheists are capable of committing evil deeds. After all, we are human
beings too, and capable of all the same acts that other people are capable of.
Nothing about the rejection of religious belief per se forces a person to adhere to
any specific moral code. If the apologists of religion want an admission that
atheists are capable of making mistakes, being irrational and doing wrong just
like anyone else, they have it. But that by itself proves nothing.

The more crucial question is whether atheism causes or naturally leads to evil
acts such as those of the communist regimes, and this is the second major
misconception. If it were true that atheism had an inherent tendency to produce
despotic, violent autocracies that would be a strong practical reason to reject it.
But the evidence does not show any such thing to be the case.

The communist leaders who were guilty of atrocities did not kill because they
were atheists, because they wanted to make people stop believing in God. On
the contrary, their goal was the acquisition of power over society, and they fought
against religion primarily because they believed it was a rival in that quest. But
anyone who opposed the communists' goals could come into their crosshairs.
These regimes were not reluctant to punish and persecute atheists, either, when
those atheists were the ones opposing them.

One example of this was the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. An atheist since
the age of 14 (according to this BBC article), Sakharov was one of the USSR's
youngest and most brilliant nuclear physicists, and played a decisive role in the
Soviet Union's successful development of nuclear weapons technology, for which
he was showered with prestige and awards by his government. While working on
this project, he believed it was an essential way to secure world peace through
the assurance of arms-race parity and mutually assured destruction. But later in
life, he became disillusioned with the arbitrary cruelty and militarism of his
government, and in defiance of government censorship, published eloquent
pleas for human rights and the abolition of nuclear testing. For these offenses,
this one-time national hero of the Soviet state became a pariah: fired from his
job, stripped of his privileges, denounced and slandered by government
mouthpieces, and eventually arrested and condemned to years of exile and
house arrest. Only with the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev was this by now
world-famous, and Nobel Peace Prize-winning, spokesman for human rights
released and allowed to speak freely at last.

Conversely, some of the most infamous communist leaders, despite their anti-
religion diatribes, showed little hesitance to ally with religious leaders who were
willing to support their goals. A timely January 2007 article from Reuters News,
Polish archbishop resigns in spying row, concerns the sudden resignation of the
newly appointed Catholic Archbishop of Warsaw, Stanislaw Wielgus, after
admitting he assisted Poland's former communist government in spying on its
enemies. Dozens of other clergy members have also been unmasked as
communist collaborators, possibly as many as 10 or 15 percent among the
nations of the Warsaw Pact.

Stories such as those of Sakharov and Wielgus show that communism was first
and foremost a political system. Its main goal was not to promote a certain set of
beliefs or ideologies, but to gain power for itself. The communists were willing to
work with anyone who supported that goal and to attack and persecute anyone
who opposed it, regardless of that person's religious beliefs. It was this lust for
power, not atheism that was the motivating factor in the atrocities the
communists committed.
Unlike many religious texts, which contain specific injunctions to dominate or do
violence to nonbelievers, atheism by itself never causes people to become
murderous. Indeed, how could it? Atheists have no holy book, no sacred text
directing their actions. On the contrary, atheism only causes harm when
conjoined with some other dogmatic ideology that contains such instructions. At
best, these historical lessons could show that atheists, just like theists, are
vulnerable to corruption when given absolute power (which, as the saying goes,
corrupts absolutely). But, again, I know of no rational person who disputes that.

The desire of some apologists to tar all atheists with the brush of communism
looks especially ridiculous when one perceives the true diversity of atheist
thought. There are atheists occupying every position on the political spectrum,
from the socialist groups on the left to the libertarian atheists on the right, such as
the followers of Ayn Rand, who advocate a capitalist conception of the free
market. The thinking of each of these groups would be anathema to the other,
and yet they are both atheists. It would be ludicrous to say that the crimes of one
group implicate the other when the two are, in every way except for their
nontheism, diametric opposites.

A similar principle holds true in my case and in that of many other prominent
atheists and atheist organizations. The arguments against communism would be
valid attacks on me if I subscribed to the same system and believed the same
things as the communists. But I do not.

I am not a communist, but a humanist. The two are as different as night and day.
Whereas communism worships collectivism, conformity and the state, humanism
places supreme value on individual liberty and the intrinsic dignity and worth of
every human being. While I recognize the importance and value of living together
with others in a harmonious community, I believe even more strongly that every
individual must ultimately be free to chart their own course through life and that
the decision to participate in a community must always be a truly voluntary
choice. As a humanist, I also believe in the desirability of a meritocratic society,
where people are rewarded commensurate with their skills, their talents, and their
desire to apply these and work toward achieving their goals. Finally, I believe in
the tremendous importance of free speech and intellectual freedom, where
people have the right to educate themselves, to pursue knowledge, and to ask
whatever questions they wish, even when those questions are uncomfortable or
damaging to those in power. Communism denies all these principles, and so I
reject it wholeheartedly.

It is a telling fact that religious apologists who argue against atheism refuse to
address the views I and others actually believe and advocate, and instead insist
on judging us based on other people's views, views which we do not support in
any way. Such tactics are an admission that the actual views we hold cannot be
so easily refuted, and so they must argue by unfairly attempting to link us with
positions that they can more easily attack.

Saying that humanists and communists are alike because both groups are
atheists makes about as much sense as blaming Christians for the crimes of
Islamic terrorists because both groups believe in God. In both cases, the one
thing that these groups have in common hardly suffices to establish a direct
sharing of responsibility for the crimes of one of them.

However, even when religious groups disavow the evils of their past, it is not
unfair to point out that they still believe in and defend books that contain explicit
endorsement of such violence. Nor is it unfair to point out when religious groups
that no longer practice violence nevertheless still hold to the dogmatic rejection of
dissent that has been the seed of tyranny so many times in the past. But neither
of these parallels hold true in the case of yesterday's communists and today's
humanist atheists.
Ari C. H. Hinnant | http://www.wix.com/love32/arichinnant