I decided to start this post because of the comments I see in my previous post. I really don’t like to divert the comments of articles so much from the main subject so I think that a new post related to the issue is the best choice.
Like many other times before, a classic Christian argument against atheism has cropped up, that is, that Communism is atheistic. Included there are a few quotes from Marx like so:
“…criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism”
” Once the essence of man and of nature, man as a natural being and nature as a human reality, has become evident in practical life, in sense experience, the quest for an ALIEN being, a being above man and nature (a quest which is an avowal of the unreality of man and nature) becomes impossible in practice. ATHEISM, as a denial of this unreality, is no longer meaningful, for atheism is a NEGATION OF GOD and seeks to assert by this negation the EXISTENCE OF MAN. Socialism no longer requires such a roundabout method; it begins from the THEORETICAL and PRACTICAL SENSE PERCEPTION of man and nature as essential beings. It is positive human SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, no longer a self-consciousness attained through the negation of religion.”
” The abolition of religion as the ILLUSORY HAPPINESS OF MEN, is a demand for their REAL HAPPINESS. The call to abandon their lllusions about their condition is a CALL TO ABANDON A CONDITION WHICH REQUIRES ILLUSIONS.”
Now, I am no expert in Communism. I’ve read the manifesto and a few other articles on it but my experience is nevertheless quite limited. However the quotes above do not seem to me to read as if Communism requires the forced applciation of atheism. If nothing else, he seems to be saying that Atheism is unnecessary as socialism goes over it and grants self-consiousness through the placing of the man. It is worded in a strange way but nowhere there is the urging of violent abolition that some Cristians would like to claim.
The rest of the quotes, as pretty normal for an atheist and I happen to share a lot of that sentiment. Still, the communist manifesto is an idea. It is not set in stone and, very much like religion, open to interpretation. Sometimes that interpretation will be bad and sometimes better (Granted, there has not been a good interpretation yet but in general I don’t believe that Communism is ready to be introduced to the world currently anyway; but that is the point for another discussion, outside the scope of this site) but just because Marx was an atheist, does not make Communism an atheist ideology and nor is it correct to attribute the deaths caused by the self-called Communist regimes to atheism.
If nothing else, Communism, as being mostly a socioeconomic system, does not care about personal beliefs. It knows they will fail in the coming age and treats them as irrelevant. The anti-religious actions of some of the Communist regimes cannot and should not be attibuted to the whole concept. The same way that the actions of Jehova’s Witnesses or Later Day Saints, cannot be attributed to the whole of Christianity. Not only that but what is said to be the original teaching of Christ, resemble Communist ideals much more than they do Capitalistic ones, which is understandable of course when you think where he got his ideology.
There is also the fact that not all Atheist are Communists, as exemplified by the Objectivists and the Libertarian movements. This should be obvious as Atheism does not have -by itelf- any political or philosophical connotation but for some reason it is lost on some Christian critics.
It is common for Christians to lump all aspects of Communism together, as it is common for many atheists (or other religions) to lump all aspects (denominations, intra-denomination) of Christianity together. Both of them are open to interpretation and even then, applying them to the real world may wield different results. The difference here is that Communism can be improved. It can be changed so that the wrong aspects of it are taken out. There is no “right” version but rather the better version will make itself known when a society achieves it. It is only an idea and it is not set in stone.
Christianity on the other hand, very literally, is. While you may interpret the Bible in a thousand different ways (or even just make some stuff up, say it’s the word of God and start your own version) it is impossible to improve it beyond a certain point. Why? Because it requires the belief in an unprovable and self-contradicting entity. No matter how many “good” values you add to your particular denomination (i.e. Environmentalism) it will still keep this illogical belief. Not only that, but you will also have to keep various other aspects of Christianity in order to keep a certain coherence, or Groupthink. Some of those, as exemplified by our new frequent visitor, Deep Thought, are quite controversial, especially the ones that go against personal liberty in order to satisfy some religious mandate from a nomadic lifestyle that goes back a few thousand years.
The comments then moved on to my previous article where Deep Thought decided to comment after my urging.
“Even if you compare Stalin’s and Mao’s to religious leaders like (this time correctly) Hitler, Mussolini, King Justinian and even Bush, you will see that, were the first did what they did for the benefit of their country (albeit at a high cost of human lives within the same country they were benefiting) with tangible results (USSR become a superpower and China is on the same track right now), the later did their atrocities for no other specific reason than to follow demented (religious) ideals and/or satisfy their own (or, as in the case of Bush, the people that move their strings) lust for power.”
And to compare Stalin favorably to Bush!!!!! Sweet heavens to Betsy, man! Stalin purposefully starved no less than 2 million of his own citizens to death to make a freakin’ POINT was not doing so “for the benefit of their country” as you claim, but in a naked rush for power. Yeah, Bush is *mush* worse than Stalin.
Stalin was a demented power hungry megalomaniac, I agree but he still did everything he did for the nation and not for personal power (he was as high as he could be what the heck). I believe my point still stands.
I did not say that he was a good leader, just state the results of his regime. While under Stalin the USSR become a world power, under Bush the USA has become one of the most hated countries in the world, not to mention the debt they are in.
Communism is not about nationalism however. Even if Communism was an atheist ideology, it would still not align the original idea with Stalinism. Nor Maoism nor anything else. If people were to blame all the evils of communism on atheism, should we then place the blame for 1500 years of intellectual darkness on Christianity? After all, the leaders of those times happened to be Christians. Hitler was religious as well, should we place the WW2 blame on theism? It’s just not how it works.
There is just no connection between atheism and “the evils of communism”. And the same goes for secularism.
“The more theocratic the community, the more ridiculous the morals seem to be.”
Let me make a few counter-examples, if I may. Hussein’s Iraq (secular nation); Khmer Rouge Cambodia (explicitly atheist); Mao’s China (also explicitly atheist); Republican Spain (also explicitly atheist). We can cut out Hussain’s Iraq and Republican Spain entirely and just focus on the two explicitly, vocally atheistic nations of Khmer Rouge Cambodia and China while Mao was alive. Their total death toll (internal only)? No less than *no less than* THIRTY MILLION. 30 million people dead under explicitly non-theistic governments, of their own citizens only, in single generation. It works out to about 1 million people a year, or more than 2,700 people every day for three decades.
To put that in perspective, you would have to slaughter ever man, woman, and child in modern day Israel 4.2 times to reach this (minimum) number of deaths.
In contrast the First and Second Intifadas have killed less than 10,000 people over 20 years, or about 4 days worth of deaths under the atheistic China of Mao.
Isreal is a secular nation with religious citizens. So is Syria. So is Jordan. So is Egypt. So is Lebanon. America has one of the highest rates of weekly church attendance (a great proxy for ‘level of devoutness’, a term I despise) - how ‘ridiculous’ are the morals of America? How about compared to the morals of the oh-so-anti-theistic Cambodia of the Killing Fields?
Perhaps I should not have used the word “morals”. Nevertheless, all these examples do not show morality, nevermind the fact that the examples are all the worst cases that you can present for secularism. But even then, secularism, like atheism, does not promote any philosophy. It just means that laws are not made on religious grounds and nation’s religion does not affect people who do not share the same belief.
If you are to just take religion out of the picture and replace it with nationalism however the same if not worse environment will appear. When you make decisions based on abstract terms like “The good of the nation” or “the will of God” then human lives stop meaning much in front of the greater picture. That was the problem of Stalin, Pol Pot and all the rest bad apples.
However when I mention morality, I of course, compare it with the generically accepted western morality. I understand that it is not the best comparison but it’s one who is similar enough to mine to talk about.
Theocratic nations have laws that are based on morals taken from ancient books from shepherds and illiterates. These are laws preventing the existence of gays, divorce, abortion and other personal choices.
In the end. It is not that a secular nation cannot have bad laws, but at least it will not have bad laws because of religion. It is not that atheism will make a person good but at least it will not make him to bad things because of religion. It’s that simple. The more religion takes power and the more secularism is eroded, so do you get more ridiculous laws, based on ridiculous morality.
(PS: Sorry for any grammatical errors but I do not have time to proof-read it)
The Antichristian Phenomenon
