And if theistic regimes did the same thing, it doesn’t count. Yeah, I already read that.
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Certainly it would count! But it’s counterfactual, at least for Christendom in the 20th century – and that is the century I was talking about when I made my original claim. In the 20th century, the greatest part of genocide, mass murder, torture, enslavement, etc. came from regimes that were formally or de facto atheist, and which explicitly or in practice repudiated Christian teaching on the equality of all men. That’s just historical fact.
I don’t know why you have trouble accepting that atheism in its political forms has often resulted in massive human and civil rights violations. I’ve said repeatedly that I don’t hold you or genteel, kindly atheists like some of your Ivy League scientist friends (e.g., Carl Sagan) responsible for what the political atheists in Europe and Asia did. You needn’t be personally sensitive about this. Why not admit that the rejection of the existence of God was often tied to despicable regimes, and try to find out why that was the case? Wasn’t the promise of the 20th century that if we could just get rid of organized religion, especially Christianity, cruelty and social discrimination would stop and a golden age of equality and brotherhood would dawn? Why were the countries that either repressed or abolished Christian religion so often the worst human rights violators? Doesn’t that question strike you as possibly important?
The second sentence contradicts the first. You will come up with any excuse you can find .
How so?
Excuse for what? I haven’t excused anyone or anything. You’ve apparently been trying to excuse the most murderous regimes in human history, or at least to minimize their evil by comparing them with the much smaller quantities of bloodshed by pre-modern Christians, as if the scales were comparable. And you’ve been avoiding the uncomfortable question whether their atheism had anything to do with what they did.
Example #1:
Example #2:
What you are calling an “excuse” is nothing more than a statement of the fact that religious believers often do not live up to their own ideals. And I have been saying all along that such “believers” are blameworthy, whether they are Christian or of any other religious persuasion.
What I have been “excusing” is not particular acts of bad behavior by Christians, but Christianity itself – Christianity as a set of teachings. You seem to be implying that because some Christians have behaved in certain bad ways, Christianity itself is at fault, and that is what I am disputing, not the claim that Christians have done bad things (which is obviously true).
On the other hand, the regimes I have been talking about were not “failing to live up to their own ideals” when they murdered thousands of unarmed men, women, and children. They were in fact carrying out their own ideals – ideals which justified the destruction of races, ethnic groups, social classes, etc. as morally good and necessary for the progress of the human race toward some Fascist or Communist utopia. There is a huge difference between failing to live up to a noble ideal, and living up to an evil ideal. Christians have intermittently done evil while aspiring to carry out a good teaching, whereas many of our modern secular humanist utopians were animated from the start by a bad teaching.
Voltaire, etc. imagined that by casting out Christianity, the world would emerge from medieval darkness into a glorious future. The 20th century showed that dumping Christianity was no protection against the evils of discrimination, tyranny, torture, etc. In fact, “man’s inhumanity to man” reached its greatest heights ever in the 20th century. Stalin and Hitler made the perpetrators of the Crusades and the Inquisition look like amateurs in the dealing out of cruelty and violence. We are fortunate that the nations which still had significant remnants of Christian ideals – the USA, Britain, Canada, Australia, France, etc. – won WW II rather than lost it.
Then the other regimes you mentioned did not live up to the ideals of atheism, and are therefore not representative of atheism. Problem solved.
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Which “ideals of atheism” did these regimes fail to live up to?
What “ideals” does atheism hold?
Most unfair of you Eddie. Atheism is simply the absence of belief in gods, so how can it have particular moral ideals? Therefore who can blame Pol Pot or Vladimir Lenin or Adolf Hitler for being ignoring them?
All the state resources the Soviet Union and Communist China (and North Korea, Cambodia, Romania and so on) put into the study and promotion of atheism and the destruction of religion were done on the basis of ignorance. The Communists lacked the intellectual rigour of modern Western atheist thinkers like the FFRF or Jerry Coyne.
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Nitpick time: Not quite. WWI was at best the second deadliest war up to that point, and may even have been 3rd or 4th. The Taiping rebellion was worse, as may have been the Qing conquest and the wars of the three kingdoms.
Feel free to rephrase. If it helps, the Taiping rebellion would have been different had Xtianity not been introduced to China.
Where “de facto atheist” means “theist but I don’t want to admit it because it weakens my argument”.
The Nazis, for instance have been labelled “de facto atheist”, despite the Wehrmacht motto God Mitt Uns, the Waffen-SS barring atheists, and the Nazi party extolling Positive Christianity which includes the idea that Jesus was of the divine Aryan race.
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There no doubt were many Nazis who imagined that God existed and was on their side. But the Nazi ideology, when reasoned to its philosophical bottom, implied that some human beings were worth more than others, and that view is incompatible with the existence of the Christian God, who in the Bible teaches the opposite. So if their fundamental convictions weren’t atheist, they were at best some non-Christian form of theism (or pantheism or polytheism). And even pantheism and polytheism, as they historically existed (i.e., before the Romantic reading they were given by the German intelligentsia in the 18th and 19th centuries) could provide no justification for the Holocaust. The fact that they thought their party ideology was compatible with Christian teaching is only further evidence of the ability of human beings to live within gross self-contradictions when it serves their interest.
The bible teaches that the Israelites were the chosen people. This, like Nazi ideology, implies that some human beings - albeit not the same ones - are worth more than others.
Exactly my point. They held to some form of theism. You have labelled them as “de facto atheist”, when you know they were both individually and ideologically theistic.
That’s dishonest.
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Hello, Roy. I don’t think we have interacted much yet, if at all, here. You may not know where I’m coming from. Give me some space to explain this.
Now, I’m not sure where your remarks are coming from here. I don’t know whether you are a Jew, a Christian, or something else. I’ll tell you where I’m coming from. I did my doctorate in Religion and studied under many Jews (as well as Christians). I had Shabbat dinners in Jewish homes and heard lectures from and had seminars with many Jewish teachers. I am quite sure they would all deny – and I heard one of them explicitly deny – that Judaism teaches or implies that Jews are worth more than others. The Bible does not teach that the Jews were chosen due to superior merit, in the sense that the Nazis thought of merit. One Jewish teacher told me that the right metaphor for the Jewish people in relation to God was that they were “drafted”; and back in the days when there was a compulsory draft, it wasn’t merit that earned one a draft card.
“They” is your generalization. It would be more correct to say “some.” Maybe even “many.” But you can’t say that all Nazis believed in God, unless you have done a pretty detailed survey of the religious beliefs of a large sample of them. Are you a sociologist of 1930s German religious belief?
I “know” no such thing. I know that many of them conceived that God was on their side, but I have only the vaguest idea of what some of them meant by “God.” As for “ideologically,” I’m trained as a philosopher to get to heart of ideologies, what lies beneath them ultimately, as opposed to surface gloss. For example, both Nazi and Soviet regimes thought they were bringing true democracy to the people, but in fact neither regime did so. Now at the heart of Nazi ideology is a repulsive view of life which denies everything that is central to Western, Judaeo-Christian theism. Whether all individual Nazis were aware of this is irrelevant. And that human beings can say they believe in God while running an extermination camp whose very existence spits in the face of God is just another example of the ability of human beings to live with massive cognitive dissonance.
One of the few first-rank intellectuals to support the Nazis, the German philosopher Heidegger, was not a theist in any normal sense of the word, but closer to some undefined form of paganism.
I am not an expert on Hitler himself, but Richard Weikart, a good historian who has studied Hitler and the whole Nazi period specifically, from an ideological point of view, has a book out on HItler’s religion, which would probably be worth reading for both of us. He has also written in the past about Nazi racial theory and its philosophical roots. Try looking up his name on Amazon and have a look at some of the books.
Its clear where you’re coming from. You are trying to distance nazi atricities from Christianity, and don’t mind deviating from the truth to do so.
For example:
“They” is your generalization. Sure, you applied it to religious convictions of people rather than the actual people, but that doesn’t stop it being your generalization.
I didn’t say that all Nazis believed in God.
I don’t need to be.
This is blatant hypocrisy, since you have blithely declared the Nazis to be “de facto athiests” without being “a sociologist of 1930s German religious belief”.
If you know that, then you know that many of them were not atheists. But you said they were de facto atheists anyway.
This is the God that supposedly ordered genocide.
You also haven’t noticed that if you “have only the vaguest idea of what some of them meant by “God.” ", you equally have no idea whether running concentration camps requires cognitive dissonance.
I don’t need to look up his name on Amazon - I’m fully aware of him, his association with the Discovery Institute, and his attempts to blame the holocaust on Darwin and evolution.
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Your conversational tone is aggressive, and not very conducive to discussion on a site that aims to be “Peaceful.” I don’t intent to respond further to you, unless you change the tone to that of civilized dialogue.
You picked at my use of “Nazis,” as if I had in mind the whole body of Germans who supported the Nazi party, rather than the regime and the ideology, which is what I meant, and what I thought would be clear in context.
The Nazi regime did not stand for anything that anyone today, or in most periods of the history of Church, would recognize as authentic Christianity. The fact that its apologists sometimes spoke of Jesus, called themselves Christian, etc. means nothing. There are all kinds of false versions of Christianity.
Speaking of intellectual dishonesty, which you accuse me of, how intellectually honest was it for any Nazi theorist to claim that Jesus was an Aryan? Completely dishonest, since at the time, the Germans had the best Biblical scholars in the world, and 99% of them or better would have told the Nazi regime (if they didn’t fear for their lives) that Jesus was of Semitic stock, and more particularly Jewish. But the Nazis weren’t going to let a little thing like accurate scholarship get in their way.
Further, if one believes that Jesus was Aryan, one believes that the Gospel story of Jesus’s ancestry was false, i.e., that the Bible contains lies. Christians don’t believe that the Bible contains lies. Therefore, the Nazi regime, insofar as it supported the Jesus was Aryan claim, was accusing the Bible of lying, and departed from authentic Christian belief. (And that of course is only one of countless ways the regime departed from Christian belief.)
Meaning, as is frequently the case in these debates, that you only know his ideas by hearsay, haven’t read any of his work, have no intention of reading any of his work, but are sure that his work is wrong without reading it.
I think it’s pretty clear that an intellectual conversation, as opposed to a bar-room quarrel, is not something anyone is likely to have with you here.
That’s what happens when some-one tries to shift the blame for the holocaust from theists to atheists.
It also aims to be about “Science”, but you’ve blissfully ignored that half.
Anyone capable of using a scrollbar can see that your change is false, and that I explicitly referred to the Wehrmacht, the SS and the Nazi party propagandists.
I didn’t accuse you of intellectual dishonesty, only of dishonesty.
Your current attempt to divert attenition onto the Nazi regime’s dishonesty, as if their shortcomings somehow excuse yours, is a further example. Your continued attempts to show the Nazis were non-Christian rather than non-theist is another.
I have read some of his writing. I haven’t read Hitler’s Religion but since you say you haven’t either, I don’t see that as a problem.
I will note that your complaint that I might be “sure that his work is wrong without reading it” rings hollow in light of you having recommended it unread.
I look forward to your non-response.
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