THAT'S NOT THE HALF OF IT...:

Some bright ideas just don’t work: The contribution of atheism to the sum of the world’s happiness has been very meagre indeed. (Thomas C. Reeves | Friday, 19 March 2010, MercatorNet)

Ah, but what does the atheist say about Hitler, Stalin, and Mao? They were self-declared atheists, and they murdered more than 100 million people. And then there was Communist Pol Pot, who killed as many as 2 million of his countrymen in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. Fidel Castro and Kim Jong-il are of the same bent. And how tolerant and benevolent were the atheists of, say, the French Revolution or the Spanish Civil War? They were often killers, their targets being Christians.

The way out of this problem for the atheists is to claim that the great mass murderers of the recent past were not really atheists. Sam Harris claims that Stalinism and Maoism were each “little more than political religion.” Christopher Hitchens suggests that Stalin and Mao offered their followers a substitute religion, and therefore one can’t blame atheism for their atrocities. Some atheists claim that Hitler was really a Christian who never renounced his Catholicism.

This line of historical argument just won’t wash. Dines D’Souza, in his book What’s So Great About Christianity, asks “Should religion now be responsible not only for its own crimes but also for the crimes committed by atheists on behalf of atheist ideologies?” In fact, Stalin and Mao made their atheism crystal clear. Ask the millions of Christians who suffered at their hands. (Millions of Christians are still in hiding in Communist China.) Hitler was intensely anti-religious. Privately, he hoped that Germany would be “immunized against this disease” of the Christian faith. Nazis cracked down on churches, the clergy, and the faithful in every way, including murder, earning the condemnation of Pope Pius XII. Check the record of the killing of Polish Catholics at Dachau, including 4,154 priests, 2,365 religious, 283 nuns, and 13 bishops.

The slaughter by atheist regimes was done in the belief that science and materialism were so vastly superior that those who believed in the supernatural and divine law had to be eliminated to sustain and increase human progress.

...because if the atheists were right then the body counts wouldn't matter. The dead are still material.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 19, 2010 6:13 PM