Does Atheism Breed Evil?

I get this a lot from religious fuckheads. Wasn't Stalin an atheist? Yes, he was along with Mao, Pol Pot, etc. For what it is worth, atheists are responsible for more human misery and suffering on the planet than religionists. It is a good argument but one I am going to dispose of.

Atheism is not a philosophy any more than being an a-unicornist is a philosophy. I hear fundamentalists claim that atheism is a religion, but this is not true. Atheism is merely a belief that there is no such thing as God. That's it. If religion were to disappear tomorrow, atheism would disappear with it. It exists only as a stance against religion.

If you talk to atheists, you realize that most of them share very little in common. For instance, both Karl Marx and Ayn Rand were atheists, yet I doubt they could have ever occupied the same room. Most atheists I meet are liberal fuckheads who believe in socialism or what have you. But then again, a lot of Christians are socialists, too.

The reason Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. committed their atrocities is because they were communist fucks who believed in a myth just as damaging as religion which was the Worker's Paradise that was the end justifying all means. Their atheism was merely incidental to this. When you consider the proto-atheism of a guy like Thomas Jefferson, should his non-belief get credit for the Declaration of Independence? Or how about an atheist like Camus who abandoned communism when he saw it conflicting with his basic compassion for humanity?

Atheism does not create bad people. It does not breed hatred except for ignorance. And like it or not, most of the Nazi atrocities were committed by people who decried the Jews as Christkillers. From the Inquisition to the Salem Witch Trials, Christians are responsible for a great deal of suffering, and they perpetrated it believing they were doing it for the good of their victims. This should sicken us.

The difference between the atheist and the Christian is that the Christian believes that his atrocities are justified by Almighty God. The Marquis de Sade was a sick fucker who believed his atheism gave him license to do the things he did and wrote about. Ironically, de Sade's favorite villians were Catholic clergy given to lechery and perversion. De Sade's fiction became reality when Catholic priests in the USA molested children and sodomized boys and what have you. And they did this with the Catholic Church covering up the crimes. The "greater good" is what was at stake.

If anything, what all these evil folks had in common was that they were collectivists. I don't see one whit of difference between communism and Christianity. Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't either which is why he embraced Marxism. Today, Hugo Chavez is both a Communist and a committed Catholic. Catholic liberation theology is nothing more than communism wedded to religion. I would go so far as to say that Marx got most of his ideology from the New Testament.

The fact is that our morality is a cultural thing that has changed and evolved over time. Much of what we read in the Bible offends our modern moral sensibility. The reason Christians quit killing people is because of the influence of Enlightenment thinking which was inherently secular. It was not because of a religious impulse.

I am not under the illusion that the world would be a perfect place without religion, but it certainly would be a better place. Most of that bullshit in the Middle East would be gone without religion. In short order, what religion lacks in severity it makes up for in longevity. The Berlin Wall fell within a lifetime. 200 years from now, Jews and Muslims will still be fighting over that worthless real estate.

As for me, I derive my morality from the Golden Rule which can be found in the Bible as well as in Confucianism or what have you. Morality isn't hard. Respect the rights of others in the same way you wish your rights to be respected. You don't have to be a Christian to believe that, and it would probably help even more if you weren't a Christian. Christians are notorious for not following what they profess to believe. They aren't even decent to one another.

I am against religion, but I will never be against compassion, honesty, or fair play. The end can never justify the means because people are the end. This is individualism, and it is the only true moral stance. Everything else is propaganda in service to tyranny. This includes religion.

Nothing negative or positive can be ascribed to atheism except that it is true. That is the bottom line. Or as Dawkins points out, much of the world's atrocities were committed by men with moustaches. Should we insist that facial hair breeds evil?

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