Atheists are hypocritical in blaming atrocities on Christianity
By Robert E. Meyer (06/09/08)
Editorial letters and columns often cite religion, particularly Christianity, for much of the world's past and present brutality and atrocity. Such was repeated in a recent diatribe printed in my local city newspaper.
I have no trouble in apologizing for atrocities involving my religious tradition, though I wasn’t personally responsible, except for the guilt by association in claiming to be personally a Christian. Presumably, if I called myself an atheist, I wouldn’t have been held ideologically culpable by this detractor.
However, critics must be honest and objective in their condemnations of atrocities whether caused by religion or secular movements, lest we believe their intentions are really gratuitous attacks against religion, not condemnation against atrocities altogether.
Therefore, to atheists and humanists who want to make this charge, you should be equally considerate, apologizing for the proportionally larger atrocities committed by cultural leaders, espousing godless, non-theistic Utopian ideologies, within the "enlightened" 20th century alone. Because whatever principle makes me guilty of the former, makes you equally guilty of the latter.
The point is not that any such examples of secular violence would excuse or diminish religious atrocities, but rather, that the critic who uses examples of religious atrocities without making reference to crimes motivated by secular ideologies, is obviously biased and short-sighted in his approach.
Critics will say that demagogues, such as Stalin, Poll-Pot, and Mao (who are among the greatest mass murderers of all time), didn’t really act on the basis of their atheism, but because of fanatical political and economic objectives.
Yet their policies were informed by a view of man consistent with metaphysical atheistic/evolutionary dogmas. Lenin retorted that, you have to crack a few eggs to get an omelet, and Stalin obliged him as the short-order cook, carrying out his purges that viewed the masses of humanity as expendable instruments to achieve a cause.
We must also be careful to observe that when people commit atrocities in the "name of Christ," or under some similar ecclesiastical declaration of authority, these acts are clearly abuses, for they do not represent the values of Christ himself. We never see acts of violence carried out by Christians in the first century. These violent activities largely result from improper convolutions of the jurisdictions in church/state spheres of sovereignty. These errors can be corrected though a proper application of the Christian world view.
On the other hand, secular violence can be directly related to the faithful application of materialist/evolutionist metaphysical narratives carried out to their logical end. Fortunately, most secularists are inconsistent, in that they do not live or reason in a way that comports with their stated ultimate view of reality. The correct application of such world views would themselves lead to the violent ends that secularists claim to loath while pointing their collective fingers derisively at religion.
One must honestly ask the question, which claim about reality is likely to produce a more harmonious world, if carried out faithfully to its logical end? The assertion "God created man in his own image," representing the Judeo-Christian tradition, or the manifesto by atheist/evolutionist Richard Dawkins, representing the ideological epitome of the atheist movement, "the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pointless indifference."
We must point out that if Dawkins' assessment of an atheist universe is correct, it leaves critics, such as the one remonstrating in my newspaper, with nothing left to complain about.
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