| | Over the last year, I've taken an interest in the many debates being held between the popular atheist writers of the day (Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, etc) and the various theists they get paired against at universities and elsewhere. In these debates, the question always comes up that if religion is so bad for humanity, how come the atheistic communist regimes are responsible for death and destruction on a scale far greater than any religion had ever caused? This is a fair question asked by religionists, and I must say that the answers I hear for it on the part of prominent atheists are not very impressive. I believe I've come up with a better answer to this question, and I wanted to test it out here:
To begin with, communism is only a political ideology, it is not in any way a moral philosophy or a system of ethics. Communists, knowing that any institutions which held the previous social order in place needed to be eliminated, did away with religion in order to replace it with the almighty power of the state. Communists used brute force to eliminate and supress society's generally accepted source of moral absolutes (religion), yet it replaced religion with no meaningful system of ideas that people could apply to their own lives. All that was left was the advancement of the state, an institution characterized by nothing else but force.
Regarding atheism's relationship to communism, I don't know the origins of Marxism well enough to say this for sure, but it seems likely that the underlying premise and motivation from which the ideas of communism flowed was not "God does not exist", rather it was a recognition of the gap in wealth between the few and the many at the time, followed by a general notion that collective ownership of property would lead to a life of abundance and liberation for all. In other words, it is various notions of altruism and egalitarianism that are at the root of communism, not atheism. I don't believe for a second that Marx began with the premise: "God does not exist, therefore there is nothing to stop me from creating a murderous political ideology". It seems far more probable to believe that he may have been an atheist in his point of view, but that atheism was ancillary to his political ideas, and the antipathy that communism had toward religion had mostly to do with wanting to cut off the old social order at the roots to faciliate its rise to power.
It should also be pointed out that atheism per se is also not a philosophy or system of ethics. Atheism represents no specific worldview. This is evidenced by the fact that a communist, an Objectivist and a secular humanist could all call themselves atheists with no contradiction of any kind. At it's root, atheism is merely a rejection of the cosmological and metaphysical claims that some humans make. In reality, the term 'atheist' shouldn't even exist. As Sam Harris and others point out, we don't have to refer to people who reject astrology and alchemy as "non-astrologers" or "non-alchemists".
As such, atheism is not the primary driver of communism and its atrocities. The horrors of communism stem from the concentration of too much power into the state and away from the private decision making of its individual citizens. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Sure, atheism can be incorporated into bad ideas, but so can religion.
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