The title to this post is intended to be a paradox, if that is even the right word. “Atheism,” in its most basic sense, denotes nothing more than a lack of belief in gods, supernatural forces, and so forth, in the absence of evidence. Atheism is therefore a “negative” viewpoint, in that it only addresses what a person does not believe. Atheism may, but by no means must, accompany “positive” views such as humanism or other philosophies, but by itself the word “atheism” has limited descriptive powers.

That does not stop others from ascribing traits to atheists as a whole, of course. (Part of this post is yet another re-phrasing of an irate Facebook comment, FYI.)

A Facebook commenter alerted me to an article on the website Evidence for God titled “What About Atrocities That Have Been Done in the Name of Religion?” It is yet another effort to move the goalposts on the question of evil in the world, and to cast aspersions on modern-day atheists by citing the activities of people more than half a century ago who may or may not have shared minute aspects of a worldview. The author begins, in the very first sentence, with a logical flaw:

Many atheists claim that religion is evil and, as such, cannot be from God.

Not exactly. See, atheists as a general rule don’t believe in any gods at all. It is therefore axiomatic to say that an atheist believes evil cannot come from God (presumably the Judeo-Christian Biblical God.) I also do not believe that evil can come from Voldemort, Sauron, or Walter White. The author goes on to remove the responsibility for the world’s evil from his God’s shoulders:

I absolutely agree with atheists and others who say that many atrocious things have been done in the name of God, and even in the name of Christianity. However, these atrocities were not perpetrated by God, but by evil human beings.

I don’t even want to get into theodicy here, so I’ll just move on to what seems to be the broader point. The author lists a number of disastrous conflicts from roughly the third century B.C.E. up to the eighteenth century C.E., categorizing them as “religious” or not “religious.” Here, he shows a rather selective view of history, opining that the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) was not religious in nature. Historians may still dispute the precise cause of a war that pitted Catholics against Lutherans, devastated the European continent, and killed around eight million people, but it is facile simply to say the war was not “religious.”

The author goes on to list wars of the twentieth century, categorizing them as “atheist” or not “atheist.” Of course, the body count is notably higher. He does not seem to appreciate the role of twentieth century innovations like the machine gun in shaping these statistics.

The implication, of course, is that because more people died in “atheist” wars, atheism deserves at least as much blame for human suffering as religion. (I have a feeling I am going to get tired of using the word “facile” before I’m done here.) He may not say it quite so explicitly, but this is the implication of every “Hitler/Stalin was an atheist!” argument offered in the English-speaking world. In its more sinister form, the argument attempts to portray the horrors of Stalinism as the inevitable result of atheism. It insults the word “wrong” to say that this is wrong (I’m going to focus on Stalin here, because Hitler wasn’t even an atheist).

Stalin may or may not have been an atheist, but more pertinent was that he was an authoritarian communist. Historians had to create the words “Stalinism” and “Maoism,” since they both men went so far beyond the tenets of what Karl Marx wrote, even beyond what Lenin did. I have yet to see a reference to a single incident specifically motivated by a lack of belief in gods, as opposed to adherence to one dogmatic belief system or another (e.g. Stalinism, Maoism, Juche.)

In short, Stalin did not kill millions of people because he was an atheist. He did it because he was (a) an asshole (b) propped up by an irrational, dogmatic system that, while secular in nature, suppressed rational inquiry and demanded faithful obedience. As far as I am concerned, Stalinism and Maoism are irrational belief systems that fly in the face of reason and evidence in much the same way as the religious dogmas that have inspired similar wars and genocides. Atheists today can certainly be irrational jerks, but they have yet to find an ideology that has the same killing power as either communism or religion (and to be clear, no one is looking for one). To claim that “Stalin was an atheist and Stalin was evil; therefore atheism is evil” is an affront to the multitudes of people who go through their lives with peace, love, and honor, yet without belief in the supernatural. It is also just poor logic and poor reasoning, and it makes my brain cry.

Photo credit: “Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1994-041-07, Dresden, zerstörtes Stadtzentrum” Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1994-041-07 / CC-BY-SA [CC-BY-SA-3.0-de], via Wikimedia Commons.