But let’s see the hypocrisy of Christians on this
What I find interesting about all of this is? In #10 Americans feel less warmly towards us atheists, and rate us alongside Muslims. But in #9? 56% of Americans say it is not necessary to believe in god to be moral, while only 42% say it is necessary to believe in god to have good morals.
Part One: ARE WE ATHEISTS COMPARABLE TO MUSLIMS?
We atheists are compared on the same level of Muslims. But I have to ask the following questions:
1. When or where have you heard of atheists, demanding you become an atheist or you will be beheaded for it?
2. When have you heard of atheists stating that if you insult our supposed prophets, like Hitchens, Harris, etc, we will blow you up, or behead you, or have done so?
3. When have you ever read where an atheist threw a homosexual off the top of a high rise building because we atheists proclaim how evil homosexuality is and that homosexuals deserve to be put to death?
4. When have you heard atheists demand the right to marry child brides?
5. When has an atheist hijacked an airplane and flew it into a building, murdering thousands in the name of atheism?
I have yet to see any atheists doing any of this. Matter of fact? Quite the opposite.
Atheists do not care if you worship a god or practice a religion. The problem comes when you demand all people follow your religion, or our secular government promote your religion. We do not demand if you do not become an atheist, we will kill you. We do not demand your brutal murders should you speak against any of our supposed prophets like Hitchens, Harris, et al. We do not demand that if you do not follow atheism we will then go blow up your churches, or massacre your followers simply because they do not accept atheism.
Atheists do not care if you are straight, or an lgbt. We do not care what two consenting people do to have sex. The only time Atheists will speak out against people on the topic of sex? Is on pedophiles, or those adults who seek to harm children through sex. And honestly? Hundreds of thousands of Christian priests and pastors, Muslim clerics and Jewish Rabbi’s been busted for raping children.
Part Two: Christian defense of saying atheists have done these things destroyed:
And of course? Christians and Muslims and others will proclaim how Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, or other “atheists” slaughtered and committed murder and crimes in the name of atheism. Yet any true historian knows? This is a fallacy.
Let’s check out the real facts that disproves these false assertions of Christians.
HITLER
Hitler proclaimed himself many times as a Christian, had the support of Christians in his country and even? The support of the Roman Catholic Church. Matter of fact? Hitler proclaimed his brand of Christianity? Positive Christianity.
Hitler’s anti-Semitism grew out of his Christian education. Christian Austria and Germany in his time took for granted the belief that Jews held an inferior status to Aryan Christians. Jewish hatred did not spring from Hitler, it came from the preaching of Catholic priests and Protestant ministers throughout Germany for hundreds of years. The Protestant leader, Martin Luther, himself, held a livid hatred for Jews and their Jewish religion. In his book, “On the Jews and their Lies,” Luther set the standard for Jewish hatred in Protestant Germany up until World War II. Hitler expressed a great admiration for Martin Luther.
Hitler did not have to parade his belief in God, as so many American Christians do now. Nor did he have to justify his Godly belief against an Atheist movement. He took his beliefs for granted just as most Germans did at that time. His thrust aimed at politics, not religion. But through his political and religious reasoning he established in 1933, a German Reich Christian Church, uniting the Protestant churches to instill faith in a national German Christianity.
“My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice… And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
In the 1920s, Hitler’s German Workers’ Party (pre Nazi term) adopted a “Programme” with twenty-five points (the Nazi version of a constitution). In point twenty-four, their intent clearly demonstrates, from the very beginning, their stand in favor of a “positive” Christianity:
24. We demand liberty for all religious denominations in the State, so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the morality and moral sense of the German race. The Party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, but does not bind itself in the matter of creed to any particular confession. It combats the Jewish-materialist spirit within and without us, and is convinced that our nation can achieve permanent health from within only on the principle: the common interest before self-interest.
This section comes from The Atheist Atrocities Fallacy by Michael Sherlock
STALIN
Of these three characters, Stalin was the only confirmed atheist, yet Hitchens thoroughly dealt with the religious nature of Stalin’s dictatorship in a manner that has left religious apologists without sufficient reply. Notwithstanding the fact that Stalin was raised as a Christian under the religious influence of his mother, who enrolled him in seminary school, and that Stalin later took it upon himself to study for the priesthood, as Hitchens and others have pointed out, Stalin merely stepped into a ready-made religious tyranny, constructed by the Russian Orthodox Church and paved with the teachings of St. Paul.
Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves. Romans 13:1-2
Such teachings were the inspirational well from which the Russian Orthodox Church drew their justifications to support this new Tsar, causing the more sensible fringe of the Church to flee to the United States in contravention of St. Paul’s teachings.
Here then, the central premise of Hitchens’ argument is worthy of reiteration. Had Stalin inherited a purely rational secular edifice, one established upon the ethos espoused by the likes of Lucretius, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Einstein and other free thinking and rational secularists, then the apologist’s argument would hold slightly more weight, but such wasn’t the case. Stalin merely tore the existing religious labels off the Christian Inquisition, the enforcement of Christian orthodoxy, the Crusades, the praising of the priesthood, messianism, and Edenic ideas of a terrestrial religious-styled utopia, and re-branded them with the red of communism. Had this Christian machine not been in place, then it is more than likely Stalin wouldn’t have had the vehicle he needed to succeed in causing so much suffering in the name of his godless religion, Communism.
To quote Hitchens:
For Joseph Stalin, who had trained to be a priest in a seminary in Georgia, the whole thing was ultimately a question of power. “How many divisions,” he famously and stupidly inquired, “has the pope?” (The true answer to his boorish sarcasm was, “More than you think.”) Stalin then pedantically repeated the papal routine of making science conform to dogma, by insisting that the shaman and charlatan Trofim Lysenko had disclosed the key to genetics and promised extra harvests of specially inspired vegetables. (Millions of innocents died of gnawing internal pain as a consequence of this “revelation.”) This Caesar unto whom all things were dutifully rendered took care, as his regime became a more nationalist and statist one, to maintain at least a puppet church that could attach its traditional appeal to his. [28]
I shan’t rehash Hitchens’ arguments in full, but if you would like to learn more about the details of his logically sound and beautifully crafted reply to this fallacious charge, I suggest you read chapter seventeen of his book, ‘God is Not Great – How Religion Poisons Everything.’
Hitchens was not alone in seeing the parallels between Russia’s old supernatural religion and its new secular one.
In Emilio Gentile’s ‘Politics as Religion,’ Gentile describes the sacralising of Stalin’s regime in the following words:
The sacralization of the party opened the way to the sacralization of Stalin when he became the supreme leader. After 1929, the political religion of Russia mainly concentrated on the deification of Stalin, who until his death in 1953 dominated the party and Soviet system like a tyrannical and merciless deity. [29]
That vast and seemingly bottomless “reservoir of religious credulity,” as Hitchens so eloquently phrased it, which served to subdue the servile Soviets for hundreds of years beneath the yoke of an equally brutal supernatural religion, was the very fountain of boundless unthinking acquiescence that Stalin, having adorned himself in the Tsar’s clothes, utilized to send countless innocent Russians to their deaths. Where would Stalin have found such docile servitude, servitude that fed the flames of his secular religious tyranny, had Lucretius, Thomas Paine, Albert Einstein or Thomas Jefferson bestowed upon these poor religious Russians, their intellectual legacy? To answer in a word, nowhere.
POL POT
Pol Pot, possibly not even an atheist, but almost certainly a Buddhist, believed in the teachings of the Buddha, no matter how perverted his interpretations may or may not have been. His violence, much like the violence of many earlier religionists, wasn’t the result of a lack of belief in a god, whether Zeus, Osiris, Yahweh, or the god-like Buddha of Mahayana Buddhism, but in the megalomaniacal belief that heaven or destiny was guiding him to improve the state of affairs for all those who could be forced to share his misguided utopian delusions. Not only was Pol Pot a Theravada Buddhist, but the soil in which his atrocities were sewn was also very Buddhist.
In Alexander Laban Hinton’s book, ‘Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide,’ Hinton drew attention to the role that the belief in karma played in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, particularly with regards to the cementation of a docilely accepted social hierarchy, not too dissimilar from Stalin’s ready-made Russian religious tyranny, as well as highlighting the Buddhist origins of Pol Pot’s ideological initiatives.
Hinton remarks:
This [Pol Pot’s regime’s] line of thinking about revolutionary consciousness directly parallels Buddhist thought, with the “Party line” and “collective stand” being substituted for dhamma…One could certainly push this argument further , contending that the Khmer Rouge attempted to assume the monk’s traditional role as moral instructor (teaching their new brand of “mindfulness”) and that DK regime’s glorification of asceticism, detachment, the elimination of attachment and desire, renunciation (of material goods and personal behaviors, sentiments, and attitudes), and purity paralleled prominent Buddhist themes… [30]
I have only presented a small snippet of the available evidence that points to religion’s role in Pol Pot’s crimes, and there is not one single piece of solid evidence that Pol Pot was an atheist, so let us once and for all dispense with that speculative piece of religious propaganda. Pol Pot spent close to a decade at Catholic school and nearly as long studying at a Buddhist institution, so religious education was something he had in common with both Hitler and Stalin, but I would never use such data-mined facts to assert that religious education invariably inspires tyrants to commit atrocities, although a case for such a proposition could probably be made without committing too many logical and historical inaccuracies. I won’t even bother sharing the un-sourced quote from Prince Norodom Sihanouk that Christians present as “proof” that Pol Pot was an atheist, as its origin is not only dubious, but its contents reflect a belief in heaven, which, if genuine, negates any claim that Pol Pot was an atheist.
Atheist Militants Rising 