Atheist Atrocities: The Atheist Case Against the Existence of Atheist Atrocities and Mass Murder

Michael Sherlock is an Atheist author who has written an article purporting to debunk the idea that Atheism is involved in the great totalitarian genocides and bloody atrocities of the 20th century. He addresses Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. I will address only Stalin, because Hitler was not an Atheist, he was a pagan who corrupted Cristianity to suit his purposes. And Pol Pot can be saved for later. The issue of soviet Atheism is enough to provide a solid case for the existence, source and meaning of Atheist Atrocities.

For the most part, Sherlock merely copies Hitchens’ arguments out of “God Is Not Great”.

Stalin per Hitchens, via Sherlock:

"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.

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."

But what Hitchens does is revisionist history, and it doesn’t match the work of actual historians. It is not even historian-type writing, because he is completely selective, discriminating in favor of revisionist “history” sources and in favor of protecting Atheism. Hitchens doesn’t give specific references for most of his heated claims; he makes claims using rhetorical devices as does Sherlock, above. Actually Hitchens gives four general references in the back of the book, all of which are prejudicial in the sense of being sources which are only ideological. And he completely ignores the fact that the church was essentially eradicated and its leaders either killed or made captive by Lenin. So there was hardly a church structure left to be useful to Stalin. More importantly, Stalin didn’t need a pre-existing structure from the church: he created his own structure quite effectively.

Consider this from Robert Service, in his massive, “Stalin, a Biography”:

“Although Lenin had founded the USSR, it was Stalin who decisively strengthened and stabilized the structure. Without Stalin, the Soviet Union might have collapsed decades before it was dismantled in 1991.”
Pg 3.

It was not the pre-existing religious structure which enabled Stalin. It was Stalin who enabled an all-new structure in the midst of massive destruction of the old.

From Overy’s “The Dictators”:

“At the Sixteenth Party Congress in 1930, he [Stalin] announced ominously that religion was ‘a brake on building socialism’, but the Central Committee had already decided the previous year that the failure to eradicate religion by argument required a complete overhaul of the anti-religious campaign.(30) Under Stalin the cultural and institutional life of all the Soviet Union’s religions was ruthlessly emasculated and thousands of clerics murdered or exiled. From 1929 onwards the ideological war against religion was intensified using crude inspirational slogans: ‘beat religion on the head every day of your life’.(31) Religion was regarded as a principle obstacle to the modernization of Soviet society and the construction of a communist economy, and religious communities were treated as if they were political supporters of a vestigial capitalism.
The physical assault on religion meant the closure of confiscation of churches, chapels, mosques, synagogues and monasteries. Beginning in 1928, with the closure of a modest 532 religious houses, by 1940 the overwhelming majority had been dynamited, closed down or taken over by the civil authorities for a wide variety of other purposes. The famous Strastnoi monastery in the center of Moscow was converted into the National Anti-religious Museum, where posters and artifacts drove home the message that all religion stemmed from an ancient fount of primitive superstition; smaller exhibitions of godlessness – Museums of Scientific Atheism - proliferated across the Soviet Union." (32)

Lenin called for a program of "militant Atheism" and "militant materialism". And here in the Library of Congress is Lenin's letter prescribing the killing of the religious.

The atrocities were, in fact, in the name of Atheism.

“In 1921 the regime shifted from a policy of political repression to a battle of ideas. Lenin called for the praty to adopt a program of ‘militant atheism’ and ’militant materialism’.(21) Religion was to be defeated by the power of scientific explanation, which represented a ‘single truth’. In June 1923, the party set up the League of the Godless led by Emilian Yaroslavsky an Old Bolshevik who had briefly preceded Stalin as secretary to the Central Committee of the party wan was the most openly atheist of the regime’s new leaders. By 1929 the League had 9,000 cells of atheist agitators a 465,000 members.(22) A year later, in 1924, a Society of Militant Materialists was founded. The party launched a nationwide program of atheist propaganda and scientific demonstrations…. In 1922, the atheist weekly Bezbozhnik (The Godless) was first published and soon had a circulation of hundreds of thousands; a monthly journal Bezbohnik ustanka (The Godless in the Workplace) was targeted at the proletariat; the magazine Ateist, launched in 1925, carried more sophisticated scientific articles to challenge the moral and metaphysical claims of the Church intelligentsia”.

When the intellectual attack failed to staunch religion, the physical attacks began in earnest, with over 8,000 clergy killed, their churches demolished, leaving only those willing to submit to communist Atheism.

What Hitchens would have us believe is that totalitarianism is actually a form of religion. He tries that tack valiantly, as have other Atheists before him, but that is just a pitiful feint away from the truth: Russian Communism was specifically officially Atheist, and their driving philosophy was Atheist, Materialist, and totalitarian. The propaganda was not religious in any sense; it was mind control as diktat, a completely non-theological process. The purges under Lenin were specifically meant to support the installation of Atheism into the culture, while dismantling religious structure and robbing their possessions. The purges under Stalin started as fear generation for the sole purpose of consolidation of power, and became random features of Stalin’s paranoia and desire to keep the population on edge.

It is true that a religion can pervert itself into totalitarianism; it is not true that totalitarianism is a religion or religious.

More from Service’s “Stalin”:

“The fact that he jotted down his remarks in a copy of a work by Lenin may not have been an accident: Stalin measured himself by Lenin’s standard.(27) … Possibly Stalin’s style of amoralism came not from Marxism-Leninism but from a much earlier set of ideas. He read Machiavelli’s “The Prince” and annotated his own copy of it…(28) His insistence on the importance of courage could well have derived from Machiavelli’s supreme demand on the ruler: namely that he should show vertu. This is a word barely translatable into either Russian or English; but it is identified with manliness, endeavor, courage and excellence. Stalin, if this is correct, saw himself as the embodiment of Machiavellian vertu.
Service, p342.

Regardless of Stalin's source of motivations, it most certainly was not from his Christian roots.

From Overy, pg 266-7:

“In the Soviet union the whole system of Marxist-Leninist thought was predicated on the idea of ‘dialectical materialism’, a term that held an exceptional authority throughout the Stalin years. It was officially defined by Stalin himself in an essay on Dialectical and Historical Materialism that he published in 1938. It’s philosophical essence was simple, even simplistic: everything in nature is part of an objective material world that is both completely integrated and constantly subject to change. The changes occur ‘dialectically’, a term fist used in the modern age by the very un-Marxist nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Hegel, to describe the dynamic contradictions that propel all phenomena from lower to higher forms of existence. Marxists asserted that dialectical materialism could be used to describe not only the development of the natural world but also evolution of history as an unfolding succession of economic systems, each with its own social contradictions generated by class conflict. Stalin took from Marxism the idea that these changes could be defined in terms of observable, scientific laws of history, just as there were scientific laws governing the behavior of the natural world. These laws, Stalin wrote in 1952, are ‘the reflection of objective processes which take place independently of the will of man’.(3) the coupling of natural science and social history, first formulated by Lenin, made the emergence of communism not simply historical accident by historical destiny, a product of the essential nature of things.(4)"

The motivation was false science (social and economic deterministic evolution), molded into an Atheistic creed, Dialectical Materialism.

In all cases, and up until Gorbachev, the motivating philosophy was Atheist Dialectical Materialism, and Gorbachev was removed after a coterie of critics attacked his policies, wanting to preserve Atheist Dialectical Materialism.

Says Michael Sherlock,

” 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.”

Unthinking acquiescence? Docile servitude? Hardly. The valiant Russian objectors of conscience and intellect were murdered, en masse, early on, as dictated by the specifically Atheist diktat of Lenin and the Central Committee.

And the existence of a contrary intellectual legacy came in the form of a pre-existing religious culture in the USA where the governing after the revolution was peacefully pursued, whereas the Atheist Enlightenment legacy in France produced the Reign of Terror, bloodbaths against hated classes, and ultimately resulted in a new totalitarian, Napoleon.

Returning to Sherlock, he attempts to give the argument for Atheist Atrocities a set of logical fallacies. Let’s see how that works out.

First, he attempts the Tu Quoque Fallacy, and that would apply if the Atheist Atrocity argument were used only as a rebuttal to charges of Christian Atrocities. However, taken by itself as a stand-alone argument against Atheism means that the Tu Quoque has no meaning; the argument addresses “you”, not “you too”. Thus because the Atheist Atrocity is a valid argument in its own right, the Tu Quoque Fallacy does not apply, and that assertion becomes a Red Herring Fallacy.

Second, he tries the False Analogy Fallacy, claiming that Atheism is not a religion, so the two cannot be compared. But this is the same failure as the Tu Quoque: the argument that Atheists and Atheism slaughtered millions of people is not an analogy; it is historical fact, taken as a single fact and used as a direct argument against Atheism. So this is another Red Herring.

Third, he attempts the False Cause Fallacy, claiming that there is no causality in the relationship between Atheism and the Atheist Atrocities. Yet historically, there certainly is a demonstrable causal relationship, and that case is made above in the discussions surrounding (a)Atheist Dialectical Materialism as the organizing and unifying principle of the state; (b)the specific atrocities on religions in the name of Atheism. Since cause can be demonstrated reliably, this charge is false and fails.

Yet there is another dimension within this charge. Sherlock makes the claim that Atheism is merely a lack of belief; then he sets up an analogy:

” Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot were all non-figure skaters. Therefore we can conclude that not being a figure skater causes a person to commit atrocities.”

But Atheism is not merely “non-belief”; it is a rejection of an entire worldview, including its moral authority and its moral principles, leaving the Atheist in a moral void either to be filled with personal choices or left void. [note 1] Further, as demonstrated above, it is the proselytization of that moral void which leads to atrocities, as amoral elitists attempt to force amorality upon entire cultures and civilizations. The initial premise, "non-belief", is false. Thus the failure is Sherlock’s, with both a false premise and a False Analogy.

So the premise here, "non-belief" is a purposeful false assertion, designed to avoid responsibility for that which is rightly attributable to Atheism: i.e. it is a lie.

Fourth, he asserts the Poisoning the Well Fallacy. Well, no. Either the claim is true, and Atheist atrocities occurred, or they did not. Poisoning the well involves a preemptive Ad Hominem strike directed at the individual. Presenting factual evidence in no way "poisons the well". What he hopes to do is to disassociate himself from the truth of the accusations and their consequences – even while doing the same false association to religions. But is the association truly false, if the propositions extend to current events today within Atheism, and if the results are demonstrably progressing in the same direction today as they did then? Is the association truly false if there is no difference in the Evolution, Materialism and the Atheist moral void between Leninist positioning and today’s Atheist intellectual positioning? No, the current eliminationist, classist rhetoric of the Atheist Left demonstrates that the well is poisoned by their own identity rhetoric, without any help from external sources. This is not fallacy, it is demonstrable fact.

Fifth, Sherlock attempts one last escape, the Slippery Slope Fallacy. But again, the slope is being traversed, and that downward spiral is called Progressivism, these days. It is exactly Marxism except for the designation of classes other than the proletariat as Victimhood Classes, and classes other than the bourgeoisie as Oppressor Classes. Other than changes in the identities of victims/oppressors, the amoral attack on religion is progressing directly down the slope, toward total amoral behaviors being acceptable, with dissent being purged (currently using demonization of Political Correctness to silence dissent, and legal protection – the extra punishment of hate crime - of victimhood Classes, as well as attacks on free speech and the First Amendment protection of religion).

The slippery slope is a fallacy only if the Precautionary Principle is used without evidence in order to stop an opposing theory from implementation; it is not a fallacy if the slope is observably being slid down. This is another, and final failure in the logic attack which Sherlock is trying to attribute to the use of the Atheist Atrocity argument.

To summarize briefly: Sherlock bases his argument on prejudiced and false revisionist history. He follows this with false premises against which he attempts to apply logic fallacies, all of which fail for the reasons given above.

If an argument, A, is valid and true, then all counter arguments purporting to falsify it are false and will fail. That is what has happened here: the communist atrocities in Russia and then the USSR were based on Atheism and done in the name of Atheism and its derivatives, Evolution and Dialectical Materialism. Further, Atheism since then has changed none of its worldview beliefs, which include Materialism and Evolution and the superiority of the elite Atheists. Atheism has no restraints on morality (there being no objective Good or Evil), and no constraints on its intellectual positions (there being no objective Truth).

Notes:
1. The moral void is filled with "atheistic science", which in practice is the scientism of non-empirical Evolution. In the USSR, their science was even a false notion of evolution, and that failure produced even more death due to persistent crop failures.