A recurring objection to atheism is the following: Hitler, Stalin and Mao were atheists and they killed millions. What about them?
I’m not at all convinced that Hitler was an atheist. Perhaps he wasn't a Christian (though many of his fellow Nazis were), but he wasn't an atheist. God comes up a lot in Mein Kampf. Even if he became an atheist later, Nazism was (among other things) a weird revival of Teutonic paganism mixed with messianic elements and a good dose of Christian anti-Semitism. Not exactly atheism.
What about Communism? Hitchens makes the point of how fundamentally theocratic all totalitarian regimes are, even the ones that profess themselves to be atheist. I’m not totally convinced by that argument, although there are some interesting parallels.
Yeon-mi Park, a North Korean defector, tells the story of how, as a child, she was terrified of thinking bad things about the Great Leader because at school they were told that the Great Leader could hear their thoughts.
That’s just like Roman Catholicism. “God knows what you’re thinking, and just thinking about sinning is a sin.” (What a horrible thing to be telling children.)
But to call Communism theocratic is, for me, a bit of a stretch. Let’s assume that Communism was, indeed, an atheist ideology. Should atheism be held responsible for some of its excesses?
Before we answer that question, it’s important to remember, as Dan Barker pointed out, that atheism is not a moral philosophy. In fact, it’s hardly a philosophy at all. It’s simply lack of belief in something for which there’s no evidence. That’s all.
Once we don’t believe in the supernatural, all the questions are still wide open. How should we treat each other? What are our rights and our duties? How do we make the world a better place? These are all questions for which religion offers some answers (some good, some bad). Atheism doesn’t.
That doesn’t mean that atheists have no morality. The idea that all atheists are nihilists comes from a wrong assumption: if morality comes from religion, then if you are an atheist you don’t have morality. That’s nonsense, but there’s something that needs to be said.
The same way that religiosity, in itself, adds nothing to the morality of a person, it’s also true that the lack of religiosity doesn’t necessarily add anything either.
I’ve met a few atheists so far in my life, and I liked them all very much, they were all intelligent and moral people. But that is accidental. I see no reason why an atheist could not be a horrible person.
It is perfectly possible to have an atheist capable of horrible things, as is indeed the case with Stalin and Mao. But is atheism responsible for their actions? I would say no (with some exceptions, and I'll come back to that).
Stalin and Mao happened to be atheists, but I think their regimes would’ve been just as oppressive had they not been. What those historical experiences show us is not what happens when an atheist is in charge. What they show us is what happens when a self-centred megalomaniac is in charge.
At this point there’s a recurring objection from religious people: “How come when an atheist commits an atrocity, it has nothing to do with atheism, but when a religious person commits an atrocity, it’s because of religion? How convenient!”
That’s a fair point. Obviously, not every atrocity committed by a religious person has to do with religion. But by the same token, atheism is not necessarily responsible for every atrocity committed by an atheist.
To say, as some people do, that atheism killed millions of people is just nonsense. In the case of Russia, most of the killing was done during the purges of the 1930s, and the victims were mostly political dissidents.
In the case of China, it was economic mismanagement and failed agricultural policies that caused a massive famine in the 1950s that killed millions of people. In both cases atheism had absolutely nothing to do with it.
But could atheism kill? What if there’s a regime that wants to exterminate all believers in the name of atheism? Would atheism be responsible for that? In theory I would say no, because that is not what atheism dictates, given that atheism dictates nothing at all.
However, it’s not impossible for atheism to morph into a dogmatic, almost religious ideology. Human beings are really good at doing that sort of thing (and maybe that’s what Hitchens was talking about).
For example, in the early 1920s the Checka (the Soviet secret police) arrested religious leaders of all denominations (Orthodox Christians, Lutherans, Jewish, Muslims) demanding that they renounced their faith in exchange for their lives. When they refused to do so they were executed.
That is a cautionary tale for all of us. Religious people always like to say that atheism is a religion itself. It’s not. Let’s keep it that way.
