It would be wrong to expect atheists or antitheists to answer for a murderer who used those labels.

[thucythucy]

106. I see your point, but

I would advise against taking the constitution Stalin drafted for the USSR at its face value. That constitution also supposedly granted freedom of speech, of assembly, and respect for ethnic minorities all "consistent with the interests of a workers' state" or whatever hedging language was included. In point of fact people living in the Soviet Union had no such rights, and there was certainly a concerted attempt, prior to June 1941, to pull Russian society toward atheism. That ended, for a time, with the German invasion, at which point Stalin relented in his anti-church campaign, but you can't tell me the destruction of thousands of Russian churches and monasteries during the 1920s and 30s, the jailing and torturing of tens of thousands of monks and clerics, weren't all a part of an attempt to destroy the Russian orthodox faith, whether or not it constituted a threat to the regime.

This was in marked contrast to the Italian fascist approach to religion, which was to come to an agreement with the Catholic Church, a concordat, which circumscribed Church power, but made no attempt to target people of faith who weren't otherwise a threat to the regime. Stalin regarded faith itself as a threat, whether it be Russian Orthodox, Catholics, Jews, Baptists, and acted accordingly. Now, he might have justified his assaults by concocting some trumped up "threat"--but this was window dressing on a par with his campaign against "wreckers." It's doubtful, for example, that the doctors put on trial in the late 1940s and early '50s for allegedly murdering Soviet officials, and plotting to murder Stalin, were guilty of anything other than being Jewish.

I'm not blaming atheism, or even anti-theism, for Stalin's mass murders. But to say that atheism wasn't at all in the mix--which is how I understood the original post to which I was responding--is a bridge too far. Atheism was one of the things that distinguished Marxism-Leninism, and Stalinism, from other ideologies of the time. Certainly the idea that there was no afterlife, no judgment, no God, was a part of the underpinning of an ideology that professed the idea of morality, fair play, basic decency, to be "bourgeois illusions." Read Trotsky's essay "In Defense of Terror"--which basically comes down to might is right whenever the interests of the dictatorship of the proletariat are concerned. Some of the anti-theists, as you might call them, of the French Revolution shared similar beliefs. Then too, there is Nietzsche's whole "God is dead" "let's all bow down to the coming Superman for whom ordinary morals don't apply" shtick. German Nazis were very keen on citing Nietzsche's atheism as a precursor to their own rejection of Christianity, which they regarded as a "Jewish perversion" foisted on the German volk, and to see Nietzsche's writings as texts in support of "the Fuehrer prinzipal."

My point is, I wouldn't be so quick to give absolute and blanket absolution to atheism, or to give any and all atheists a free pass when it comes to some pretty egregious crimes against humanity. I'll grant you that theists have committed far more crimes than atheists, but then again theists historically have outnumbered atheists probably a million to one, so one would expect a certain disproportionality. Even so, to say, as some seem to be saying in this and other threads, that atheism has never been in the mix of human depravity is I think historically inaccurate--particularly in the past hundred and fifty years--and perhaps dangerously naïve.

I would also draw a distinction between religion--which almost always has been coopted by the state or various elites--and spirituality. A text I continue to go back to on this is William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience." Spiritual or transcendental experience can often be disruptive to the powers that be--whether it be Jesus threatening the political and religious oligarchies of his time, or the Great Awakening in colonial America undermining the authority of the English crown, or Gandhi's Satyagraha taking on not only British imperialism, but also the Hindu caste system. As opposed to organized religion, which is often, as I see it, an attempt to co-opt and channel such spiritual or transcendental experiences into the service of the powers that be.

Atheism, too, can be channeled I think in just such a way--as was, at least in part, the case under Stalinism and Maoism. One major justification for the Chinese occupation of Tibet has been to "free" the Tibetan people from the "shackles" of their Buddhist faith. Not that Tibetan Buddhism offered much by way of human rights to Tibetan woman and girls. But then, I've never been much for one form of oppression becoming the justification for another.

Essentially, I'm asking that we recognize some nuance here. The role religion has played--for good and ill--is certainly gist for reasoned discussion on a political board. I just hate to see one or the other side resort to caricature and bi-polar thinking in an attempt to score points.

Best wishes to you Major, and all who sail with you.