From Zeitgeist to Poltergeist, Part 4 of 13

The Faulty Conclusion
Richard Dawkins reasons that atheism does not incite war because,

"why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief?"2

This statement is either the greatest scholarly hoax since The Jesus Seminar or the utter bankruptcy of atheism's arguments.
This is a perfect, a perfectly disappointing, example of Richard Dawkins' conveniently simplistic arguments. He states that no one would go to war for the sake of an absence of belief as if atheism was merely not believing in something, namely God. If someone does not believe in God they must find something with which to replace God. Atheists replace God with various concepts and worldviews. The misanthropic Communist atheists which brought us the bloodiest century in human history, they who wrought terror wherever they ruled, did not believe in God and thus generally believed in the Darwinian view of life's origins. They applied the survival of the fittest and struggle for life to another species of mere animals, namely humankind, and were largely backed by the reason and science of the day.
Simply stated, when theists want to engage upon malevolence, particularly on the level of the Communists and Nazi, they must take steps to justify to themselves, and sometimes others, their actions by claiming divine revelation in the form of direct instructions. However, when atheists partake on such levels of malevolence they need no such justifications as they view their action as a mere outworking of the laws of nature.

Joe Keysor notes,

"Parenthetically, atheists, agnostics, and skeptics should not look with derision on these groups as evidence of the folly of religious belief. The various Communist groups, committed to diagnosing and solving mankind's problems by reason alone, were also groping in a dark world of false theories and false solutions. Many of them saw the Soviet Union as the beacon of humanity, and considered Stalin to be in the vanguard of human progress. Christians who reject the authority of scripture and invent their own philosophies to suit the times are spiritually akin to atheists who do the same-the only difference is that one group disguises its unbelief with religious language while the other does not."3

With regards to accountability, or responsibility, Professor of philosophy Daniel Dennett wrote:

"Those who maintain religions, and take steps to make them more attractive, must be held similarly responsible for the harms produced by some of those whom they attract and provide with a cloak of respectability. Defenders of religion are quick to point out that terrorists typically have political, not religious agendas, which may well be true in many or most cases, or even in all cases but that is not the end of it. The political agendas of violent fanatics often lead them to adopt a religious guise, and to exploit the organizational infrastructure and tradition of unquestioning loyalty of whichever religion is handy. And it is true these fanatics are rarely if ever inspired by, or guided by, the deepest and best tenets in those religious traditions. So what? Al Queda and Hamas terrorism is still Islam's responsibility, and the abortion-clinic bombing is still Christianity's responsibility and the murderous activities of Hindu extremists are still Hinduism's responsibility."4

I must first point out that just as Richard Dawkins did, Prof. Daniel Dennett uncritically, and without providing statistics, correlates Islamic terrorism with "Christian" abortion-clinic bombing. I will not give it away here for the sake of suspense. But if you are interested in facts take a moment to consider the statistical relation between the two and then see my essay The Dawkins Correlation.

Of greater importance and direct relevance is Prof. Daniel Dennett's insistence that any and all Islamic terrorism is Islam's responsibility, that any and all "Christian" abortion-clinic bombings are Christianity's responsibility and that any and all Hindu extremist acts are Hinduism's responsibility. Let us grant this for a moment and ask the logical question, "Is this only so regarding religions and their extremists who often are violating the very tenets which they claim to be upholding?" Now more directly, let us ask, "What about atheism? Does atheism somehow and for some unstated reason get a pass? Is atheism not responsible for the most brutal regimes and the greatest body count that the world has ever known?" At least according to Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Prof. Daniel Dennett the answer is clearly that atheism gets a pass and is not responsible.

But why do they get a pass and sidestep responsibility? Well, one answer is quite intriguing and again, directly relevant. During his debate with Dinesh D'Souza entitled "Is God (and Religion) a man-made invention?" Prof. Daniel Dennett stated:

"…it occurred to me - let's think about Stalin for a moment. Was he an atheist? You might say well of course he was an atheist. No, on the contrary. In a certain sense, he wasn't an atheist at all. He believed in god. Not only that, he believe in a god whose will determined what right and wrong was. And he was sure of the existence of this god, and the god's name was Stalin."

So, now theism is not only responsible for everything and anything done in its name but theism is also responsible for everything and anything done in the name of atheism including the actions of those atheists who suppressed and oppressed theism. This is a hyper-convenient argument that is not worthy of professor of a philosophy nor anyone else. Perhaps he ought to curve his zealousness for his worldview and return to the realm of philosophy. However, granting his statement, if this is true of Stalin it is likewise true of all atheists. Thus, atheism is self-refuting circular logic since all atheists are theists. Discarding supernatural god(s) atheist encounter the highest being in the universe, a natural god, in their mirrors.

Richard Dawkins reasons thusly,

"the evils of Hitler's regime can hardly be held up as flowing from atheism. Even when he was railing against Christianity."5

Richard Dawkins knows perfectly well where Darwinism leads and he jumps ship just before it takes us to its logical conclusion. At that point Richard Dawkins knows very well that, as he admits, he cannot condemn selfishness or murder on Darwinian or even intellectual grounds. Thus, he jumps the Darwinian ship and would plunge into the sea of absolute relativism were it not for the fact that he is, as he states it, a "cultural Christian." Admitting that neither Darwinism nor intellect can premise morality he does what many atheists do, he borrows morality from the very same theistic systems against which they protest namely, Christianity (see my essay Introducing the Dawkinsian Weltanschauung). Richard Dawkins may argue that Darwinism is not to be employed to order society but that is clearly his own subjective interpretation of Darwinism.

Athe"ism" has nothing to say to a Hitler. To what then was Hitler to turn in order to forego malevolence? Simply stated, he met a coalition of countries who survived as the fittest and simply did away with him-the strongest won. Hitler recognized their military superiority and his inferiority and ended it all with a vial of poison and a bullet. Again, the law of the jungle, the law of nature, the strong beat the weak.

Furthermore, to state that no one would go to war for the sake of an absence of belief is to respond to an argument that no one has made. The argument is, rather, that the void which is atheism leaves an open door through which anything may march unrestrained by absolute standards. Consider that Sam Harris believes that rape served as an evolutionary advantage and that Dan Barker believes that even today rape is not absolutely immoral and we have a terrifying window into the atheosgeist (find quotes here).

As I have already stated, there is no particular reason for believing that Hitler was an atheist. However, merely as an intellectual exercise it may be interesting to make the following argument based on a statement by Richard Dawkins:

"Much unfortunate confusion is caused by failure to distinguish what can be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion. Einstein sometimes invoked the name of God (and he is not the only atheistic scientist to do so), inviting misunderstanding by supernaturalists eager to misunderstand and claim so illustrious a thinker as their own."6

If Einstein was "atheistic" even though he made various references to God we may argue that Hitler was an atheist even though he made various references to God.

For the sake of further accuracy, Einstein aught not be referred to as an "atheistic scientist" nor should he be referred to as a monotheist or a theist. This is what Einstein claimed of himself:

"I'm not an atheist. I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God."7

The Deicidal and Misanthropic Prophecies
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, "Men Have Forgotten God" - The Templeton Address:

"More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.
Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.
What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.
The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century…The only possible explanation for this war [WWI] is a mental eclipse among the leaders of Europe due to their lost awareness of a Supreme Power above them. Only a godless embitterment could have moved ostensibly Christian states to employ poison gas, a weapon so obviously beyond the limits of humanity…
Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.
To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned. Only in this way can our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate twentieth century and our bands be directed to setting them right. There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing."

With regards to men forgetting God, it is of interest to note that in the Parable of the Madman Friedrich Nietzsche had his protagonist announce "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." He then makes a statement regarding what was to come in the 20th century-the century of secularism, materialism, rationalism, and irreligion, "…whoever is born after us-for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto." [I have posted the Parable of the Madman here]8

Moreover, a few decades after the Parable was written, Ernst Haeckel wrote Monism (in his The Riddle of the Universe, 1900) in which he complained that Catholicism automatically paints the "godless" as "wicked" and "the theistic church-goer" as "a good citizen." Thus, he wrote, "This error will only be destroyed when, in the twentieth century, the prevalent superstition gives place to rational knowledge and to a monistic conception of the unity of God and the world." Note that by "monistic conception of the unity of God" Haeckel was referring to pantheism which he understood to be a "polite form of atheism" (as per Arthur Schopenhauer) since "The maxim of the pantheist, 'God and the world are one,' is merely a polite way of giving the Lord God his conge [an abrupt dismissal]."

Furthermore, in 1849 Friedrich Engels wrote:

"All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm…The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward…in history nothing is achieved without violence and implacable ruthlessness."9

The German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) wrote:

"…so the Naturphilosoph [the nature philosopher] will enter into terrible association with the original powers of nature. He will be able to conjure up the demonic forces of Old Germanic pantheism, and that lust for battle which we find among the Old Germans will awaken in him, which does not battle to destroy, or to conquer, but solely for the sake of the battle itself.
Christianity-and this is its greatest merit-has to some extent tamed that brutal Germanic lust for battle, but could not destroy it; and if ever' that restraining talisman, the cross, breaks, the savagery of the old fighters will rattle forth again, the absurd frenzy of the berserker, of which the old Nordic poets sing and tell so much. That talisman is brittle, and the day will come when it breaks apart miserably.
The old stone gods will then emerge from their forgotten ruins and rub the dust of millennia from their eyes. Thor, with the giant hammer, will spring up at last, and destroy the Gothic Domes."10

British academic Adam Sedgwick wrote to Darwin in 1859 and,

"warned Darwin that his denial of the moral aspects of nature had the potential to brutalize humanity and 'sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history.'"11

1. 1. Hitler's Secret Conversations 1941-1944 (Farrar, Straus and Young, Inc. 1953), published in Britain as Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944 (Oxford University Press), pp. 49-52
2. 2. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006), p. 235
3. 3. Joey Keysor, Hitler, the Holocaust and the Bible (Athanatos Publishing Group: pre-release review ed., 2009), p. 171
4. 4. Dennett Daniel, Breaking the Spell - Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin Group, 2006), p. 299
5. 5. Dawkins, p. 277
6. 6. Ibid., p. 11
7. 7. "What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck," The Saturday Evening Post, Oct. 26, 1929
8. 8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Parable of the Madman-The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-182
9. 9. Friedrich Engels, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, "The Magyar Struggle," January 13, 1849 and "Democratic Pan-Slavism," February 15, 1849
10. 10. Joey Keysor, Hitler, the Holocaust and the Bible (Athanatos Publishing Group: pre-release review ed., 2009), p. 227
11. 11. Joey Keysor, Hitler, the Holocaust and the Bible (Athanatos Publishing Group: pre-release review ed., 2009), p. 328