Why the recent outpouring of anti-theistic zeal and hostility? Richard Shweder suggests an answer in the New York Times:
A deeper and far more unsettling answer ... is that the popularity of the current counterattack on religion cloaks a renewed and intense anxiety within secular society that it is not the story of religion but rather the story of the Enlightenment that may be more illusory than real.
The Enlightenment story has its own version of Genesis, and the themes are well known: The world woke up from the slumber of the "dark ages," finally got in touch with the truth and became good about 300 years ago in Northern and Western Europe.
As people opened their eyes, religion (equated with ignorance and superstition) gave way to science (equated with fact and reason). Parochialism and tribal allegiances gave way to ecumenism, cosmopolitanism and individualism. Top-down command systems gave way to the separation of church from state, of politics from science. The story provides a blueprint for how to remake and better the world in the image and interests of the West's secular elites.
Unfortunately, as a theory of history, that story has had a predictive utility of approximately zero. At the turn of the millennium it was pretty hard not to notice that the 20th century was probably the worst one yet, and that the big causes of all the death and destruction had rather little to do with religion. Much to everyone's surprise, that great dance on the Berlin Wall back in 1989 turned out not to be the apotheosis of the Enlightenment.
Indeed, critics are fond of pointing to the Catholic Church's Inquisition as the paradigm of religious evil. Throughout the 500 years of the Inquisition, however, something like 6000 people were murdered. That comes to about twelve people per year. By contrast 110,000,000 people were murdered by officially atheistic communist governments in the 87 years from 1900 to 1987. This does not count those killed in wars instigated by communists nor does it count those murdered by other state atheisms like Naziism. In other words, there's no comparison between the crimes of atheism and the crimes of Christians.
Why has atheism amassed such a horrific record? The English political philosopher John Locke, whose influence on the founding fathers was such that Jefferson incorporated whole sentences from his writings into the Declaration of Independence, offers an answer that has been stressed frequently on Viewpoint:
John Locke, who was almost everyone's favorite political philosopher at the time of the founding of our nation, was a very tolerant man. In his 1689 "Letter Concerning Toleration," he advocated a policy of live and let live for believers in many faiths, even heretics. But he drew the line at atheists. He wrote: "Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of God. Promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all."
Atheists bristle at the suggestion that they cannot be trusted to keep promises, etc. but they shouldn't take umbrage. It's merely the logical consequence of their denial of a transcendent moral authority. There is no reason, given the truth of atheism, why anyone should keep a promise that becomes inconvenient and which can be discarded with impunity. Locke was correct. For the atheist integrity is nothing more than a subjective preference, if it is a preference at all, and as such it can be dispensed with whenever it suits one's self-interest.
As with promises, so with human lives. If it suits the state to murder its people then, unless there is a divine constraint, there is no constraint at all on those who have the power to realize their wish.
