With this post we continue our critique of Sam Harris' Ten Myths About Atheism with his second alleged myth. Harris claims the following is not just mythical but also false:
Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.
People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.
Harris is playing a bit of a shell game here. He slides in the first two sentences from an allegation against atheism and individual atheists to the evils of fascism and communism. He tries to shift the onus away from atheism and onto the nature of political ideology. It's true that these ideologies were very religious but that's irrelevant. It's not fascism which led to the holocaust and not communism that perpetrated the Killing Fields and the crimes committed against humanity in the Soviet Union. Neither ideologies nor religions do anything. It is individual fascists and communists who committed the horrific crimes or the twentieth century and in doing so they were simply carrying to its logical conclusion the basic assumption of atheism.
They believed there was no God and that meant that there is no moral right nor wrong, no eternal consequence for what one does, no reason not to adopt the ethic of might makes right, and no reason to consider others as having dignity and worth. Since they disdained the belief that other people are made in the image of God and loved by God, they therefore concluded that those people have no more rights than do cattle in an abattoir. If one has the power and the wish to kill them there is no moral reason why one should not.
That Hitler, et al. committed the greatest crimes of the century is beyond dispute. That these men were atheists is beyond dispute. That their deeds were wholly consistent with their atheism is also beyond dispute. Thus the myth is not a myth at all. It's a historical reality.
Moreover, even if we were to grant Harris' premise that the responsible agent for the evils of the twentieth century was a kind of religion (fascism and communism), the salient point about this is that these were atheistic religions. Not all religions are bad, but those two were and it could be argued that they were bad precisely because they were, implicitly in one case and explicitly in the other, anti-theistic. Harris, though, clearly seems to think that because some religions are bad therefore they all are, but this is such obvious nonsense that one wonders how an intelligent man could hold that view.
You can read our comment on the first of Harris' ten myths here.
RLC
