Real People Vs. POWER
I really and truly don’t understand why it is that Christians can’t seem to handle the idea that atheists are capable of being moral people. I remember when Bill Donohue of the Catholic League was on a news program opposite an atheist, and at one point Bill just exploded with “That man’s philosophy is responsible for Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot!”
I call bullshit. Hitler’s religious beliefs were eccentric and nebulous, but he definitely wasn’t an atheist, and even if he had been, being Catholic didn’t stop other Germans from switching on those gas chambers. The oppressive socialist regimes weren’t objecting to religion because atheism was what let them be evil. Rather, they found religion to be an impediment to getting people to worship the state, and they were entirely too happy to use the church to their own ends when it suited them.
When critics of Christianity point to stuff like the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, Christians are quick to say that those things were more about social and political matters. To a large extent they’re right, but the same could be said of the things that they try to lay at the feet of atheism. When Ferdinand and Isabella started up the Spanish Inquisition, it was less about religious purity, and more about consolidating power in Spain. Jews represented a semi-independent subculture within Spain’s borders and, stereotypes aside, the Jews there were involved in a lot of mercantile type stuff. For the monarchs, that was a political problem, and the church became the instrument of their solution. In a sense, Stalin and his ilk took the Spanish monarchs’ modus operandi a step further, founding a new “religion” of state-worship and purging society of all elements of disloyalty rather than only ones that public opinion made easy to tear away.
The problem here isn’t atheism or Christianity, but a cult worship of power for the sake of power. For a healthy, rational human being, power does not hold much allure in and of itself, but it seemingly has this dreadful potential to become a cyclical desire that ignores human decency. Certainly even our politicians, who can only attain a relatively limited amount of power, seem to be rife with corruption, and just plain seem to view themselves as being different from normal people, and exempt from normal morality. That kind of attitude should be unacceptable to anyone–Christian, atheist, or otherwise–regardless of the faith (or lack thereof) someone publicly claims to follow.
