THE STRONG ASSOCIATION BETWEEN ATHEISM, DARWINISM, COMMUNISM, AND GENOCIDE

When atheists argue that Christianity has been associated with horrors, I retort that atheistic communism has it beat, by a great leap forward. Some offer the conservative estimate that communists have murdered one hundred million in a few short decades.

However, atheists protest that atheism has nothing to do with communism, even though all of the well-known communists had also been atheists. For Karl Marx and the other communists, atheism was even an essential part of communism:

·       Marx stated: "Communism begins from the outset with atheism…He brandmarked also religion as "the heart of a heartless world."

Therefore, if religion is removed, so too will the “heartless world be removed:

·       He also advocated mass murder and terrorism as being the key practice of Communism, being directly inspired by the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. As he told Frederick Engels in their correspondences: “There is only one way of shortening, simplifying, and concentrating the bloodthirsty death-throes of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new--revolutionary terror. . . . [...] Once we are at the helm, we shall be obliged to reenact the year 1793 [the bloody French revolution]. [...] We are pitiless and we ask no pity from you. When our time comes, we shall not conceal terrorism with hypocritical phrases. . . The vengeance of the people will break forth with such ferocity that not even the year 1793 enables us to envisage it.” (Conservapedia)

Marx was not an anomaly. Militant atheism has come to be closely associated with all forms of repression. Atheist Gordon Stein wrote:

·       Atheism has long ceased to be a rare and oft-ignored philosophical outlook...It has transformed itself into an active political programme with clear objectives which, though they vary from state to state, unequivocally include the elimination of state religion, religious education, and the enshrinement of scientism. (Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion, 74).

It was atheism that had emboldened both the French and Communist revolutions. Understandably, Marx had been a Darwinist:

·       "Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history."

How does the atheistic embrace of Darwinism play out? Dr. Carl Wieland published an article entitled “The Blood-Stained Century of Evolution”:

·       Communism also took evolution to its logical conclusion. If everything just evolved from “natural law,” then man's opinion, not God's Word, determines what is right and wrong. If the working class can take power by armed struggle, then this is 'right,' regardless of how many must die to bring in the socialist paradise. Communism's death toll far outranks the Nazis'—probably more than 90 million worldwide.

As Wieland argued, atheism used Darwinism to justify genocide:

·       Some have suggested that the bloodthirsty deeds of Stalin were an 'aberration' from the revolution's ideals. However, it was Lenin, the 'father' of the Russian revolution, who 'perfected the science of mass killings,' and total, merciless brutality as the ultimate method of political control. Evolution was the chief tool used to brainwash communism's masses into 'scientific atheism.' If everything just evolved, then everything is at the whim of the most powerful, and there is no Maker to whom to be answerable. Hence Stalin’s belief that killing millions of people was no worse than mowing your lawn (grass is our cousin in evolutionary doctrine).

Wieland pointed to the fact that Mao also killed his millions through the inspiration of atheism and Darwinism:

·       Mao's reign of terror and lies resulted in the deaths of tens of millions. It is no coincidence that his two favorite books were by the evolutionists Darwin and Huxley. With millions dying from his forced famine, his physician records that Mao said, 'We have so many people we can afford to lose a few.' His successors have since persecuted and killed hundreds of thousands more.

It seems that the communists were all atheists, and they regarded atheism as inseparable from communism. The evil capitalist were supported by religion, and so religion had to go:

·       Lenin agreed with Marx that "Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man." As far as Lenin was concerned, it was quite understandable why the oppressed turn to religion: "Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters... inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death "

·       It seemed equally clear to Lenin why the capitalists turned to religion: [They] "are taught by religion to practice charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven."

·       Like Engels and Marx, Lenin believed that religion was an historical phenomenon, tied to the oppressive structures of human history such as feudalism and capitalism…In Lenin's words, "the yoke of religion that weighs upon mankind is merely a product and reflection of the economic yoke within society."

·       Lenin cites Marx and Engels that due to the fact that religion has deep roots in capitalist oppression, it will not disappear until the people completely overcome their oppression: He writes in The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion that "No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are crushed by capitalist hard labour, and who are at the mercy or the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in all its forms, in a united, organised, planned and conscious way." (http://sfr-21.org/lenin-religion.html)

This would justify the use of any form of terror. Consequently, atheism has often been an engine for mass extermination. Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was asked to account for the great tragedies that occurred under the atheistic Soviet communist regime. He explained:

·       Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old 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 spend well-nigh 50 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 60 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.” (Humber, Paul G. “Stalin's Brutal Faith,” Institute for Creation Research)

We often forget that Adolph Hitler was also a socialist – remember National Socialism – who hated religion, especially Christianity. In this regard, economist Thomas Sowell had argued that both Mussolini and Hitler had been embraced by the Left:

• In Germany, the Nazis followed in the wake of the Italian Fascists, adding racism in general and anti-Semitism in particular, neither of which was part of Fascism in Italy or in Franco’s Spain. Even the Nazi variant of Fascism found favor on the Left when it was only a movement seeking power in the 1920s.

Both Sowell and Jonah Goldberg (“Liberal Fascism”) associated Fascism with the Left:

• Fascism was not only looked on favorably by the Left but recognized as having kindred ideas, agendas, and assumptions. Only after Hitler and Mussolini disgraced themselves, mainly by their brutal military aggressions in the 1930s, did the Left distance itself from these international pariahs. Fascism, initially recognized as a kindred ideology of the Left, has since come down to us defined as being on “the Right” — indeed, as representing the farthest Right, supposedly further extensions of conservatism. If by conservatism you mean belief in free markets, limited government, and traditional morality, including religious influences, then these are all things that the Fascists opposed just as much as the Left does today. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/223648/who-fascist-thomas-sowell

Who was Hitler’s god and how did this affect his political agenda? In his new book, “Hitler’s Religion,” historian Richard Weikart attempts to pinpoint the beliefs had been central to Hitler’s worldview and his genocidal rampage. He identifies Nature:

·       Since Hitler thought that nature was God, he believed that morality was defined by conforming to nature’s laws.  One of the natural laws he thought most important was the Darwinian struggle for existence, which produced evolutionary progress.  Since the struggle in nature was vicious and resulted in the strong destroying the weak, Hitler considered it good and right to viciously destroy the weak.  He thought this would bring about a better world with superior humans.  He thought he had divine approval for annihilating the allegedly inferior races and people with disabilities.

The 20th century has often observed a strong association between atheism, Darwinism, communism, and genocide. Perhaps we need to take note of this.