Religion and atheism: How deadly are they, if at all?

[DigitaL VampirE]

The excitement of the moment in the nonfiction publishing industry is the cause of atheism.

Because public appearances sell books, the authors - including scientist Richard Dawkins and essayist Christopher Hitchens - go on the road to deliver talks and speeches to support their points of view, which, in turn, support book sales.

Christians always should pay attention when atheists speak, and especially when they take the lectern in the public square. They bring up a lot of important points that believers should think about.

For one example, Dawkins' strong suit is his argument against the rationality of belief in God.

Christians - and not just their opinion leaders - need to check out what he has to say, objectively, and not merely to line up opposing arguments. They need to pay attention to what they fail to explain, and prepare themselves to discuss it intelligently.

For another, it helps to know what they have to say even if it doesn't sound too honest. Take Hitchens' grave warning: "Religion kills."

Well, yes. Religion kills, all right. So we've seen, in the Crusades, the pogroms, the Inquisition, the modern Sunni-versus-Shiite violence. And that's bad, as reasonable, peace-loving people should agree.

But it is not the only reason why people kill other people - and may play no greater part in social or cultural decisions to declare war, or attack without warning, than other reasons.

"If it was not for God, we would have nothing to war over" and "Religion is genocide," a vandal scrawled on a church door Downtown, three years ago. We pointed out then how that was only half true, if that.

Russian dictator Josef Stalin, an atheist, starved 10 million people to death in the Ukraine, and Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, also an atheist, sowed more than 1 million bodies onto Cambodia's killing fields.

Pot's atheism was in the mold of Mao Zedong, under whom the body count of the Cultural Revolution is only guessed at, often conservatively, somewhere in the hundreds of thousands.

But does that mean atheism kills? It may be argued that the influence of atheism, which eliminates practical faith in God, allows a culture to place a lower value on human life. But the same can be said about religion, in several circumstances.

Read the words uttered early last week by Abu Jandal al-Dimashqi, who advertises himself as the leader of an Islamic group called Tawhid and Jihad: "Our people in Syria, how do you accept to be ruled by the vulgar Nassiries? . . . (R)ise up as one man to chop their legs and heads." "Nassiries" is a Sunni term for the Alawites, Shiite Muslim subset to which Syrian leader Bashar Assad belongs.

That sounds like a direct suggestion to commit genocide for reasons connected to religion - at least, to us. Still, the condemnation of opposition is the central theme, and not necessarily religion.

The consideration of religion would be the only difference between al-Dimashqi's call and the orders Mao sent down to the Red Guard to find certain types of people and arrest, torture, imprison and, if necessary, kill them. In the hands of someone determined to eliminate opposition, one difference is as good as another.

The truth is that atheism and religion stand on the same, blood-soaked level, one as culpable as the other. But the reason for that is atheism and religion are not strict opposites.

Atheism is not the opposite of religion, but of faith, specifically in God or, for that matter, any god or gods. Religion is the demonstration of faith, defined in prosaic terms in James' epistle: "To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world."

Faith is the basic idea of belief - "the substance of things hoped for," as the writer of Hebrews put it.

Does faith kill? Well, we can say that people have been killed because of their faith. Often, those people accepted their beliefs despite the threat of death.

Why? Because their faith redefined the way they looked at life, to the point that the God it connected them to was more important than self-preservation - or political or cultural dominance.

In those cases, the believers were given their lives back, in fuller measure - saved, some people say, to a calling beyond whatever surrounded them and bound them to Earth.

So we're left with the dismal fact that religion and atheism can kill, because as practical belief systems, they allow such abuse, even if they should not.

Investigation and experience tell us, however, that faith can and does save life, sometimes in a quite practical sense, in too many examples to list here.

Does atheism do that?

Stan Nelson column