Please, show us this organized, monolithic Atheism-with-a-capital-A. Or are you pointing fingers at something so nebulous and intangible as saying ‘no’ when asked a particular question? There are other questions even more people happen to agree with totalitarian dictators on the answer to: I am sure Stalin valued oxygen just as much as you and I do. Does that make us horrible people by association?
The claim that atheism itself is directly responsible for atrocities such as those committed by Stalin, Pol Pot, or Mao Zedong is ludicrous. Those crimes were carried out in the name of totalitarianism and protecting the nation; that the ‘danger’ happened to be religion in many cases is incidental. Art and literature were also frequently punished, if you’ll recall; but where’s your outrage over that?
Perhaps you would prefer the term “godless?” Yes, protecting the state from the danger of Judeo Christian values!
A State doesn’t have to declare itself an atheistic state to BE one, although Communist Russia and Communist China both did so. Stalin said his intention was to destroy the church, ask progeny of the Ukrainians about death plans for Christians during Stalin’s totalitarian regime. Hitler’s Nationalist Socialist State was his god. Thousands of Christians were his victims.
My point, which you seem to have missed, is that without the philosophical grounding of the inherent dignity of the individual, which is a given in Judeo Christian western philosophical thought and from which the concept of Natural Law derives, there is no human incentive to value personhood.
The best examples, in the 20c of such states, are the totalitarian and facists ones I mentioned. In these states, an individual is completely expendable, he has no inherent value. Therefore, since there is no absolute in terms of the “Good,” there are no human rights, life and death are totally at the arbitrary whim of a government or a dictator.
Really now? And here I’d thought atheism was a theological stance, not a question of ethics, and as such the idea of individual value was out of its scope!
What?? “Atheism. a theological stance?”." Atheism promotes godlessness, theology is the study of “God and God’s attributes and relations to the universe, the study of divine things…” Theology is antithetical to atheism.
No, there is no standard of ethics in atheistic states, therefore, the only value is arbitrary power. What would a materialist use for a standard? Morality is completely relative, therefore arbitrary.Again, that’s my point, atheistic states have no standard regarding the inherent integrity of personhood.
Uh… I don’t know where you’re getting these ‘facts’ about atheism, but they sure don’t look like anything I’m familiar with.
Uh…it’s pretty obvious. Certain axioms follow logically from atheistic materialism.
And, not to forget your example of Franco. I have no intention of defending the Church in its too late condemnation of a dictator in Spain, but it’s incontestable that Franco was NOT implementing Christian values, he was all about his own power.
This whole subject regarded a comment
A made regarding Christian influenced countries. My point is that the best shot for human dignity is in a state where Judeo Christian values are held up as the standard.
