To follow on from this point, I think it is gives a misleading and incomplete picture to say that Stalin and Hitler ruled over atheist societies. What they actually did is impose their own will upon their people through the creation of police states.
as to stalin, the communist regimes were officially atheistic, coming from marx on down through lenin, stalin, kruschev, etc. the official line of the state was atheism and stayed that way until the wall came down, they imposed a police state from the that bloody october, when a they had a revolution. that atheism allows people to be treated as statistics, tools to be used to acheive a goal. it was a complete exercise of applied relative morality, applied atheism, and the consequences of such. millions of deaths, systematic violations of human rights, and a paranoia inducing police state where nobody was safe. people did not derive their rights from G-d as special creations, but rather from what was deemed best relative to the interests of the state.
as to the hitler, he whipped up popular support, much as lenin, in the economic crisis germans faced from punitive economic measures following ww1, he offered hope, scapegoats, and a way out. but he did not do it alone, his was an applied atheism that the whole nation, and eventually also the italians, took part in. jews, gypsies, etc were just statistics, to be treated as less than stray dogs. put down because they polluted the pristine german environment.
neither of these characters did these things alone, millions of of inteligent, average pople had to cooperate with them, and they did. the process was repeated, for decades among atheist regimes, and still occurs, look at red china, officially atheistic, and devoid of human rights.
In today’s urban jungle, the messages we are constantly fed through the media and advertising tell us that we are the most important people in our own worlds, and that we are “worth it”, and that we have the right to do whatever we want - and more importantly, to buy whatever we want. There is a pervasive sense of entitlement, that might=right, and the governing principle of action has become whether or not you can get away with it. I am in complete agreement with those Christians who feel that we’ve lost our way. The only difference is that Christians meet this challenge by saying that we must turn back to God, while my own view is that we need to build a morality that is based less on individualism and more on the collective good.
i agree with most of the statement above until you get to the bolded part, that could have been lifted straighrt from communist handbooks. our own experience with that sentiment is that relative morality results in societies that treat people as statistics, tools to acheive an end. im not sure that extreme environmentalism is any better of a reason, than hitler or marx had, and i dont see how the outcome of such a system would be any different.
in fact we see the problems when we look at gas prices, we have plenty of oil for now, but we havent built a refinery in decades, squeezing supplies, and driving up prices, same with nuclear power,
when people come second to the goal, its always immoral
So easy to throw out “accusations”, isn’t it?