When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything
It becomes either belief in New Age, Crystals, UFOs, the Maharishi, or any fantasy, or mostly a sick inner-focused pride that makes oneself one’s own God. And this seems quite true.
The quote at the top was made by Malcolm Muggeridge. He began life an agnostic with communist leanings. He then traveled to the paradise where God was pronounced dead. The only belief system there was atheistic communism predicated on human reason. They would have the standard agit-prop parades of priests and rabbis being satirized and humiliated.
Muggeridge, in travelling this atheist wonderland, came across something horrific. He witnessed in 1932-33 the Bolshevik orchestrated genocide against Ukrainian farmers, their churches, and their intelligentsia. He saw the suffering, heard the cases of families so into the madness of the hunger, that mothers would steal any morsel of food from their own children and visa-versa, their own families. Children too weak to walk, collapsing on Ukraine’s streets in the millions in search of food, only to be thrown to the city dumps or cannibalized by others lost to madness. Ukraine became one great fenced-off concentration camp where its people were to learn there is no God but that only atheism was true. 5-7 million people died tragically to put an atheistic communist moral code and civilization into place, all within one year.
Muggeridge was right, no God, then plenty of fantasies like Dialectic Materialism take its place. Hey, here’s the Communist utopia we all can acheive by killing the “superstitious Church” and God.
That society demonstrates perfectly what militant atheism is capable of. As many who witnessed it attested, the lack of belief in God or a higher moral authority other than Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot, which was brainwashed into many people, resulted in perhaps the greatest killings of human history. The Black Book of Communism written by prominent French scholars of Communism puts the death toll of atheist communism at 100 million for the last century.
Christianity demands that what one has done to the least of one’s brethren, one has done to Christ. Despite, its numerous human failures, it seeks this. This is a Message ultimately of Love. Most atheist regimes and leaders have no time for love. To Lenin, who rarely used the word love, love was simply bourgeoise sentimentality which would inhibit the revolution. Lenin could watch as a student in complete apathy as people starved around him in the Volga famine, as he believed this would positively accelerate the revolution and what is one individual life in the grand scheme of atheist collectivism.
Muggeridge like many others, and not ones like us who type all sorts of witticisms comfortably from our keyboard, got to witness Incredible Evil, face-to-face. He realized the danger to the World was not in the Church, it was belief in the death of God in human history. He converted to Roman Catholicism. More than most I would venture on this particular thread, he saw Incredible Suffering on a Grand Scale face-to-face.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Muggeridge
Hitler, a believer in Nordic paganism, too barely used the word love. Stalin as well.
It’s funny that this word Love is the central one that Christians always accentuate as a Virtue. We believe in a God of Love.
The alternative of believing in nothing apart from yourself is a recipe for disaster and for self-gratification i.e. morality is what I make it or think reasonable. The fact as many philosophers have argued is that human reason has limitations too. It is not at all perfect.
Thomas Jefferson’s compatriots in the French Revolution, the radical Jacobins threw Christ out of Notre-Dame replacing Him with the Goddess of Reason. The Christian calendar was de-Christianized and France was to become de-Christianized by the guillotine and by throwing priests, monks, nuns, normal people into locked barges which were then submerged.
Maximilien de Robespierre, leader of the French Revolution and a believer in Reason alone, in his Speech before the Convention on February 5, 1794: “Terror is nothing else than justice, prompt, secure and inflexible.”
The Vendee resistance against the French Revolution in defense of the Church, in which some 300,000 French Catholic peasants were massacred in defending Christianity shows something of the extent to which French peasantry didn’t think that the Church was just venal and corrupt but were indeed faithful Catholics. Alexander Solzhenitsyn once pointed out that the mass murders of Christians in the Soviet Union was directly inspired by the massacres in the Vendee.
The French Revolutionary Terror was severe and it is utter falsehood to claim the Terror saved France. Throughout the autumn and winter of 1793, the Terror maintained unabated and Robespierre hoped to persuade the militant “sans-culottes” (Paris artisans if you want) that they shared a common cause. 3,000 executions took place in Paris; 14,000 in the provinces. Countless people feared the sound of a knock in the door in the middle of the night when most arrests took place (as in the Soviet Terror).
Saint-Just (Robespierre’s colleague) exclaimed: “We must rule by iron…You must punish not just traitors but the indifferent as well”. In Lyons, two Jacobins decided that the guillotine was too slow an instrument for their purpose and had over 300 victims mowed down by cannon fire. The Jacobins reported to Paris bluntly: “The butchery has been good”. Another eyewitness proclaimed: “What a delicious moment! How you would have enjoyed it. Worthy indeed of liberty…Wish bon jour to Robespierre.”
The Loire River became so choked with penal barges that had the Terror’s victims stripped naked and bound together in couples, that ships weighing anchor in the river would bring up anchors full of the dead. When a priest was tied up with a nun to drown together Birds of prey circled overhead, gorging themselves on human flesh, whereafter the fish became so contaminated, that orders had to be given forbidding the catching of fish. There were the infamous “republican marriages” where a man and woman, priest and nun would be stripped, tied together, and tossed overboard to die.
All this was done in the process of attempting to deChristianize France and make out of Human Reason a goddess. Well, the experiment failed, with the loathsome Robespierre finally being guillotined himself by those who had had enough.
My point is that of Dostoevsky’s: “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted”.
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