HITLER, STALIN, POL POT WERE EVIL BECAUSE THEY WERE ATHEISTS? (PART 1)

A common misconception that has been decidedly promoted among the theist community is that Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot were evil because they were atheists. The implication is, that without a god, people have no 'moral grounding' and are therefore somehow inclined to perform evil acts such as mass murder.

This is completely false. Morals and morality are natural to all humans, and are entirely separate to religious belief. Would a believer in religion suddenly decide to kill and rape if they stopped believing in god? Indeed, if morals are truly determined by religious teachings, then slavery, the stoning of adulterers, homosexuals, misbehaving children, and many of the other atrocities condoned by the Bible would not be considered atrocities at all -- they would be perfectly 'moral' things to do. 

In practice, morality is better described as being an inevitable result of the Zeitgeist (from the German phrase meaning 'the spirit of the times'), the ever-changing social understanding that we all share that determines what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior within every society.

If a person doesn't already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won’t discover this by reading the Bible or the Koran - as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.

We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn't make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery, even encouraging it and yet every civilized human being in this age recognizes that slavery is an abomination. Whatever is good in scripture, like the golden rule, can be valued for its ethical wisdom without requiring us to believe that it was handed down to us by the creator of the universe.

The argument is also intrinsically wrong for the following reasons:

The existence of gods is not contingent on who takes a theist or atheist position.

Causality is crucial in understanding any kind of relationship. The causality between examples of immoral atheists and atheism is borderline non-existent, in most cases - as much to the point as saying that Hitler and Stalin were both bad because they had mustaches.

The causality between immoral actions is much greater with religions. Perhaps the purest and most recent example is the attacks on various European cartoonists drawing pictures of Islam's Mohammad. Were the attackers not Muslim, it's doubtful they would take such violent offense.

It denotes grave misunderstandings of history as will be discussed later in this section.

Read Part 2 here: 

Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot were evil because they were atheists?

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