Monday School: Christian Atrocities…

It’s time once again for Monday School. It’s STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!”

Today’s Lesson: Can Christians Adequately Answer The Charge That Their Religion Has Inspired Many Terrible Atrocities?

Anyone familiar with world history knows that Christians have committed some of the worst acts of savagery that we know of.

At the same time, anyone familiar with the United States knows that a significant majority of Americans identify themselves as Christians – and apparently feel very good about doing so.

How do Christians reconcile these two facts? How can they be so happy and proud to be followers of a religion responsible for so many awful things?

In an attempt to answer these questions, I recently read an online article by Robert Meyer. He’s a Christian who seems to recognize the basic problem and apparently has tried his best to deal with it. Did he do a good job? I suppose to some degree that’s a matter of opinion. I encourage you to read his essay for yourself and then tell the rest of us your reaction.

What follows is a detailed account of mine.

Meyer begins his essay this way: “One of the age-old arguments that has been foisted against Christianity, is the canard about how Christianity is responsible for most of the world’s hatred and bloodshed. Of course we would be remiss to deny that in the historical analysis of man’s incivility to man, people and groups haven’t done evil in the name of Christ. We could list the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the European custom of burning witches and heretics, and that would merely touch on some of the more familiar atrocities. As Christians we cannot deny the black marks of our heritage, or escape being reminded of them.”

I appreciate Meyer’s willingness to recognize the obvious evils that have been perpetuated by Christians. Too bad he prefaces that recognition with such an awful opening line. The statement that “Christianity is responsible for most of the world’s hatred and bloodshed” may or may not be a canard (which my dictionary defines as “an unfounded or false, deliberately misleading story”); it is not an argument in the logical sense (arguments requiring at least two statements leading to a conclusion). Such sloppy use of language is never a good sign in discussions aimed at getting us closer to the truth, and it strikes me as an especially bad sign when it comes in an opening sentence.

Use of the word “foisted” doesn’t help matters, as it prejudges the outcome of the case yet to be made and sets a bad tone.

Worst of all, IMHO, is that Meyer seems to be attacking something of a strawman. We don’t need to believe or prove that Christianity is responsible for most of the world’s hatred and bloodshed in order for us to conclude that Christianity is an absurd religion that has inspired much that is bad and ought to be abandoned. In implying otherwise, Meyer has set the bar Christianity must clear terribly low – and SURPRISE! His Christianity apparently manages to clear it in his next few sentences even as he lists some of Christianity’s worst consequences. It’s a neat rhetorical trick, but I don’t believe it withstands close analysis.

These preliminaries out of the way, Meyer continues thusly: “Having said the above, we are able to answer the critic who uses this rational in justifying his dismissing of Christianity. There are two distinct approaches. First of all, we must insist that a sense of proportionally is brought into the argument. This is a test pertaining to the sincerity of the critic. Does he or she criticize across the board, or do they single out Christianity, as though they have a vested interest in diminishing and impugning it? Secondly we must view and evaluate Christianity as a system of thought, rather than simply evaluating it on the basis of the poor examples of a few select movements or individuals.”

It would have helped Meyer counter my sense that he was arguing against a strawman had he given us the name of a single critic whom he had in mind as he wrote these words, but he doesn’t – and by not doing so, he deepened my sense that he is arguing against a strawman.

That aside (and overlooking his use of “rational” when I suppose he meant “rationale”), his “two distinct approaches” raise problems of their own.

First of all, we do not need to insist that anyone who criticizes Christianity must criticize all similar belief systems in order to prove his or her sincerity. The “sincerity” of someone making an argument is a separate question, much as is the sincerity of lawyers in a courtroom. Like jurors, rational people are expected to decide issues on the merits of the available facts and the logic with which they cohere. Personalizing things and focusing on the motives and qualities of the people who just happen to be passing along those facts and logic is something of a fool’s game – first, because it improperly changes the question we’re trying to decide; second, because personal qualities such as “sincerity” are terribly subjective and almost impossible to determine; and third, because it’s essentially irrelevant. In my first college philosophy class, for example, my professor carefully laid out the arguments for and against gOd. It seemed pretty clear to me even then that belief in gOd couldn’t be justified, yet, when the professor allowed us to ask him anything we wanted on the last day of class and he confessed to being a theist on the basis of the so-called Argument from Design that he himself had demolished to my satisfaction earlier in the course, he only diminished himself in my eyes – not the arguments against gOd that existed independently of what he personally believed about them. Had I judged those anti-gOd arguments on the basis of the “sincerity” of the person presenting them, however, I guess I would have had to reject them in Meyer’s view. I respectfully disagree. Alas, Christians all too often seem to do exactly what Meyer has done here: Jump from a proper analysis of a case to an improper analysis of the person who happens to be making that case. This often takes the form of an ad hominem attack – and I really wish it would stop.

As for Meyer’s second point here – “we must view and evaluate Christianity as a system of thought, rather than simply evaluating it on the basis of the poor examples of a few select movements or individuals” – I think he’s grossly minimizing the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the other Christian atrocities we can cite rather than attempting to deal with them fairly. They are, after all, neither poor examples nor the work of a few misguided individuals. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” comes from the Bible itself (Ex. 22:18). So do many other justifications for similarly horrid behavior. Those who claim Christianity has often been perverted by others for their own nasty purposes fail to recognize how perverted and nasty Christianity always has been at its heart.

Parts of his next paragraph reveal the extent to which he’s willing to go to minimize the crimes of Christians: “[P]eople frequently bring up incidents such as the Crusades or the Salem Witch Trials. These are events from hundreds of years ago, yet they are dredged up as though they occurredlast week. In the case of Salem, only 19 or 20 people were executed, yet we dare to compare this with schemes of exterminations a la Hitler and Stalin.”

I happen to agree that the Salem Witch Trials tend to be over-emphasized – which is why I prefer to bring up the centuries of much more savage witch hunts conducted by Christians in Europe which Meyer himself referred to in his first paragraph but seems to have forgotten by his third.

Furthermore, if it’s wrong for us to bring up the Crusades and witch hunts because they occurred hundreds of years ago, then I guess it’s wrong for Christians to bring up those much older tales of Christians being thrown to the lions by the Romans – and perhaps even wrong to wallow in Jesus’s alleged crucifixion (as Christians did with Mel Gibson’s movie version of it last year) – but Meyer doesn’t say so, which is rather odd behavior for a man who has just attacked us for not criticizing all those who commit the same error equally.

It’s also odd that Meyer apparently thinks Hitler was a non-Christian given that Hitler seems to have identified himself as a Catholic, his speeches are heavy with Christian justifications for his ideas and policies, and the vast majority of Germans who followed Hitler were Christians.

Meyer continues: “On the other hand, when have you last heard that more people were slaughtered during the ‘enlightened’ 20th century, as a result of non-theistic causes, than all the people murdered in the name of religion since the beginning of recorded history? Secular intellectuals never seem to mention this fact because it opens the ugly can of worms on top of their ideological cake.”

Actually, I’ve not infrequently heard Christians make the claim that more people were slaughtered by atheists in the 20th century than Christians have ever slaughtered. I just don’t understand how they can possibly know this. It seems to me that they’re making lots of assumptions and jumping to a highly questionable conclusion even while many of them are busily attacking the much better supported theory of evolution (among other things).

Even if Stalin was an atheist, it doesn’t follow that everyone who killed because he told them to did so because they too were atheists. Indeed, such blind obedience to authority seems to owe much to centuries of Christian theology rather than, say, Satanic rebellion. What Paul says in the New Testament about the need for slaves to obey their masters and about the need of people to obey their leaders – none of whom allegedly come to power without gOd’s approval – seems to me to be a possibly unrecognized cause for what happened in both Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany.

Even if true, the significance of what Meyer is claiming here is less than obvious, given that far more people seem to have been alive in the 20th century than at other times – meaning that it might also be true that Christians slaughtered more people in the 20th century than they ever had before. Did Christians really perform their slaughtering at a lesser rate than atheists? I don’t think so, but if I’m wrong and they did, is that really a good defense of Christianity? It’s hard for me to see that it is….

And in his last sentence, of course, Meyer once again attacks the alleged motives of his unnamed opponents instead of staying focused on the facts he needs to focus on. *Sigh*

Meyer continues: “To this charge, the secularist will say that people like Stalin didn’t murder others because of a godless worldview, but because they were fanatics. Of course they are trying to head off any implications that secularism and atheism heavy [sic] contributed to genocide and atrocities. Here they tackle a straw man when the ball carrier is running around the end. The point is not that every humanist or atheist will engage in a career of axe murdering as a result their unbelief; but that with God out of the equation, they no longer have a foundation from which to legitimately criticize that which they say is wrong. The Russian author Dostoevsky points out that without God all acts are equivalent.”

I wish Meyer wouldn’t put words in the mouths of secularists. Wasn’t there a single one he could actually quote?

Having consulted as many bios of Stalin as I could get my hands on, *I* can say that none of them blame his murderous actions on his atheism. Instead, he seems to have learned many of the techniques essential to running a police state from the priests who ran the religious seminary he attended. And he took as his role model the very Christian Ivan the Terrible rather than any atheist.

Secularists don’t say these things in a self-serving attempt to protect atheism from criticism – they say them because the best evidence available strongly suggests that they happen to be true. Had the bios I consulted actually blamed atheism for Stalin’s reign of terror and provided examples to back them up, I would have modified my beliefs. (How many Christians are now willing to say that they’re willing to modify their beliefs in the face of new evidence?)

If atheism and secularism actually grease the skids to genocide, as Meyer seems to believe, we might rationally expect the most secular areas of the world to be hell-holes of violence right now. Instead, those areas are actually pretty peaceful while the most religious areas of the world seem to rank among the most violent. The worst atrocities in Europe since Hitler, for example, were committed in the 1990s by theists in what used to be Yugoslavia. Once again, Meyer’s claims simply do not withstand close scrutiny.

As for his assertion that eliminating gOd deprives atheists and humanists of the ability to distinguish right from wrong, I could hardly disagree more. As I’ve indicated many times before, we no more needed gOd to give us the Ten Commandments to know murder is wrong than we needed gOd to give us a book of traffic regulations to know that driving across people’s lawns at 100 mph is not the best way to get to where we want to go. The benefits of what we call moral behavior are, in fact, pretty obvious.

On the other hand, embracing gOd is hardly a guarantee of moral behavior. Indeed, all manner of atrocious behavior has been justified on the grounds that gOd basically demands that we act in apparently atrocious ways in this allegedly lesser world in order to win a desirable place in a purely hypothetical next world (as suicide bombers prove almost every day). The fact that I’ve managed to collect and post hundreds of tales this year alone of theists acting badly while finding virtually no similar tales involving atheists or humanists is a resounding indication of how off-base Meyer is here….

Meyer’s continues: “There are two distinct worldviews at loggerhead [sic]. The Judeo-Christian position, which claims that humanity, is created in God’s image; and the naturalistic worldview, which promotes the belief that man is nothing more then material and energy, which has arranged itself in its current complex form merely by chance. One can only wonder how time, plus matter, plus chance can morph into a moral imperative?”

Meyer is grossly over-simplifying matters. “The Judeo-Christian position” – as the name itself implies – is hardly one position. In fact, both Jews and Christians are further sub-divided into a confusing mass of contradictory denominations and sects that reflect a wide range of views on virtually all important issues. Like many Christians, he seems to be lumping as many theists together as he can and contrasting them with atheists when it serves his purposes while ignoring the very real differences between theists. The importance of those differences pop into sharp focus when one recalls that it’s been Christians – not atheists – who have massacred countless numbers of Jews over the course of the last 2000 years. If both Christians and Jews agree on the one thing that more than any other underpins morality, how can this be?

Furthermore, given the awful ways gOd acts in the Old Testament, saying that we’re created in gOd’s image can hardly be the firm underpinning of morality that Meyer seems to think it is.

At the same time, Meyer’s understanding of evolution, the evolution of morality, and the role chance plays in such things seems to be at least as poor as his recognition of the above issues. (See any of my entries on the creationism-evolution debate for further details.)

“The non-believer however, cannot be intellectually honest without admitting that the atrocities committed by Stalin’s purges, Hitler’s concentration camps, Mao’s red death, Pol-Pot’s killing fields, and others, are consistent with assumptions of naturalism and atheism. For example, when Stalin talks of breaking a few eggs to get an omelet, he is applying a standard of ‘survival of the fittest’ to justify his ruthless purges. We might note that animals out in the forest or jungle appeal to the sharpest teeth and fastest legs in deciding who survives. What did Hitler do but give a militaristic interpretation to the philosophy of Nietzsche?”

Setting aside Meyer’s confusion about Hitler and his crimes yet again, let me make two points:

First, the gOd and the lord that Meyer worships allegedly act in ways far worse than Stalin ever did. If Stalin broke a few eggs to make an omelet, what did Yahweh do with the Flood? And what does the Jesus of the New Testament promise to do on Judgement Day but throw the vast majority of people who have ever lived into eternal hellfire merely because they refused to believe his nonsense without evidence? What’s more, Stalin didn’t invent death, nor has anyone ever credited him with creating a world in which violent death is not only possible but common throughout the animal kingdom. If Stalin’s actions were bad, how much worse are those of an all-knowing, all-powerful gOd who created a world in which those actions were possible – and in fact did nothing to stop them once they began to unfold? How much worse is a gOd who kills far more people every year with cancer, other diseases, and natural disasters than Stalin ever did? How much worse is a gOd who has basically mandated death for every living creature? Exactly who is it in this debate who is refusing to judge all killers by the same yardstick, Mr. Meyer? I don’t think it’s me!

Secondly, if – for the sake of argument – we assume atheists and humanists do in fact embrace a “survival of the fittest” mentality, let the record show that Stalin and Hitler and the philosophies of Communism and Nazism that they promoted failed to survive. It would seem that spending one’s time and energies on war and genocide is not a successful strategy. Is that because almighty gOd intervened? Hardly. It’s because the natural world we live in does not unfailingly reward the most brutal. It does, in fact, often reward the loving and the cooperative – which is why love and cooperation are as common as they are (as Michael Shermer explains in his book, The Science of Good & Evil, and many others have attempted to explain elsewhere).

Meyer’s gOd simply makes much less sense than the atheist/humanist view that morality (like everything else) has evolved quite naturally. The imperfections of such a morality are perfectly understandable, given the imperfect nature of evolution – but what can possibly explain the imperfections of Meyer’s “perfect” gOd? Nothing but special pleading that throws fact and logic overboard whenever basic Christian beliefs are threatened by them….

“If man is merely another animal, albeit more advanced, why should he not merely develop more cunning devices to ensure his survival, rather than a moral system that is sometimes self sacrificial?”

Meyer utterly fails to recognize that love, compassion, morality and self-sacrifice are all examples of “more cunning devices” that aid our survival. Brute force isn’t the only way for us to increase our chances of survival any more than it’s the only way for plants to do so, or countless other species….

“Humanists believe that man is on an ever upward progressive journey. But if he is a merely a by-product of a cosmic accident, why should we expect a continuous flow in a progressive direction? Could he not easily go in the opposite direction by chance?”

Actually, humanists don’t believe we’re on an ever upward progressive journey. How can we, given the apparent increasing popularity of Meyer’s uninformed opinions??

If he had ever read any of Stephen Jay Gould’s books on evolution, he would know that life radiates outward in all directions like a shrub – not simply upward like a redwood.

Ah, so many misunderstandings… so little time.

“Indeed, the beginning of the 20th century was crowned with optimism, as a new gilded age of human ‘enlightenment’ which would end all armed conflict. Then came WWI and the most violent century humanity has ever known followed along.”

And let the record show that WWI was started and fought by overwhelmingly Christian nations… that WW2 was mostly a conflict between theists… that the Holocaust was perpetuated mostly by Christians… and that it was the US – one of the world’s most Christian nations – that remains the only nation in all of human history to have dropped atomic bombs on men, women, and children….

Meyer concludes with this: “The person claiming the Christian world and life view has created the worst atrocities of history, is not merely wrong, but has a vested interest in his disregard of the obvious.”

Meyer seems to be combining mere assertion with a final ad hominem shot at those who disagree with him. Was it his vested interest in defending Christianity that inspired his apparent disregard of all the counter-arguments that were obvious to me? Instead of jumping to conclusions without proof, I’ll just say “I don’t know.”

Whatever may have inspired his poorly argued essay, I do know it left me feeling sad. Why? Because as unconvincing as it was, it’s probably one of the best attempts by a Christian to deal with these issues that I’ve ever found online.

Come to think of it, that’s not just sad – it’s downright scary.

If YOU happen to be a Christian who can do better, please do so! I seem to have a sudden need to gather all the evidence I possibly can that Christians are worthy opponents rather than hopelessly self-deluded ignoramuses….