09.29.06
Atheism and Marxism
Review of Dawkins and comments here.
I see no problem in theory with a robust secular humanism, but that is just the problem, it isn’t robust. And it is worth considering the history of Marxism and Communism. The founders of movements, and their first generations, are intelligent enough to not degenerate into idiot versions of their platform. Then slowly but surely the form takes over and the extreme distortions emerge. Thus, it is worth pondering the possible fate of the Dawkins mini-movement of Darwinized atheism, and ask if it can do anything but end badly. Dawkins denounces religion, but what else is this Darwinian cult with its atheist enthusiasts? Actually, as a diffuse social philosophy with no central organization in the midst of multiple positive interactions and dialectical encounters this trend toward organized atheism remains within reason and safe from itself, able to do some good. But one sees the whiff of intolerance already there. And the example of Marxism is worth studying, along with its roots in the era of post-Hegelian Feuerbach, positivism, and the whole nine yards.
Dawkins is outraged (that religious opinions lead people to terrible crimes), but I fear that Darwinism is so corrupted, and was from the beginning. You know, Darwin the dunce took sides in the Crimean War and applied his theory to that situation. As for Social Darwinism,…well, check out William Jennings Bryan on that subject.
Bad Marxism ended up spoiling socialist hopes. Will this junky Darwinized humanism spoil modernity?
Dawkins is inexhaustibly outraged by the fact that religious opinions lead people to terrible crimes. But what, if there is no God, is so peculiarly shocking about these opinions being specifically religious? The answer he supplies is simple: that when religious people do evil things, they are acting on the promptings of their faith but when atheists do so, it’s nothing to do with their atheism. He devotes pages to a discussion of whether Hitler was a Catholic, concluding that “Stalin was an atheist and Hitler probably wasn’t, but even if he was… the bottom line is very simple. Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism.”
Yet under Stalin almost the entire Orthodox priesthood was exterminated simply for being priests, as were the clergy of other religions and hundreds of thousands of Baptists. The claim that Stalin’s atheism had nothing to do with his actions may be the most disingenuous in the book, but it has competition from a later question, “Why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief [atheism]?”—as if the armies of the French revolution had marched under icons of the Virgin, or as if a common justification offered for China’s invasion of Tibet had not been the awful priest-ridden backwardness of the Dalai Lama’s regime.