New Atheist Sam Harris, insists that faith is responsible
for the vast majority of the atrocities that have occurred in history, and that
faith is driving humanity towards apocalypse:
A
glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which
divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter,
generally have their roots in religion. (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror,
and the Future of Reason p.12)
Of course, Adolph Hitler, Mao Tse Tung and Joseph Stalin
were together responsible for the death of between 80 and 109 million
non-combatants.
Harris believes these deaths ought to be blamed on
faith. His reasoning?
Consider
the millions of people who were killed by Stalin and Mao: although these
tyrants paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a
political religion … Even though their beliefs did not reach beyond this world,
they were both cultic and irrational. (p.79)
The
rise of Nazism in Germany required much in the way of “uncritical
loyalty.” Beyond the abject (and religious)
loyalty to Hitler, the Holocaust emerged out of people’s acceptance of some
very implausible ideas. (p.100, italics in the original)
Harris’s extraordinary assertions aside, these men were all
atheists and socialists. For their recent arrival on the world stage,
these ideologies certainly have a disproportionate volume of blood on their
hands. This is without taking in account Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge who
was responsible for another two million lives lost – 25% of the Cambodian
population.
What should this tell us about atheism and socialism?
Whenever
you hear that people have begun killing noncombatants intentionally and
indiscriminately, ask yourself what dogma stands at their backs. What do these
freshly minted killers believe? You will find that it is always – always – preposterous. (p.106)
Of course, I am using Harris's propensity for vitriol and overstatement
against him. Neither atheism nor socialism inevitably results in holocausts.
But Harris’s view on religion clearly does not bear scrutiny.
