21st-century Christian Philosopher

Back and Forth

“Faith is dangerous,” says the atheist. “It’s trail of blood through history is a well-known fact.”

“Oh yeah?” says the apologist, “Then explain the bloody history of Communist atheists!!” And then they go on to cite that in a century communists had killed more people than were killed in millenia by religions. Like the Inquisition on speed.

To which the atheist counters: 1) communists are religious, and 2) the abuse by communists cannot be traced back to their atheism.

They contrast this by maintaining that a theist–and more to the point: a Christian–may kill as an act of following that faith.¹

This argument can be very convincing unless you’re watching for the sleight of hand. I’ll have to admit, I don’t always see the trick at first. But I usually catch up.

What I plan to discuss in the following sections is 1) the theistic faith is comparable in claim #2, and that these claims for atheism do not tend to be “fair” in application.

Simple Belief

First of all, no one kills another on the simple belief that there is a God and he cares about you. Even if you believe that he cares about people of your kind, specifically, there is still at least a small leap that has to be made to “God cares for me, but others are useless, so I can and should kill them.”

Now I’ve always felt that this objection had value, but I wasn’t able to put it to work as more than a pendantic stipulation. However, repetitive musings on this quibble have focused my mind on what larger issue that it points to.

Given that stipulation, theism is equivalent to atheism in that nobody is likely to kill as a direct result of either. Of course the counter is that theism isn’t just theism, in most cases. Generic theists are so often identified as deists, that the Deists come to claim them as their own. So theism has content. In the case of the Hebrews, the Torah and Tanach and, to some degree, the Midrash. And Christians have the Gospels and Epistles.

The “simple case” begs to be broken into specific cases. Simple theism is academic and does not exist out in the wild. But in real beliefs there is content. The Bible tells how God told the children of Israel to drive the Canaanites from their land. So from there, you can see how people would get the idea to kill people based on faith.

Except it doesn’t work that way, either. Even granted that God told the Israelites to drive people from the valley because he is giving the land to them as fulfillment of his promise. It is not directly conclusive that God is directing you to do anything. It can make one perhaps more likely to believe that God might in your case. But with counters like Paul’s statement that we do not fight wars “according to the flesh” with weapons “not of the flesh”, it still is not flat out evident or even basic that God is calling you to do so.

It has something to do with our Faith, but it is not as a direct result of it.

…And Remorse

Now almost on cue, I feel sludge of dread pouring over me at having thought this. It sounds like so little to say about so much. It sounds like a difference that makes little difference. Surely the lives of people warrant more than just some convenient side-stepping?!

And it is this emotional reaction, and my lament that I may be wrong, that has kept me from looking at this any further. But as far as the argument goes, if we curl over at this point in shame, sorrow and remorse, you likely do not see the atheists walking away, arms raised in victory.

But on the other hand, victims of Communism were still killed en mass by atheists. Not a-any-unbeknownst-to-them-religion-ists, but a-theists. If it is a sin for me to try to get God off on any technicality, then the force of the atheist argument is not that they have points, but how strong those points are.

We must weigh coldly the amount to which stipulations apply to either side. Should we find that atheist arguments are just as thin.

So here we have fact #1. I’ve never accepted it as a fact. I have reasons for doubting that “secular religion” is anything but a dodge by atheists selling their “product”. But I can still argue as if it were given. So I will.

Secular religionists are religionists not theists. Thus, under “religion” it is possible for people to fall in the realm of “disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings” and still believe in things that get people killed in bunches.

The sudden switch to “religion” is a bit of sleight of hand. But as tasty as that morsel sounds, I’ll leave that to a future time, unless it cuts back into the conversation.

Godlessness

What is “atheism”? If we are to know that the murders of the Communists didn’t directly flow from atheism, then we need to know what the limits of atheism are. Atheism is simply “disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings” (dictionary.com).

Darned if they aren’t right! From that definition, I can hardly tell how I would be compelled to kill people for that. But then again, it is maintained as entirely content-less.

Atheism, broadly defined, it is the absence of belief in the existence of any gods. atheism.about.com

Lower on the page, answering the question: “Does Godless Atheism Have Implications for One’s Philosophy or Ideology?”

Atheism, which is the mere disbelief in the existence of gods, has no inherent philosophical or political implications. ibid

This, I refer to as “content-less”[^2]. So it has no content. It is the “disbelief” or as most atheists request “lack of belief”. “No inherent philosophical implications.”

However, link on the sidebar is kind of questionable: “Atheist Activism & Politics”. What is there to be “active” about as an atheist? I don’t see it in a disbelief; I don’t see it in a lack of belief. So despite that there is no direct path from simple atheism to “activism”, such a thing can exist. Atheists, it seems, are not content to be simple atheists.

Deny Everything

First of all it’s kind of cheap ploy to compare a system with content to a system without content. There are implications in Christianity, moral and otherwise. It’s what makes me feel great shame or remorse that I am wrong on this issue. It’s the guilt card that can only be played on a system that promotes moral guilt.

And it does nothing more than confirm what I already suspected about faith vs. doubt: It’s easier to doubt and find fault, than to have faith and build. That is ultimately why, although I employ skepticism rather readily, I don’t find consummate value in it.

So I’m not surprised that they’re innocence is easier to maintain. If you hold that nothing follows from simple disbelief, then, how much more could a pogrom follow from it. It can’t.

It’s not something especially admirable of atheists, its just something that if it’s true in the general case, it’s true in the specific case. It’s a trivial exercise from the clause of easy deniability that they’ve dealt themselves.

But is easy deniability the response we want on the subject of hundreds of millions of people slaughtered for non-theistic causes? Isn’t that really in the neighborhood of the stipulation that I could only advance once I saw it pointing to more relevance?

The Witness of History

Also, it’s pretty trivial that no government would ever be defined in strict accord with atheism. Here’s where the work of specific atheists comes into play. Let’s lasso everyone who showed more doubt than their peers and the prominent “myths” of that society. Thus the rationalists who rebelled against the monarchy in France, and the generic theists that founded our country are forward indicators of the value that atheism (as a trend) would bring.

Thus atheism is not seen as a lack of belief, but a historical development. It’s the source of the boast that used to be more common among atheists about religion going the way of the dodo. But it’s not really content-less, and again the development of the Communists occur in history and counter the claim that incremental atheism has been a source of anything.

It also never fell within the bounds of being “traceable directly to their atheism”. So thus, historical progression “toward” atheism is lauded as representative of atheism despite any direct traceability to it, but we sidestep historical developments we don’t like so much. Because they don’t follow directly from a content-less definition of atheism. With each step in the “progression” not coming directly from their atheism.

Which leaves the idea that some doubt is good. Some self-doubt is good. My theology of self-doubt comes from the Bible. The content of Christianity also councils against “self-righteousness”. We are told to examine ourselves. I do not find glib Christianity ideal Christianity.

From here, the atheistic counter can only sound a bit like, “well if a little doubt was good, more ought to be better!” But they would never do that, outside of arguing the historical progression, because that would be a general claim with consequences that had to be defended.

For everything I can think of that they don’t have a solid guide for–where the individual atheist must “find out for themselves”–I can cite scripture where it is more clearly laid either in relief against the Law, or in relation to the mission of Christ.

Q: What would a state of ultimate doubt look like?

A: Is there a reason to have such a state?

Is there such a thing as a historical progression? Might that be many things mixed together into one jumble, where the “essence” is simply abstracted and promoted?

Again, to advance something, there needs to be a claim: The atheist brand cleans whiter than the competing brands. Any such claim could never be a direct consequence of a disbelief. Instead it is the consequence of a belief.

In summing up the direct context of the quote yanked from the end of Chapter 2 of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, I still hadn’t touched on the most grievous abuse.

I believe that I did quite the adept job of laying out the actual context of Hitler’s quote. What you should know, however, is that I could have backed up through the most of that near 30-page chapter.

As attractive as it is to make Hitler a total loon who couldn’t put three coherent sentences together, that’s not the case. The chapter is fairly well structured. It starts with about a page and a half of introduction, telling us about his previous visits to Vienna, and then launches into the topic sentence about this particular stay:

In this period my eyes were opened to two menaces of which I had previously scarcely known the names, and whose terrible importance for the existence of the German people I certainly did not understand: Marxism and Jewry.

And it takes off from there. The next 30 or so pages are fairly well structured. With each topic section arranged more or less by a time line. Hitler discusses just how he learned about the “two menaces” and his reflections on them. Quite a lot of it dwells on the victimization of the lower class, both by the bourgeoisie, propelling them into self-destructive cycles, and then in turn by the Marxists who prey upon the people’s need to escape these conditions. And as he saw Jewish people behind Marxism, he hated them as well.

In keeping with his statement that he had “scarcely know the names,” — along with writing that his father would have been scandalized by the word, he writes:

…[T]he Jew was still characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I maintained my rejection of religious attacks…. Consequently, the tone … of the Viennese antiSemitic press … seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation. I was oppressed [italics mine] by the memory of certain occurrences in the Middle Ages, which I should not have liked to see repeated.

…

I was reinforced in this opinion by what seemed to me the far more dignified form in which the really big papers answered all these attacks [of the smaller antiSemitic presses], or, what seemed to me even more praiseworthy, failed to mention them; in other words, simply killed them with silence.

What follows is not Hitler recounting that he discovered that they should repeat occurrences in the Middle Ages. If you expect, from the featured quote, to find that the Jews “killed Christ,” that’s not in there. If you expect to hear how the Jews were enemies of the faith–that they lied and blasphemed about Christ–that’s not in there either. In fact if you go to that page and search for “Christ” you’ll only find two hits talking about the “Christian Social Party/movement”. That’s it.¹

He writes about the failings of the press: “the undignified fashion in which this press curried favor with the Court [of the Hofburg Palace of the Hapsburg's, I guess].” He also write about the “loathsome cult for France” and their “saccharine hymns of praise to the ‘great cultural nation.’” He says he found a particular anti-semitic paper to be more dignified in its treatment of the Hapsburg Court.

It has more to do with Hitler’s “observation” that the Jews were involved in vice, owned major portions of the press which praised France and Jewish authors and artists and seemed to denigrate Germans. They needled William II, and in general made the Germans feel inferior for being Germans. That’s what Hitler saw.

We already know that Hitler was a nationalist. We already know that he had a strong love for Germany. And almost anybody who read the first three chapters could recognize that Hitler wore his hate on his sleeve. He hates the Hapsburg’s; he hates the Social Democrats, he hates anybody that stands in the way of the rise of Germany.

In other words, if you wanted to know Hitler’s motivations, about how Hitler came to his conclusion, how he convinced himself he was right, how he transformed himself from a “weak-kneed cosmopolitan” to an anti-Semite, the best thing to do is READ THE CHAPTER.

I can’t tell you a more slovenly way than pulling a quote the summary statement and making that the sole expression of Hitler’s hatred of Jews. And to do this without weighing not just the last 4 paragraphs, but the flesh and muscle of the chapter.

Oddly enough, I’ve read one historian that says that Hitler did not become anti-semitic this early in his his life. That he is lying in this chapter, and he is playing to the masses. How can we consider that he might be overplaying the anti-semitism for which he is more than known, and not accept that there might be a little flourish of populist language in the last little sentence?

The counter is that people take Hitler as a major propagandist, but if he says he is doing it for the Lord, we have to take Hitler’s word as gospel. On the other hand, I don’t need Hitler to be reliable on this, I just need to point out that his text, whatever the truthfulness of it, is arranged fairly logically. The whole of this chapter paints a quite different picture than what we’re supposed to take from the quote.