Defending Atheism
Aug 25th, 2008 by nick
The Colorado Springs Gazette wrote an incredibly offensive editorial about atheism last week. To save you from wasting your time on this drivel, I’ll quote the most egregious part of the editorial here.
Hitler imagined a world without Jews. The Freedom From Religion Foundation rented a billboard near the Colorado Convention Center that says: “Imagine No Religion.”
Imagine a world with no religion and one sees a world without the Golden Rule, devoid of most charities, hospitals and great universities. One sees hurricane recovery zones, minus all the chartered planes and buses full of churchgoers giving their time and money to rebuild homes. How many children are fed and clothed by atheist charity organizations? Approximately none.
Imagine no religion and one sees a world ruled by atheist tyrants - Pol Pot, Albania’s Enver Hoxha, Stalin and Mao, to name a few - who have murdered tens of millions in modern efforts to cleanse society of religion.
I couldn’t let that stand unchallenged, so wrote the following letter to the editor.
I understand the Gazette’s point that it’s silly for atheists to demand participation in an interfaith service at the Democratic National Convention (“Dems Dismiss The Atheists,” Our View, August 20.) However, comparing atheists to Hitler and saying that a lack of religion would lead to “a world ruled by atheist tyrants,” is fallacious and offensive. To prove its point, the Gazette lists a few supposedly atheist dictators. I can just as easily enumerate a list of religious tyrants: Osama Bin Laden, Franciso Franco, Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, and so on. What does that prove? You can’t judge an entire population based on a few rogue examples.
The Gazette goes on to claim that only religiously based organizations perform charity work and that in a world with no religion, there would be no charity. That’s plainly false. The largest private charity organization in the world, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is secular. Plenty of atheists work with and contribute to such organizations without feeling the need to explicitly declare their atheism.
Moving beyond the facts, the underlying logic behind these spurious assertions is fundamentally flawed. Atheists are perfectly capable of living morally and ethically, contributing to society, and ruling fairly and justly. By insisting otherwise despite a lack of evidence, the Gazette only exposes its irrational bias against non-theists.
Unfortunately, the Gazette chose not to publish my letter, probably because I didn’t send it until the day after the editorial was published. On the positive side, they published three other letters critical of the editorial, and a column-length response from Becky Hale, the Freethinker mentioned in the original editorial (which unfortunately doesn’t appear to be online).
Great post! Too bad they didn’t publish your letter. Here is some more to add to your argument:
From a historical perspective, a belief in God is obviously no guarantee of virtuous or moral behavior. What about the numerous religious wars that have plagued the world since the dawn of time? What about the Inquisition and the Witch burnings in Europe during the Middle Ages, when tens of thousands of Jews, other non-Catholics, and women were murdered in the name of Christianity? What about the recent scandal of hundreds of priests accused of sexual abuse?