The Atheist Atrocities Fallacy – Hitler, Stalin & Pol Pot

[whatthehey]

31. And another strawman

The point of the article is that lack of religion is not a motivating force for tyranny.

It is not that religion always motivates tyranny, or that only religion motivates tyranny, or that tyranny would be absent were it not for religion. Disputing any of these is picking an easy, but false target and pretending you have addressed the argument.

The folks at ISIS or whatever they are called this week are indisputably exercising tyranny motivated by religion. They may want secular power and wealth too, but they want those things in the context of a fundamentalist Islamic caliphate. Not only do they say so, where Stalin et al never claimed to be acting for atheism for obvious reasons, but they also act as if that were a true motivation, by imposing the strictest interpretations of Islamic law in their hegemony.

The abortion clinic bombers, gay nightclub bombers and doctor shooters are also indisputably committing terrorism and slaughter motivated by religion. They also both say so and act accordingly. Their conveniently remote-diagnosed "mental health issues" even if by coincidence genuine somehow never direct them to shoot pederastic priests or hetero adulterers, only targets whose "sin" they believe to be against fundamentalist Christianity.

Atheism lacks a similar group. There are legions of genuinely atheist and genuinely evil people (incidentally a tautology very few DU Christians indeed will echo, even though their legions are far far larger) byt there are two very important distinctions:

1)These legions neither claim nor act as if atheism were a motivating force for their evil, despite false RW media attempts to pretend so in cases like the wholly made up Columbine questionings. Stalin for example never went after folks who prayed privately, only the power structure of the church. It was potential rivals with premade power-bases not different theistic positions he wanted to get rid of. Religious evil people very often do claim and act in a way consistent with religion as a motivator.

2)There is nothing in atheism that claims to be a moralizing or behavior modification influence for good. Atheism has no normative rules or code which members even supposedly must follow. The morality of folks who have atheism as an attribute says nothing at all about whether atheism is achieving any of its supposed influence, since it claims none. The Abrahamic faiths and most other religions I'm aware of do claim to enjoin a moral code on their followers. Many, Christianity front and center, claim an improvement effect. You can claim your church/sect may not but parole hearings, the mainstream media and the very language itself say that this supposed positive correlation between belief and morally virtuous behavior is ingrained in our majority-Christian culture. The words "Thanks, that's mighty atheist of you" have never been said except in irony or satire. Thus when this supposed influence and motivation for better behavior has the opposite effect, it DOES say something about religion achieving its often-claimed ability to improve morality.