COMMENTARY: Myths, Motives Of Human Imperfection

Acompanion to the myth atheism is a more rational belief than monotheism is the myth monotheists are the perpetrators of the worst atrocities of history.

Focusing primarily on Christianity, conservative scholar Dinesh D’Souza debunks this myth in his 2007 book, “What’s So Great About Christianity.”

D’Souza considers the major crimes committed in religion’s name, including early Christian-Muslim conflicts, the Inquisitions, witch trials, etc. and the Thirty Years War, which began over religion but continued for secular reasons.

Only Islam’s early wars of conquest and Christendom’s Crusades were primarily religious confl icts. Atheists’ simplistic, inaccurate scapegoating of religion ignores the territorial, ethnic and power motivations of the Sunni-Shiite, Balkans, Palestinian-Israeli, Northern Ireland and other confl icts. D’Souza demonstrates that atheistic anti-Christian hysteria exaggerates Christian crimes while “while neglecting or rationalizing the vastly greater crimescommitted by secular and atheist fanatics.”

Atheism is at the heart of Stalin’s murder of 20 million of his own people, Mao Zedong’s slaughter of up to 70 million Chinese, Hitler’s extermination of 10 million “inferior” Jews, homosexuals, socialists, Gypsies, and others and Pol Pot’s killing of over a million Cambodians. When the state is supreme, there’s no room for a supreme being. Atheism is in the DNA of Marxism and its Fascist brother.

The Spanish Inquisition and the witch trials in America and Europe are Christendom’s darkest hours. Estimates vary wildly, but fewer than 150,000 were executed in the Inquisitions and 60,000 in witch trials. Every death was an injustice, a tragedy, and an aff ront to God. Even if we double that number to account for heretic burnings andkillings by various hothead believers, then extrapolate for differences in world population, the total is less than 2 million deaths.

That’s horrible.

But monotheists are bumbling amateurs compared with atheists, who have killed more than 100 million people in the last hundred years.

The myth of religion as a force for evil and atheism as a force for good is indeed a pernicious falsehood.

The larger point is atrocities by Christians violate Jesus’s commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves, but atrocities by atheists are a logical consequence of a godless worldview.

Of course, many, maybe most, atheists do their best to live admirable, humane values. However, when those values are not from divine revelation, equality and freedom are but arbitrary choices. One atheist, perhaps moved by John Lennon’s “Imagine,” may choose the value of being happy and making others happy. He might be a nice friend.

Another, one who actually embraces the song’s implications, may choose subjugating, killing, and imprisoning others toadvance his happiness. He might be a Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Kim of North Korea, or atheist hotheads like the Columbine shooters.

Without transcendent morality or divine judgment, he is free to be “living for today” or killing for it. No matter.

Most atheists undoubtedly condemn such “evil.” But doing so can be nothing but personal taste, sometimes embroidered with philosophical rationalization.

Such is the point of Frederich Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity: Christianity declares certain acts as evil in themselves, not “bad” because an inferior person did them. In Nietzsche, as in nature, the strong rule.

He saw clearly that the “death of God” is the death of equality.

In his 1989 Atlantic magazine essay, “Can We Be Good Without God?”, late University of Massachusetts professor Glenn Tinder endorsed but lamented Nietzsche’s analysis: the Christian worldview is essential metaphysical foundation to the western political ideals of equality and freedom.

And it’s fading.

Tinder argued God’s perfect love for us, agape, reconciles our exaltation by God with our fallen nature. God’s love gives us radical freedom, which we too often use to attempt to displace Him.

This is pride, the atheist’s error. It promotes Man - in the guise of the state, scientism, pleasure, etc.

  • to God’s position.

Pride is root of Christian sins as well. That atheist atrocities have been worse than Christian ones is no cause for celebration.

“All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” The Christian, though, receives grace torecognize and repent of sin. Repeatedly. We all crucify Christ daily.

Today, we are blessed to celebrate God’s agape.

That love was made fl esh in Christ’s crucifi xion and resurrection, acts both human and divine.

Christians live in unsuccessful but often sincere imitation of Christ.

Fortunately, our imperfect efforts to love selfl essly neither condemn nor save us; we need only accept God’s love. Such is the gift of Easter.

BUDDY ROGERS IS A RETIRED ARMY OFFICER WHO LIVES IN ROGERS.

Opinion, Pages 11 on 03/31/2013

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