Atheists have used their amoral principles to wreak unthinkable violence against their fellow human beings around the world.
Joseph Stalin was a man committed to the dream of a civilization of power set free from the constraints of belief in God. Early in his life he had been a student preparing for ministry in the Russian Orthodox Church. He eventually came to reject God and all religion as the mere invention of man. Later in life he went on to build one of the first officially atheistic states in the world.
Stalin was probably personally responsible for the deaths of more innocent people than anyone who has ever lived. In the forced famines of 1932 he engineered to bring about the collectivization of Russian farming. It has been estimated the he purposely starved to death some seven million land owning farmers. Millions more were executed or taken to the gulags.
Mao Tse-Tung, the infamous Communist Chinese dictator, was a committed atheist – so committed, in fact, that he exerted the considerable might of the Chinese army and political apparatus to force, as far as he possibly could, all Chinese citizens under his regime into atheism.
Mao Tse-Tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of a quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime.
In Cambodia, under the dictator Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime, more than two million human beings were executed or worked to death by their atheist guards acting under orders from their atheist boss.
It would be dishonest to suggest that these dictators had no connection with their materialistic worldviews. Atheism as a worldview teaches us that right and wrong are a matter of subjective personal opinion – entirely relative and thus, gives us reason to treat others as a means to our ends. In essence, the naturalist worldview doesn’t teach us to be good.
How were Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Pol Pot able to commit such horrible crimes? Because they viewed these human beings as the mere product of evolution. How can anything be wrong if God does not exist? We may not like what some have done. But how can it be objectively wrong?
From “The Godless Delusion” by Patrick Madrid and Kenneth Hensley.