Former fundamentalist preacher Dan Barker and his wife Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-presidents of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, believe America is becoming a theocracy. “[Religion is] the source of the greatest violence in the world,” Gaylor said. “More people have been killed in the world for religion over any other reason.”[1] Actually, atheism has been responsible for more than 100 million deaths during the twentieth century. As Joel McDurom writes in The Return of the Village Atheist, “in an early private notebook Marx wrote, ‘Communism begins at the outset with atheism.’”[2] What has been the result?
At the end of the Darwinian atheists’ first great experiment in civil government, 1917–1991, at least 85 million residents of Communism’s officially atheistic social laboratories had been either executed or starved to death by their rulers. The more likely figure is a hundred million, according to The Black Book of Communism. The total may have been higher. Mao’s strategy of systematic extermination may have resulted in tens of millions of executions not recorded or else not yet made available to researchers. What went on in Castro’s Cuba has been recorded in horrifying detail.[3] What has gone on in North Korea has not been equally well recorded. The death toll from starvation is in the millions. This is the survival of the fittest, Darwinist-style.[4]
Barker and Gaylor believe that “reason and kindness” should replace “superstition and ideologies.” Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot thought they were being quite reasonable as they implemented their purges. Barker and Gaylor need to read the literature of their fellow atheists. The French revolutionaries of the eighteenth century elevated reason to high art, turning it into a goddess and confirming its legitimacy by the blood of the guillotine. Kindness is a great thing, but atheists cannot account for it given atheistic assumptions. Try telling a lion to be kind to a gazelle or a serial killer to be kind to his victims.
What Barker and Gaylor do not understand is that atheism is theocratic with the human animal as the final arbiter of truth. If atheists get their way, they will be running the world in terms of some ultimate principle. At the moment, atheists have the benefit of a vibrant Christian worldview where they can borrow moral plugs like compassion and kindness to keep their hole-filled materialist boat afloat. Given time, future generations of atheists will logically throw off these moral precepts that at one time had been mined from “ancient literature.”[5] Consistency will lead these newly empowered atheists to conclude that “kindness” is a superstitious remnant of an ancient book-led religion that once proposed that immaterial entities exist. Science will show that there is no way to account for these religion-defined virtues given naturalistic assumptions. It’s the apostle Paul who defines love as being “patient” and “kind” (1 Cor. 13:4). When atheists no longer have Christianity to borrow from, from what bank will they draw their moral capital?
Don’t be fooled by the charge that a new theocratic form of government is threatening America; it’s already here. For example, there is a new secular Third Commandment that says, “Thou shalt not take the name of a homosexual in vain.” Atheist Arthur C. Clarke demonstrates the religious nature of materialism and what it will mean for those who disagree with its tenets: “Though I am the last person to advocate laws against blasphemy, surely nothing could be more antireligious than to deny the evidence so clearly written in the rocks for all who have eyes to see!”[6] Atheists are living, breathing theocrats!
Footnotes:
[1] Quoted in Dan Harris and Paul Beban, “Atheists Battle Against Religion” (March 4, 2007): http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Politics/story?id=2923057&page=1
**[2]**Karl Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 3 (1844).
**[3]**Armando Valladeres, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro’s Gulag (New York: Encounter Books, [1986] 2001).
**[4]**Joel McDurmon, The Return of the Village Atheist (Power Springs, GA: American Vision, 2007), .
**[5]This statement was made by Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith (Quoted in Harris and Beban, “Atheists Battle Against Religion”). He describes land disputes between Israelis and Palestinians to be the result of promises made in the “ancient literature” of the Bible. His logic is clear: Get rid of the Bible and land disputes go away. And so on atheist judgment day, what justification will Hitler give for taking over France and Poland? What motivated the Soviet Union to take over Eastern Europe? It wasn’t the Bible. In time, the Constitution will be “ancient literature.” We send men to war to defend its principles. How do these examples fit into Harris’ paradigm?
[6]**Arthur C. Clarke, “Foreword,” in James Randi, An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), xii–xiii.