Willingly Blind

The Fruits of Atheism

The huffing, puffing, militant atheists have an argument that runs in the following form.  Evil exists in the world due to the incomplete, imperfect stages of more primitive creatures.  Evil will be progressively eradicated as mankind achieves an ever higher evolutionary state.  Religion and religious belief reflects a more primitive condition of humanity beyond which man is progressively evolving.  Therefore, religion and evil are inextricably bound together.  If you are primitive, you will likely be religious.  If you are religious you will be evil.

We are not concerned so much at this point with the asinine internal contradictions in the ruminations above.  What we wish to focus upon at this point is the implicit proposition that atheism and, therefore, atheist civilizations are at a more advanced stage of evolution than religious ones.
  Simplistically, Christendom was ignorant, superstitious and primitive.  It was, consequently, bloodily evil.  But atheist civilisations are more advanced and enlightened (by definition): consequently they are more righteous, less violent, evil, or bloody.

Except that rarely do atheists actually offer empirical evidence to establish the claims about pacific atheist societies.

The Christian position to this is pretty straightforward.  Religious civilisations (Byzantine empire, Western Christendom) continued to be plagued by the same evil and sin which plagues the heart of every man.  Consequently, such Christian nations and civilisations were responsible at times for grossly evil deeds.  Worse--evil was done at times in the name of the Christian faith.  But such evil, lamentable as it was and remains, pales in comparison to the manifest and relentless evil that has flowered in every atheist civilization.
As Peter Hitchens has argued:

Each revolutionary generation reliably repeats the savagery.  The Bolsheviks knew all about the French revolutionary terror, but that did not stop them having their own.  The Chinese Communists knew all about Stalin's intentional famine and five-year-plans, but they repeated the barbarity with the Great Leap Forward.  The Khmer Rouge were not ignorant of their revolutionary forerunners [having learnt Marxist ideology and Communist history in Paris], yet they repeated the evil worse than before.  The supposedly enlightened revolution of Fidel Castro resorted swiftly to torture and arbitrary imprisonment and to the lawless purging and murder even of Castro's old comrades such as Huber Matos.   [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p. 154.]

The current crop of foppish militant atheists remain strangely silent on this very recent historical reality.  Every atheistic, materialistic power has committed unbelievable, systemic torture and relentless merciless murder, yet our current crop of blind guides continue to argue that such atheism necessarily reflects a higher state of human evolution, progress, wisdom, enlightenment, and perspicuity.   Atheists may wish to declaim that, "God is not good" but they occlude the inevitable begged question, "Is atheism better?".  All the evidence points to an answer that runs something like, "Actually, the fruits of atheism are much, much worse."

Rather, the issue here should be framed more accurately: Man is a fallen, wicked creature.  When man, a society, or civilisation acknowledges the Living God, evil and sin are restrained.  When mankind rejects God, his evil nature spills forth to create a living hell upon earth.  Welcome to the wonderful world of atheism.