The celebs amongst the secular atheist crowd are known for drawing long bows between the monsters of the twentieth century (Mao Tse Tung, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, and the Nazis) and religion. The intent is to portray as many as possible of the monsters as having religious belief of one kind or another. After all, the object is to prosecute a Donald Trumpian type of argument whereby religion is evil, evil, evil and does all kinds of evil things.
The bow gets pretty long, but you have to admire a trier. Did not Stalin train in a Russian Orthodox seminary? Did not Hitler reflect in certain ways his Catholic upbringing? Sure, it's hard to find a religious connection in the case of Mao Tse Tung. But Pol Pot--well, Cambodia was a French colony, so we should assume the Jesuits had some influence over PP.
But one thing we can be definitive about, we are told, is that the atheism they all shared in common to one degree or another was in no way connected with their mass murders of multitudes of human beings. As David Berlinski writes:
Throughout their careers, these scum acted as if no power was higher than their own. Dawkins is prepared to acknowledge the facts while denying their significance. Neither the Nazis nor the Communists, he affirms, acted because of their atheism. They were simply keen to kill a great many people. Atheism had nothing to do with it. They might well have been Christian Scientists. . . .Most secular atheists are prepared to say the mass murders and killings that marked the twentieth century were bad. What caused them? Most certainly there was no connection between the orthodoxy of atheism, on the one hand, and the orthopraxy of mass murder on the other. It came from some other source, this mass murdering of human beings. And there is some reason to suspect that religion had a hand in it somewhere.
What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.
And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society. David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions. (New York: Basic Books, 2009). pp. 25ff.]
Our view is that of course religion had a hand in it, but one religion in particular, not in general (as Christopher Hitchens misuses the term his maladroit assertion: "religion poisons everything".) There is a bright connecting line to be drawn between the religion of secular atheism and the mass murder of human beings on a scale never before seen, insofar as Marxist and Leninist ideology explicitly denied the truth of any religion but its own. Moreover Nazi ideology was replete with the belief that there was no higher power to which Germans must answer than the Fuehrer--certainly not a deity to whom Hitler and the Nazis would render account.
Secular atheism has no higher power in its cosmology than the State. It is very much a "might makes right" religion in its fruits and praxis. Understandably so, for in the atheist mind there is no higher power on earth that can bind the State, and no thinking, reasoning extraterrestrial power exists to whom we must account. So, it's the State baby, and nothing but the State. In such a world-view might most definitely makes right.
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