Faith and the Good Society

People of faith regularly
claim that atheism is responsible for some of the most appalling crimes of the
20th century. Although it is true that the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and
Pol Pot were irreligious to varying degrees, they were not especially rational.
In fact, their public pronouncements were little more than litanies of
delusion—delusions about race, economics, national identity, the march of
history or the moral dangers of intellectualism. In many respects, religion was
directly culpable even here. Consider the Holocaust: The anti-Semitism that
built the Nazi crematoria brick by brick was a direct inheritance from medieval
Christianity. For centuries, religious Germans had viewed the Jews as the worst
species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued
presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed
itself in a predominately secular way, the religious demonization of the Jews of
Europe continued. (The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood
libel in its newspapers as late as 1914.)

Auschwitz,
the gulag and the killing fields are not examples of what happens when people
become too critical of unjustified beliefs; to the contrary, these horrors
testify to the dangers of not thinking critically enough about specific secular
ideologies. Needless to say, a rational argument against religious faith is not
an argument for the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem that the
atheist exposes is none other than the problem of dogma itself—of which every
religion has more than its fair share. There is no society in recorded history
that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.