Theist: “And so, if you’re gonna criticize — you know, religious people for the Inquisition, then you need to praise them for the civil rights movement,” he said. You can’t sort of have it both ways. And similarly, if you’re going to praise atheists for these things, you need to criticize the Stalinists. I mean, some of the most murderous regimes that we’ve had in the 20th century were atheistic regimes.”

What this theist refuses to acknowledge is that he is conveniently comparing apples and oranges. I do not deny that some atheists do bad things, as some Christians do. The difference is, for example, in the case of the Inquisition, murders and torture were condoned in the name of their religion and their god. Even if Stalin was a devout atheist, he did not commit his tyranny in the name of religion or because he claimed to defend reason. Stalin was simply a megalomaniac and a political opportunist. When was the last time you heard a terrorist act being done in the name of atheism or science and reason? When was the last tine a terrorist act was done in the name of a religion’s imaginary god?

Stalin was not motivated by atheism; if he was motivated by an “ism”, it was Communism. While communism is an ostensibly atheistic political philosophy, atheism is not inherently communistic. To restate that more clearly: communists are supposed to be atheists, but atheists do not have to be communists – no matter what your local evangelical tells you. The intent of the communist revolution was to eliminate capitalism, not religion.

An atheist doesn’t need to be a communist, but he/she doesn’t need neither to be a capitalist, an anarchist, a feudalist, or anything else. In fact, an atheist doesn’t also need to be a humanist. There are atheists that see humanism as a kind of ’speciesism’ against other biological organisms, and thus reject it. There are also anti-humanist atheists that do not think that every human being deserves respect simply for being human.

There are all kinds of atheists, politically, socially, economically, etc.

Moving on…

Although Stalin was an atheist, he was praised as a god in the Soviet Union and in all the official Communist Parties in the world.

An example:

“O great Stalin, O leader of the peoples,
Thou who broughtest man to birth.
Thou who fructifiest the earth.
Thou who restorest the centuries,
Thou who makest bloom the spring,
Thou who makest vibrate the musical cords.
Thou, splendour of my spring,
O Thou, Sun reflected by millions of hearts …”
(Pravda, August 28, 1936.)

And another one:

“I would have compared him to a white mountain – but the mountain has a summit.
I would have compared him to the depths of the sea – but the sea has a bottom.
I would have compared him to the shining moon – but the moon shines at midnight, not at noon.
I would have compared him to the brilliant sun – but the sun radiates at noon, not at midnight.”
(Znamya, Soviet Authors’ Union Monthly, October 1946.)

Perhaps Stalin is a self-theist?

Also, the USSR didn’t reject religious doctrines out of some ‘rational analysis’, but because Marxist-Leninist doctrines called for it. It’s good to remember that unquestioned adherence to those doctrines drove them to reject real science (especially genetics) because, according to them, it contradicted orthodoxy and was therefore false. Ring a bell, theists?

The problem here isn’t Stalin and his supposed atheism. It is about unquestioning obedience to dogma, whatever that particular dogma may be. That is why religion is so dangerous, and this why theists need to wake the up.

Also: This particular theist has just lost the game.