Responsibility And 'The Crimes Of Theism & Atheism'

There are those, on the one hand, who claim that religious believers are in some sense responsible for the crimes committed in the name of their particular faith throughout the ages. There are others in turn who claim that atheists are responsible for ‘the crimes of atheism’; citing the dark events of the last century as their main examples. It seems to me that these claims are both misleading. However, religion has the capacity to play a more sinister role than any rationalist perspective.

It is generally agreed that in order to be held responsible for an act, one must be able to be held accountable for it. In others words; if something goes wrong, it was partly your fault. Blame can be assigned to you as an individual. If you fail to act, or act wrongly, in a situation where you happen to be responsible, it would be appropriate to hand out some penalty to you.

Take the claim that religious believers bear some responsibility for crimes committed explicitly in the name of their faith. The Crusades and Catholicism is an often used and suitable example. Do modern day Catholics deserve punishment for what was done thousands of years ago simply because they share a belief system? It seems to me to be wholly unjustifiable to accuse Catholics in any way of being responsible for that particular event. In a similar way, on this basic level, those who wrongly attribute the Nazi’s of being ‘Darwinian’ cannot portion blame on those who accept Natural Selection as scientific fact. The debate must shift from this kind of name-calling. It is unhelpful and misguided. The question must be this: can both ‘the crimes of theism’ and ‘the crimes of atheism’ honestly be attributed to their respective beliefs?

Starting by examining theism, it seems uncontroversial to state that the crusades, the inquisition, the murder of the Cathars, the crimes of the Taliban etc, were all religiously motivated. There have been, and there still are, crimes committed in the name of religious belief. If you try to remove faith from the picture, none of these things could have occurred. In many of those cases, the command to commit acts of violence came from an internally agreed and unanimous leader – I am of course referring to the Pope. These crimes were explicitly committed in the name of a religious belief. This is a danger of theism; there is always a higher authority present that can be employed to justify any act. I’m reminded of a quote from Steven Weinberg “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion”.

What can motivate a human being to kill another member of their species? Perhaps many things, but among them, and high on the list, is certainty. To commit atrocities in the name of anything, you must be completely certain you are correct. Religion, unlike rationalism, makes claims to such certainty. Bertrand Russell once said “I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong”. He hit the nail on the head. A rational human being would simply find it illogical to die for a belief. You might die to save a dear friend or family member, for a loved one, but for an ideology? It just doesn’t make sense. Atheism (essentially extremely weak agnosticism) is simply a result of a rationalistic world. Uncertainty is part of the deal. The opposite is true for religion. The regimes of Stalin and Hitler were so successful at mass murder because their leaders became Gods. They had in themselves, and they demanded from others, an unshakeable faith. The historian Dmitri Volkogonov writes this: 'Stalin wanted to believe in his own strength of will, his own invulnerability, his own position as regional leader. Faith, as the cement of dogmatism, remained with him forever’ and that 'Faith in one's ideas and values is well and good, but faith should not displace truth'. To call Stalin’s outlook ‘rationalistic’ is impossible. To call this type of dogmatic surrender ‘religious’ is an apt comparison.

Believers may claim that their species of faith is as different to those religious crusaders as my view of atheism is compared to Stalin’s. They would be quite correct. However, they must understand that central aspects of their religious belief, namely their faith and inseparable certainty, are the real reasons behind the atrocities of history.