Many of you are probably familiar with this argument. It’s usually in response to someone saying that religion has killed X number of people. The argument is that “atheist” ideologies like Communism, Socialism, Facism, Nazism etc has death counts well north of 100 million. I have used this argument myself. On multiple occasions. And I was wrong.

It is true that these ideologies have killed a hundred million plus people. But the argument states that this happened because of the lack of religion or lack of belief in a deity. Maybe because of a lack of morals. Either way, the idea is that if you remove religion the death toll sky rockets.

While I do believe that these ideologies are purposefully atheistic, I don’t see that is has anything to do with the death toll. They are without a deity, but they most certainly are a religion. They are a religion of Statism. Belief in the almighty State and its power to heal and cure all injustices. Their faith in the State is unending and unwavering.

The religion of Statism hasn’t killed hundreds of millions because of the absence of belief in a deity, but because of the belief in the State. Traditional religions have been able to be abused historically to carry out terrible acts because hundreds of years ago there was a true central power. The heads of religion were the only ones that had true power as they could read etc and were the sole source of truth. As people became more educated, religion lost most of that power. The State religion fixed that “problem”. It is baked into the ideology that the State (and political rulers) are the only one’s allowed to wield violent force. But don’t worry, it’s all for the “greater good”

Anyway, was thinking about this lately and about how wrong I was and thought I would share.

Now tell me why I’m wrong

I agree with you

Fascist governments, like those of Spain and Chile (for example) were not in any way atheistic. Franco was closely aligned with the Catholic Church, and the Church hierarchy was also complicit with the Nazis to some extent. You could easily say that the Inquisition was fascist in nature.

IMO, atheists in general are no more or less capable of atrocities than the righteous. Tribal hierarchies (government is by nature tribal) are responsible for the vast majority of these evils, fueled by a belief in absolute authority whether that authority emanates from a deity or a secular philosophy.

Nice to see you here again jibninjas, it's been too long.

I think you are correct about tribalism. From what I can see pretty much all atrocities stem from tribalism. I would go further and say that at the core of all major atrocities is moral righteousness. As far as the Nazis, some members of the Catholic Church were complicate, but there really wasnt a religious connection.

It is interesting that fascism seems to blur the lines some times. I'm not super familiar with Spain and Chile governments.

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Thanks OP. I lurk ever once in a while. But I don't really think much about religion (with the exception of the religion of the State) anymore. Under most definitions I would not be considered a Christian.

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The problem is not fundamentally religion or atheism or beliefs: it's the alignment and consolidation of power.

If all power bases (governmental, economic, spiritual, etc.) end up under one roof, usually the State, you get a high potential for abuse.

When the churches, the State, the corporations and all other bases of power get into the hands of one small group, you get the most abuses. This happened under the Communists, the Nazis, and earlier, under absolute monarchies of various sorts.

The real lesson is, the best societies keep checks and balances and distributions of power, which keep the power from being in the hands of a small group. Power corrupts. The closer to absolute the power becomes, the more absolutely it corrupts. You see this in Communism and its remnants, like North Korea, with no religion but the State or the dynasty--and you see it in the theocracy of the Ayatollahs in Iran, or the Wahabism of Saudi Arabia. You saw it with Hitler, and long ago with Henry VIII and the Caesars and the Pharaohs and so on.

Separating church and state and even various branches of govenment helps keep any one group from having a lock on power.

I'd be curious to hear more. Do you still consider yourself a Christian? If not, what caused you to turn away from the faith? If so, why do you think it is no longer as important to you?

I'd also be interested if you want to share, Jibninjas.

I see no real methodology here. You say a bunch of violence-causing ideologies are both atheistic and statist. You used to believe that the aspect of these ideologies that caused them to be violent was their atheism, but now you think it is statism. Okay. Why? Did you run a regression and find a stronger correlation between atheistic rather than statist ideologies? Do you have a model which predicts more change in violence based on level of statism rather than atheism?

Second, what do you mean by "statism." You describe it as an "unending and unwavering faith" in the state to "heal and cure all injustices." This rules out all liberal views (which assume on a public/private split) as statist. I would say most of the socialists I know personally lean more towards the anarchist/libertarian side of that view, so presumably they wouldn't count. Nazis ideology put forward the Fuhrer principle, which said that a political leader should be viewed as supreme above all, even the state and its laws. I would describe that as a cult of personality, not a cult of the state. So I'm skeptical that "statism" applies as broadly as you seem to suppose.

I do think there is truth to the claim that some of the function of social regulation and moral norms that used to come from religion has been replaced by law in modern societies. This is plausibly one of the reasons for religion's decline among wealthy countries. I'm doubtful this has led to more violence though.

I think many people under-appreciate just how fundamental social regulation (both in the sense of norm enforcement but also in the sense of cultivating collective identity and social cohesion) is to "religion", at least for any sufficiently general definition of the term.

So much so that I really do wonder whether it's more correct to think of aspects of modern society as "secular religion" (despite the apparent oxymoron given more commonly used definitions of religion as something like belief in the supernatural) rather than as a replacement of religion. If this social function is the most fundamentally important aspect of religion, and beliefs, symbols, and rituals serve in large part as effective means towards accomplishing that social function, then it makes sense to think of secularization as a transformation of religion rather than a decline in religion. Although it's still useful to talk about the decline and replacement of specific institutions, beliefs, ritual practices, and so on, so I wouldn't take this to mean it's wrong to talk about a "decline in religion" when using other definitions of the term. I just think those other definitions sometimes obscure something sociologically interesting about religion.

Another problem is that often when people compare something negatively to religion (like "statism") they mean something a little different from the above. Often by religion they just have in mind some negative view of "unjustified faith in X", where X has replaced a traditional religious faith. Or they have in mind some kind of harmful indoctrination, or some other aspect of existing traditional religious institutions that they perceive as harmful. Jibs argument seems to be more in this vein.

But, where I used to dismiss most comparisons to religion as entirely useless and pejorative, I now tend to think there's some valid insight in there somewhere, related to the above. Even if I think the specific comparison being made is somewhat off the mark, as I probably do in this case.

Sure, I will share. I'll probably start a new thread though.

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Lots of great questions and replies. I'm going to try and respond tonight. I have to do some work on our washing machine, but if all goes well i should have some time. But if I disappear for a bit rest assured I will be back.

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Well, I didn’t really give any methodology so that’s fair. My change in belief stems from a better understanding of people and learning more about history. I thought a lot about what would cause people to not only be ok with mass slaughter, but actually advocate the slaughter. Of course none of the people at the time would actually admit that’s their position. How does the average person become a Nazi under Hitler? Or a communist under Mao? In pretty much every case of mass slaughter in the last 100 years the groups at the core of this atrocity were fueled by a foundation of “for the greater good”. No one thought they were the bad guys. When an individual thinks what they are doing is for the betterment of the “common people” the are filled with a moral righteousness that allows them to continue. I think this moral superiority is required for the average person to support horrific acts. Atheism doesn’t give you that on its own. Maybe some pull this out of atheism, but it doesn’t exist in the lack of belief in God inherently. That’s why I reconsidered. There is just nothing in atheism that can truly drive millions of people to act in the way they have historically acted.


I would disagree. Yes, I was being a little hyperbolic here, but the core of what I said stands. The “left” primarily differentiates itself as an ideology by turning to the state. Look at the current Democratic party.

Issue: Poverty, answer: The State
issue: Education, answer: The State
issue: Healthcare, answer: The State
issue: Economy, answer: The State
issue: Hurt feelings, answer: The State
issue: People use speech in a way they don’t like, answer The State

and on and on and on…

All the issues that the left tries to solve with the State is either caused by the State, or made exponentially worse as a result of State intervention. This is the dogma of the statist. Notice no mainstream democrat is advocating for more freedom. Except for maybe marijuana.

I don’t know the people you know, so I’ll take your word. But the fact is, those people are very very rare. Your average democratic national socialist Bernie support does not want freedom. They want authoritarian control over everyone else’s lives.

The ideology of Nazism may have had some that followed this later, but that’s not how it rose to power.

I want to be clear, I do think that statism is just one of many forms of tribalism. What makes it dangerous is its religious aspect and the fact that it has a monopoly on violent force.

I don’t know that I agree with this, but that’s probably another conversation.

The "more violence" part I think stems from the monopoly of violent force coupled with "the other" that is blamed for all the woes of the society. In most of the socialist/communist based movements its the 1%. This quickly gets expanded though.

What would you say makes a "religion" a religion? It seems to me that only a belief in a deity or supernatural is short sighted. The structure, the rules, the hierarchy seem to play just as big, if not bigger, role in the structure of a religion.

The example of this is Taoism, which specifically leaves the ultimate source undefined.

"The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao."

So is Taoism a religion or a philosophy? Does it matter.

FWIW, that quote alone tells me that Lao Tzu is the GOAT.

Jib, what you've noticed is that when people form a group, they sometimes kill people who don't belong to their group. It just happens to be the case recently that the groups with the best ability to kill outsiders are states.

It's more sophisticated than that. In order to carry out mass slaughter, the way the communists etc did, you need the support of the common people. The question is, what allows the common people to go along with such acts? What is the motivating factor to slaughter people? Atheism cannot adequately answer these question. Yes, you are correct that the State has the best ability to carry out such acts, because the State is a monopoly on violent force. That's what makes it so dangerous.

edit: You say "they sometimes kill people who don't belong to their group". To clarify, the question we are trying to address is why do these groups sometimes kill when other groups do not?

All you need for that is an in-group and an out-group. The justification to kill seems to inevitably happen as a consequence. The variation among the justifications is somewhat interesting, but irrelevant.

It would be weird if it did, and it seems odd to think it is a valid criticism that it doesn't. It is only an absence of belief in deities. One wouldn't expect someone to derive the answers to those questions from their lack of belief in unicorns either. Atheism also doesn't answer the question of how much salt to put into a recipe for chicken noodle soup.

What alternative would you suggest? Everyone with their own private army? Maybe everyone gets a club or a machete to handle their differences?

I'm only aware of one group that doesn't/hasn't. What groups do you think don't?

Your last sentence seems like a pretty good summary of what I was trying to say.

As far as defining religion or theorizing about its most fundamental features, it's certainly challenging to do, and I'm not sure there's any completely satisfactory short definition. think this book provides a pretty interesting overview of some historical theories: Nine theories of religion.

The conceptualizations of religion that I've been the most persuaded by come from Geertz and Durkheim, both discussed in that book but both worth reading more deeply. Geertz' definition of religion (from Religion as a cultural system) highlights one of the difficulties:

What I find compelling in Geertz' conception of religion is the emphasis he places on the relationship between a worldview ("conceptions of a general order of existence") and a way of life (or ethos, "moods and motivations"), summarized like this:

The challenge with his definition, though, is that it makes it nearly impossible to draw some clean analytical separation between "religion" and "culture". In other words, when Geertz makes religion a cultural system it seems like the concept of a "cultural system" in general swallows up a lot of the things that we tend to think of as peculiarly religious, like belief in a supernatural order, deities, and things like that. But I think recognizing that dynamic between ethos and worldview is a good generalization about the social function of those kinds of beliefs.

Durkheim's approach to religion also emphasizes the social function of religion but he starts by trying to draw generalizations from anthropological observations of what he took (in the early 20th century) to be the simplest form of religion and social organization: totemism in aboriginal societies in Australia. In part his aim is just to explain how seemingly bizarre (from an outsider's view) behavior is tightly integrated into an actually highly functional social system, and his elaboration on the symbolism of the clan totem leads him to a conclusion about the nature of the totem:

In excerpt I'm afraid it might sound more provocative than substantive, but what's fascinating about Durkheim's account of totemism is precisely the explanations of how totemic rituals and beliefs act to continually re-create the sense of social identity and organization which allow the clan system to function.

So if I can synthesize Geertz and Durkheim, allowing for the fact that the term "religion" encompasses too large a set of phenomena to easily capture in a definition, the essential conclusions for me are that:

a) religion is inherently about creating, maintaining and reproducing through time a sense of social identity (a "we"), including various social institutions and group boundaries, and

b) that the "religious" aspect of society is closely tied up with the processes by which social structures and institutions are legitimized, through that interplay between a worldview and ethos that Geertz describes.

With only reading your summaries, I'm left thinking that the function of a thing is different than the thing. You could describe a car to an alien by its functions, but then you have the problem of the alien thinking that trains are cars.

Also, that those functions could be accomplished through other completely unrelated means. I don't think that either one of us would describe the stories we tell children of the history of the United States as a religion, but it seems to fit the framework you offered.

I disagree. I would say you are probably right that it is a necessary condition, but not sufficient. There are millions of "groups" of people, 99% of whom have never committed any mass atrocity. In fact very few actually have.

You make think it is weird, but that doesn't address the fact that many believe that it does. That's the argument that I laid out in the OP. The argument is roughly, if you don't believe in God, you have no base for morality. If you have no base for morality you will be immoral. If you are immoral you will be more likely to commit atrocities. And it is held by many people. So me addressing this isn't exactly absurd.

A society based on volunteerism, the zero aggression principle, and private property rights.

Why would this be the default of removing the monopoly on violent force? Do you really believe the only reason everyone doesn't chop each other up with machetes when there is a difference is because of those saints in Washington DC are keeping us all honest? Really?

What? You can only think of one group that hasn't committed mass atrocities? How about people that believe in Astrology? How about Biologists? Maybe weight lifters?

I don't believe it makes sense to only look at mass atrocities. Odds of dying a violent death would be the correct measure.



How do you reconcile this myth with the existence of me? I'm definitely an atheist and definitely have a strong sense of morality.



So, how will you, as the leader of this hypothetical society, handle those who disagree? Keep in mind that there will be some very moral people who do not feel that violence is bad under every circumstance. Some will even have a strong moral compass that directly causes them to believe that your specific property was gained through immoral means and must be confiscated from you.

I assume that if you follow the non-aggression principle, that you won't struggle when they take your stuff.

Government isn't the only reason why we don't hack people to bits. It seems disingenuous to think that would be the only thing. There is also the mess to think of, among the many reasons.



I am pretty sure there were astrologers and biologists in groups that killed others. Some have even committed cold-blooded murder. This doesn't seem relevant, since you wouldn't be likely to call biologists or astrologers a society.

I've thought of a second group now. Kind of embarrassing that only one came to mind when the other was obvious.

Why would that be a correct measure? The topic is in fact mass atrocities.


I don't have to, I'm not the one making the argument.

There are no leaders in this society.

Defense does not break the non-aggression principle.

You're the one that implied this, not me.

I would call them a group. And no one is talking about individuals. That's a completely different topic. If we are limiting to "societies", then there has not been any large scale stateless society.

You seem to be proving my point then. If we are limiting ourselves to large societies.

Well mass atrocities are pretty hard to pull off. How about tribal/ethnic warfare and inter-clan violence? Those are easier.

Instead of looking at religion and irreligion as causes, it seems that having loads of resources is the primary cause. We definitely wouldn't have major atrocities if we didn't have so much of those pesky resources.



Well, since no one here seems to be arguing against my side of the argument, we can consider it completely settled. It is hereby now known to be true, for the purpose of this thread, that atheists have morals and that those who think otherwise are just silly.



What species will have this society and on what planet will it be? It doesn't sound like it is within the capabilities of any species that I am aware of. This seems like an important detail.



Does retaliation break it? Surely you go and get your stuff back if it is taken by someone who thought that their right to your property was of a higher order than the right to your former property that you believe you have, right?

Can you also take stuff in the amount necessary to cover the costs of your expedition to retrieve your stuff, or is that not allowed?



Perhaps I misunderstood you when you said, "

Do you really believe the only reason everyone doesn't chop each other up with machetes when there is a difference is because of those saints in Washington DC are keeping us all honest? Really?"

Did you mean something different than the obvious implications that could be derived from the words that you used? Please clarify.





There is probably a reason for there not being any large scale stateless societies.


There is also probably a reason for there not being many small-scale societies.

Can you even name a stateless society?


What was your point? It seems to have gotten lost to me somewhere.