Instead of arguing that religion is or is not the cause of war or other evils or that atheism is or is not the cause of war or other evils, I think that Alexandr Solzhenitsyn got it right the first time when he wrote: To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek justification for his actions. Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and other’s eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations. Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago. This explains much of human history. There are a number of nations that are all *but* officially atheist and yet, there have been no purges, no gulags for the religious, no concentration camps filled with the clergy. Why? Because they are not *ideologically* atheist it just so happens that their populations have gotten to a point where religion is a private affair and of no real bother or trouble to others. England actually has an official state church and yet it is a largely tolerant society where three of the most noted atheist writers of the last half-century came from. Again, England is not ideologically Anglican, just culturally so. It was not always thus as anyone familiar with English history knows full well. An atheist nation can be a perfectly welcoming place for the religious if the nation is not atheistic as a matter of ideology. A theistic nation can be a perfectly welcoming place for the non-religious or apostates or people of other faiths provided it is not ideologically theistic. Nations that do not enshrine their religiosity or non-religiosity as ideological imperatives are not the problem. Nations that make these questions of ideology are the problem.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 23:29:57 +0000
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