I think there is a concept that is broader and more important than atheism and that is skepticism. A true skeptic not only questions the beliefs of others but continues to look critically at his own beliefs. The skepticism of others is respected because it may shine light on our own hidden assumptions.

I try to imagine how evil would survive if skepticism were the prominent world view. The answer would seem to be that there will always be beliefs that just have to be true. But if we could at least respect the right even obligation of those to question those beliefs surely we would be heading in the right direction.

Comment by: Boelf | January 30, 2007, 12:54 am

Lots to comment on.

Trofim Lysenko had some practical skill as a plant breeder, and a talent for self-promotion and ingratiating himself with his superiors, but that was about it. He considered statistical testing to be a waste of time, saying that his mentor Michurin had not needed statistics, so why should he? And visiting biologists stated that discussing biology with him was like discussing calculus with someone who did not know the multiplication table. But he impressed a lot of Communist Party officials with his claims of superior plant-breeding skill, and eventually none other than Comrade Joseph Stalin himself.

His views on heredity were rather vague, but he apparently believed that all parts of an organism contributed to its heredity, an old view called pangenesis. Thus, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which was how some of his experimental treatments were supposed to work.

He claimed that genes do not exist, and he ridiculed the idea of a hereditary substance, even while biologists outside the Soviet bloc were closing in on its identity. He also attacked mainstream biologists for their crossbreeding of fruit flies, calling them "fly lovers and people haters". And they were metaphysical idealists because they believe in things that don't exist -- genes.

Comment by: lpetrich | January 30, 2007, 1:43 am

And before Communism, atheism-bashers were pointing to the evils of the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror as evidence of the depravity that comes from rejecting religion. That revolution was not all atheist, of course, but it was rather vehemently anticlerical. Maximilien Robespierre, who masterminded the Terror, had supposedly declared:

Atheism is aristocratic; the idea of a great Being that watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is an idea of the people.

After several thousand guillotinings of supposed troublemakers, Robespierre's colleagues started to fear that they might join his victims, so they found him guilty of some trumped-up charges and guillotined him.

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That said, I think that suppression of religion is a feature of Communism that might legitimately be associated with their atheism. If one believes the religion business to be the moral equivalent of drug addiction, and even something invented by the capitalists and imperialists to keep their underlings under their thumbs, then why not get rid of it?

Comment by: lpetrich | January 30, 2007, 7:17 am

Come to think of it, Communism (in practice)is a religion of its own: it holds that the will of the state is supreme in all matters, that the goal of the individual is the service of the collective and that the state's word in unquestionalbe by anyone.

Does this sound like the church to you?

Comment by: Christopher | January 30, 2007, 2:01 pm

Nice work, Ebonmuse, very well written. This claim about alleged atheist atrocities is a common myth that needed to be addressed.

Atheists don't have an atheist doctrine that tells them to kill or subjugate religious believers; yet believers such as Christians and Muslims do have doctrines which tell them to kill non-believers for the sin-crime of disbelief. And while atheists have no problem denouncing the actions of atheists such as Stalin and Mao, most Christians and Muslims seem to be unable or unwilling to denounce those morally objectionable elements of their scriptures (e.g., instructions to kill apostates, blasphemers, homosexuals, etc.).

Comment by: Archi Medez | January 30, 2007, 6:57 pm

I would not go so far as to call Communism a religion in a strict sense; its metaphysics was more-or-less naturalist. But Communism has quasi-religious elements, like the personality cults of its leaders.

Consider this Hymn to Stalin:

O great Stalin, O leader of the peoples,
Thou who broughtest man to birth.
Thou who fructifies the earth,
Thou who restorest to centuries,
Thou who makest bloom the spring,
Thou who makest vibrate the musical chords...
Thou, splendour of my spring, O thou,
Sun reflected by millions of hearts.

And the hero-worship of Mao Zedong and North Korea's two Kims. Complete with a miraculous birth (from Wikipedia):

Kim Jong-il's official biography also holds that his birth at Mount Paektu was foretold by a swallow, and that his birth was heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow over the mountain and a new star in the heavens.

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It's also possible to be an atheist and to believe in non-naturalist metaphysics. Philosophical Buddhism and Taoism seem like that to me, but I'm not familiar enough with them to be able to tell for sure.

Comment by: lpetrich | January 30, 2007, 7:57 pm

Yes, Marxism does have something of that quality. Marxists claim that they have discovered laws of historical development that will someday result in the punishment of the wicked (the capitalist class) and the triumph of the virtuous (the working class). "Get onto the steamroller of history before it comes and flattens you!"

Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy has noted this correspondence between Marxist and Xian concepts:

Yahweh = Dialectical Materialism
The Messiah = Marx
The Elect = The Proletariat
The Church = The Communist Party
The Second Coming = The Revolution
Hell = The Punishment of the Capitalists
The Millennium = The Communist Commonwealth

Not surprisingly, Marxists have their own apologetics, like claiming that Marxist theory is a method and not a body of knowledge.

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After genetics, what other scientific disciplines might have been next to fall? Nuclear physicists successfully fought to keep their discipline from being Lysenkoized by certain Marxist ideologues who insisted that quantum mechanics is un-Marxist. It certainly departs from a billiard-ball conception of elementary particles, and it involves effects that go contrary to macroscopic-physics intuitions.

A telling point about Marxist theory was how Soviet scientists had worked and what their theorizing was like -- it was just like what Western scientists do with no Marxist dialectics in sight. I remember reading a book by some Soviet scientist on Quantum Electrodynamics (the quantum theory of electromagnetism). It looked almost exactly like what a non-Soviet scientist might write, except for a small section on Lenin and the "infinite extensibility of the electron", whatever that is.

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Andrei Sakharov also proposed something else very notable: an explanation for the Universe's matter content, described in more detail in: Baryogenesis.

Comment by: lpetrich | January 30, 2007, 10:07 pm

KC:

Very nice article. I'm often struck by how blind they (American Christians) are to the faith that was/is involved with Communism.

Yes. A lot of supposedly "thoughtful" or "liberal" religionists--and Pope Benedict, especially--claim that equal danger lies in pure faith or pure reason. They identify pure faith with Crusades, Inquisitions, and Jihads. So far so good, right? But then they identify pure reason with communism and fascism. It's an astonishingly blithe assertion to make, ignoring the massively "un-reasonable" nature of totalitarian systems. You wouldn't even need to read entire anti-communist books to know that; just 50-100 pages or so of Animal Farm, Gulag Archipelago or Dr. Zhivago would teach that to you: That totalitarian systems can be just as loopy--hilarious really, if they weren't so deadly--as any convential mythological system.

It's probably the laziest thing in the world to quote Sam Harris on a thread or blog like this but here goes anyway, "Communism or fascism are NOT what happens when people become too reasonable."

Comment by: J | January 31, 2007, 5:38 pm

A further problem is a common association of atheism with opposition to religion. Although that is often the case, it need not be.

One can be an atheist while believing that most other people ought to believe in some religion that one considers false. Something like Plato's Royal Lie.

Comment by: lpetrich | February 5, 2007, 10:10 pm