Atheism is repeatedly assailed as being the driver of many of the atrocities of the 20th century as I'm sure you've heard a million times when names like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao are uttered in a religious debate. While these are often touted as being the inevitable result of removing religion from society, it is very easy to spot that even if these regimes outwardly claimed no religious affiliation, they were by no means secular in their nature. Many of these regimes had close ties to the Vatican, while others were based on blood worship, Nordic myth, and varied forms of mysticism, and others simply forego any established religions and appoint the head of the movement as a god incarnate. These ideas are not the result of secular values, nor do they hold to any meaning of an atheistic society, nor does it lead to any meaningful conversation about those values.
Usually after pointing these things out you can then find a bridge in the conversation in order to declare what a true test of secular society would be in order to test the efficacy of a society based on atheistic and secular views. As Christopher Hitchens so elegantly put it, "Here is what you would need to have a level playing field between your point and mine. You would need to find a society, hitherto pious and devout, and organic and stable, that adopted the views of - and attempted to teach its children the principles of - Lucretius, Epicurus, Spinoza, Galileo, Einstein, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Payne, Bertrand Russell. To adopt those teachings and then to see if that's a society that fell into famine, war, tyranny, torture, the Gulag, and so forth. That would be the fair test, and that test is yet to come."
A society of this sort has yet to present itself in the world. Any attempt at a society of this kind inevitably comes from some form of religiosity. Every country had some form of religion at its founding, or has otherwise been usurped by one afterwards. This saddles any society with the baggage of decades, if not centuries of religious ideology which will fight these values tooth and nail. Perhaps one day we can have this true test. A true secular society founded on reason. Maybe then we can have the comparison needed to draw proper conclusions.
Usually after pointing these things out you can then find a bridge in the conversation in order to declare what a true test of secular society would be in order to test the efficacy of a society based on atheistic and secular views. As Christopher Hitchens so elegantly put it, "Here is what you would need to have a level playing field between your point and mine. You would need to find a society, hitherto pious and devout, and organic and stable, that adopted the views of - and attempted to teach its children the principles of - Lucretius, Epicurus, Spinoza, Galileo, Einstein, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Payne, Bertrand Russell. To adopt those teachings and then to see if that's a society that fell into famine, war, tyranny, torture, the Gulag, and so forth. That would be the fair test, and that test is yet to come."
A society of this sort has yet to present itself in the world. Any attempt at a society of this kind inevitably comes from some form of religiosity. Every country had some form of religion at its founding, or has otherwise been usurped by one afterwards. This saddles any society with the baggage of decades, if not centuries of religious ideology which will fight these values tooth and nail. Perhaps one day we can have this true test. A true secular society founded on reason. Maybe then we can have the comparison needed to draw proper conclusions.
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