Violence and Atheism

A few weeks back I read the following via Dennis Prager:

Imagine for a moment that all the mass murderers at our universities were active Christians. Do you think that the press would at the very least note this? Of course it would, and it would be right to do so.

Yet, to the best of my knowledge, all the recent university mass murderers were secular. Is this worth noting? And if not, why not? Of course, the answer is that few, if any, in the mainstream media would find such a thing worth noting and would likely bristle at its mention. To nearly everyone in the media, the secularism of all the murderers is a non-sequitur. But if they were all active Christians, the same media people would hardly view that fact as insignificant and unrelated.

The fact is that nearly everyone in the mainstream media is secular and therefore cannot imagine associating secularism with anything negative. Secularism is presumed to be all good. But in truth, secularism, a blessing in government, is not a blessing in the lives of most individuals. Now, one can no more blame these college murders on secularism than one could blame Christianity if all the murderers were Christian. But in neither case would it be insignificant.

Today I came across this via KBJ (himself an atheist):

It’s an empirical question whether theists are more violent than atheists. Richard Dawkins et al. are simply guessing when they say (or imply) that theists are more violent. If I had to bet my life on it, I’d wager that atheists are more violent.

In Burgess-Jackson’s post there is a link to this article on Atheism and Violence. Here’s an excerpt:

Books advocating atheism have recently been enjoying a modest boomlet. Sales are solid, book readings are sold out, and their authors grace the highbrow talk shows and op-ed pages in prestigious newspapers and periodicals. But their arguments are shopworn, stale hand-me-downs and threadbare heirlooms inherited from an era that was fading away even before the French Revolution had made the connection between atheism and violence clear to any fair observer. Yet these books read as if they came from authors who had never heard of the Reign of Terror or Robespierre.

One would think that, given their insistence that faith and violence are inextricably linked, these authors would be a bit more circumspect about their own rhetoric. As it happens, one does not have to read too far into these books to see an underlying advocacy of violence animating their venom, an advocacy made most explicit in Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, which openly avows: “Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. . . . There is, in fact, no talking to some people. … We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.” To which I can only respond with one of Blaise Pascal’s more mordant observations, “Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical.” Pascal called civil war the worst of all evils and openly admitted that no evil is greater than that committed under the guise of religion. If he were living today, I am sure his response to Harris would be: yes, Mr. Harris, you’re right, and the reason atheism brings so much violence in its wake is because it is its own kind of religion—and that’s your problem: your atheism is too religious.

What’s left to say?  It is interesting to note how often violence is associated with religion, but how rarely (especially among those who make religion the wellspring of violence) it is associated with unbelief (or non-religious belief).  But, logically, that can’t be, can it?  If religion can be a cause of violence, then so can atheism.

One way out of this to argue that atheism isn’t a belief, and thus, entails no beliefs. In this case, it can’t be the cause of anything, because it isn’t anything. Something can’t come from nothing, right? But this is also a separate issue. For the question isn’t about atheism as such, but atheists. But this isn’t entirely true either. What do atheists have in common other an atheism?

More conceptual work needs to be done here.

But at the very least, here are two articles and a post worth your time and attention.