The Lethal Cancer Of Religion?

In the culture war between the religious right and the secular left, the religionists have one argument that really sticks: the fact that the most brutal genocides in history were perpetrated, not in the name of religious fanaticism, but in the name of the secular ideologies of fascism and communism.

This charge sticks because it is true that many of the past century's leading defenders of secularism opposed religion, not in the name of reason and man's pursuit of happiness on this earth, but in the name of subjectivism, determinism, and the subordination of the individual to the collective.

That's why I thought it was worth linking to the article below by crusading atheist Christopher Hitchens. The piece is not strong overall; it poses the question of whether religion is necessary to induce men to take good actions, yet it treats as self-evident the question of what is "good."

But the article is worth reading just for one really outstanding observation: the way in which religion prepares men psychologically for dictatorship—even a nominally secular dictatorship—by conditioning men to a bizarre combination of fear and reverence for a capricious, all-powerful ruler. As Hitchens puts it, "This abject attitude, of sickly love for the Dear Leader combined with dreadful terror of him, is in fact the origin of totalitarianism."

"The Subtle, Lethal Poison of Religion," Christopher Hitchens, Washington Post, September 27 This grisly vignette, which almost perfectly summarizes the relationship between sadism and masochism in Christian teaching, probably wouldn't delight all those who think that morality derives from supernatural authority. After all, the Russian Orthodox Church was the patron of Czarist autocracy, helped spread The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the West, and compromised with the Stalin regime just as it had been allied with earlier serfdom and chauvinism. It is now part of Vladimir Putin's sinister exercise in the restoration of Russian supremacism and dictatorship….

But Ms. Donshina's nonsensical propaganda is actually a mainstream statement of what the truly religious are bound to believe. Without god, how could we tell right from wrong, or learn how to do the right thing? I have never had a debate with a religious figure of any denomination, however "moderate," where this insulting question has not come up.

Yet is it not positively immoral to argue that our elementary morality and human solidarity derive from an authority that we must simultaneously (and compulsorily) love, and also fear?... This abject attitude, of sickly love for the Dear Leader combined with dreadful terror of him, is in fact the origin of totalitarianism. And there is nothing ethical about that.