76 thoughts on “The Oatmeal tackles the Great Anti-Atheist Canard”

    1. Yeah, I like bringing up the Gott mit uns thing too. It was from a long tradition among Prussian armies as well.

    2. And of course, the Holocaust had to be carried out by tens of thousands of mostly willing citizens, and the vast majority of those were as Catholic and Lutheran as the rest of the population.
      Hitler’s ideas about deities were complex, and changed over the years, but anyone who thinks he was an atheist should really read Mein Kampf, in which he repeatedly avows that it is his Christianity that compels him to solve the Jewish problem in Europe.

      1. Whatever “No True Scotsman” bagpipes one might or might not wish to play for Hitler, his publicly-espoused anti-Semitic theology as adopted wholesale by his government and armies was thoroughly Christian in origin, tracing its immediate roots directly back to Martin Luther and thence in an unbroken chain right back to the Gospels themselves.

        WWII might or might not have been a Christian war, but the Holocaust was purely Christian.

        b&

        1. It is strange how the predominance of two ruthlessly Jew hating religions in Germany gets little mention in popular discussion of how Nazism took root. Luther’s writings were much referenced by the Nazis.

      2. The last page of Mein Kampf makes it clear: “Hence today I believe I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

      1. I think I saw it first in Dawkins’s responses to criticisms of his book, but I’m not sure.

      2. I missed it, too; thanks for pointing it out. I’m so tired of refuting that untrue Scotsman that I now view it as a red herring and ignore it. The point the cartoonist makes is stronger.

    3. Agreed. I’m not convinced by this cartoon; I’m not sure it’s a good idea to accept the premise of the canard rather than point out the bigotry of the canard.

      Let’s be clear, the argument that Hitler “was an atheist” is this:

      Atheists are nasty,
      Hitler was nasty,
      Therefore Hitler was an atheist.

      Why on Earth would we respond to that with “even if he was an atheist … blah blah”?

      Save that response for Stalin!

  4. In the day and age of the internet you still have xians believing that Hitler was an atheist. I guess trying to google anything and doing some research is just too time consuming for the religious minded.

    1. Thanks for those – the Hitler the Atheist one was great! I wonder how many people watch that and don’t get the funny when the characters keep saying the answers are in fact right because Hitler was an atheist but sorry he actually said .

  6. I don’t believe the whole previous thread missed the “Author’s note”!?

    Of course, ich bein ein rationale Zahl von Zuschauern…

  8. I’m actually a bit cagey about this “no logical pathway from atheism to violence” meme. Most of us here think, after all (I presume) that mankind would be better of without religion. From there to “get rid of it by all means” there IS a possible pathway.

    So I think when atheism means “religious faith is harmful for society” instead of its more abstract definition “religious faith is wrong” things start to get a bit more complicated than the comic suggests.

    1. I thought the comic was correcting the misconception that Hitler, Stalin, whoever, killed in the name of atheism not that atheism doesn’t lead to violence (though there is no evidence for that either).

      1. Well, as Gingerbaker below points out, Stalin did kill in the name of an ideology that deemed extirpation of religion necessary to create a better society.

        The emphasis lies on “ideology” of course, but if you construe atheism as “we’d be better of without religion”, you can get from there, as Stalin did, to “kill the priests”.

        So if we want to argue for “we’d be better of without religion” instead of just the atheism as defined by the dictionary, we have to address the Stalin challenge in a different way than the comic does.

        (If I had a blog, I could now call out Mr. Inman for the harm he does to the movement, by teaching counterproductive strategies – ah, the fun I’m happily missing!)

        1. I don’t buy Stalin killed for atheism. He dogmatically tried to enforce his version of Marxism or Leninism which disliked the power of the churches over the people. Stalin didn’t have an atheism banner he killed under and he killed both whimsically and strategically as every authoritarian does. He killed off the intelligentsia, professionals and kulaks to name some groups and those people left over were suppressed in his continuing regime not to mention the army where during The Purge where 43,000 officers were murdered. There have been 200,000 bodies discovered in mass graves. Most of those dead people were not priests.

          Indeed my Great a Big Book of Horrible Things says that official records show that Stalin sentenced 158,000 Soviet soldiers to be executed during WW II! His own damn soldiers! He also made 442,000 serve sentences in a penal unit that made them do things like march into mine fields.

          Stalin was a typical tyrannical autocrat. He played powers against one another, behaved brutally to get his way and cultivated a narcissistic cult of personality. Atheism was but one aspect of Stalinism that served to consolidate his brutish power and there were far more victims in non religious groups.

          1. It’s always been my perspective that the Russian church was intimately entangled with the Crown, supporting and being supported by it. The feudal idea of the sons of nobility being assigned first to the manor, second to the military and third to the Church hierarchy was how it was done.

            Stalin had a choice, replace the Tsar and his nobles and then share power with the Church or replace both. Pure politics.

          2. > He dogmatically tried to enforce his version of Marxism or Leninism which disliked the power of the churches over the people.

            I do not object. And bien sûr he didn’t only kill clergymen. But again, “disliking the power of the churches over the people” is what we also do, and see as a part of atheism.

            So when theists ask “What’s the difference between you and Stalin?” our answer should be “We don’t think the end justifies the means.” not “You can’t kill in the name of nonbelief.” – Because, while that’s technically correct, “religion is harmful to society” is not nonbelief, but a belief, in which name you can.

          3. Yes. My answer is always, “most atheists uphold freedom of religion and freedom of conscience because we’ve been on the bad end of it most our lives and think it’s horrible to make other people conform to your way of thinking; we’d rather convince you than force you.” Also, we aren’t typically genocidal. 🙂

  9. The case of Stalin was a lot more complicated and damning toward Russian atheism than the comic strip indicates. Religion was actively opposed, churches “expropriated”, clerics killed – all in the name of state-sponsored atheism.

    1. Atheism was not the cause of the killing. The cause was Stalin and his buddies ruthless methods in imposing their political ideology.

  10. They went to war because they were twisted little assholes.

    Sums it up. I’m always uncomfortable with the whole ‘to make good people do bad things takes religion’ thing. People do bad things because there is a part of human nature that gets an emotional thrill from doing bad things, religion just gives the justification for it. But then so can philosophy or politics or culture or any other confabulation that the mind can come up with.

    1. “They went to war because they were twisted little assholes.”

      Oh, and I thought Stalin went to war because Hitler attacked Russia. I would think we should count that to Stalin’s credit.

      (Yeah, I know it’s more complicated than that, I know Russia and Germany had a non-aggression pact, we could certainly blame Stalin for that just as people cast aspersions on Chamberlain, but we can’t have it both ways).

      Short version: Stalin may have done many things that proclaim him a twisted little asshole, but going to war wasn’t one of them.

      1. Stalin enjoyed killing his own people the most. You don’t need a war for that – probably much cheaper.

        1. Agreed.

          Just I don’t think we can logically condemn Stalin for going to war when we praise Churchill and Roosevelt for going to (the same) war.

          1. I think it’s largely what Stalin did during & after the war that he is mostly condemned for.

          2. Yes. We’re probably both on the same page here. It’s just not what the cartoon said.

          4. I have heard of the Russian-Finnish war. But I think it’s not the war one immediately thinks of when mentioning Stalin and wars.

            I just think the ‘they went to war because they were twisted little assholes’ is overly simplistic.

          5. Yes, the dialogue should be updated to “commit atrocities” & that would encompass all the bad crap these guys did.

  11. The point of the comic is valid, but I don’t think it is entirely where the religious are coming from.

    It comes across as a bit of a strawman argument (but not entirely) and using it misses out on a teachable opportunity.

    The religious point about Hitler is that the absence of god created a moral vacuum for Hitler in which he was able to fill it with whatever he wanted.

    In that sense, the pathway from Atheism to Hitler is as clear as the pathway from Islam to 9/11.

    (Whether Hitler really was an atheist and whether someone that avoids evil only to avoid punishment is actually moral is another conversation.)

    Here is the pathway as the religious see it; Hitler hated Jews and wanted to kill them all. Since there is no purpose or meaning in the atheist world other than what the atheist gives it, killing all the jews – because you only have your own point of reference about the matter and not a higher power (again the religious point of view) – then there is no reason to not kill them.

    For most atheists, atheism is as the comic describes it; the product of reason with all the morality of prime numbers (i.e. none).

    HERE IS THE POINT THAT SHOULD BE MADE

    God is not the source of morality.

    Empathy is the source of morality.

    Being sensitive to feelings and point of view of the other to the point where you can feel what they feel and see what they see – while maintaining your own thoughts and feelings is what gives humans their morality.

    God is not about empathy.

    God is about doing what you are told regardless of what your empathy tells you and, all-too-often, regardless of what is actually right.

    Hitler didn’t pull the trigger for every soldier in his army, his predominantly Catholic soldiers did it themselves.

    His greatest tool to get them to do that was religion and nationalism.

    As the saying goes, good people will always be doing good things, bad people will always be doing bad things, but to get good people to do bad things, that requires religion.

    If more Germans had been taught to empathize instead of taught to be obedient and unquestioning soldiers of God, WW2 would not have happened.

    Unfortunately, they were thoroughly religious.

    1. “Since there is no purpose or meaning in the atheist world”

      I think this is at the center of the religious argument. They see religion as forming a necessary defense against humanities worst impulses. Atheism, therefor, removes that defense and lets evil play out its horrors freely. There may in fact be some truth to the idea, but its weakness is that religion contains its own evils which are justified and carried out in the name of the deity. The goal of atheists, of course, is to throw off the dogma and rely on reason to supply the defense against our worse angels.

    2. Hitler didn’t pull the trigger for every soldier in his army, his predominantly Catholic soldiers did it themselves.

      You make the same error Rowena Kitchen @11 did. Not including Austrians, Protestants in Germany outnumbered Catholics 2:1. See my reply to her for references.

    1. Catholicism was the predominant religion in Germany before, during and after WWII.

      Really?

      Your second link is a description of a particular *protestant* sect which aligned itself with Nazi principles called the Deutsche Christen. From your link:

      The Deutsche Christen were, for the most part, a “group of fanatically Nazi Protestants.”

      From your 3rd link, we find that:

      Almost all Germans were Christian, belonging either to the Roman Catholic (ca. 20 million members) or the Protestant (ca. 40 million members) churches.

      From yet another Wikipedia article, we get confirmation of the 1933 split of 67/33% and learn that even after the annexation of Catholic Austria, 54% were Protestant.

      Hitler was raised Catholic, but that didn’t mean his soldiers were.

  13. Hitler was a devout Christian who loved and worshiped Jesus and killed in his name. In fact Hitler was just doing whet Jesus supposedly does: roasted people who disagreed with him making him the most Christ-like human there ever was and hopefully ever will be.

  14. Well, we are all gullible. Prone to buy into easy solutions. It’s this,,, err, No it’s that. No easy solutions here.We are what we are-subject to determinism(?).

  15. I don’t find this cartoon persuasive at all. It seems to be suggesting that when an atheist does bad things (let’s pick Stalin and Mao since Hitler’s atheism seems to be contested) and has motives unrelated to atheism (being a “twisted little asshole”), then atheism can be let off the hook.

    Isn’t this the same argument that Karen Armstrong uses to absolve religion from blame? (I’m basing my understanding on Jerry’s remarks about Armstrong; I haven’t read the book myself.) Armstrong’s argument is that religious people blamed for atrocities in the past were really operating from mixed motives — that is, essentially, they were “twisted little assholes” who invoked religion as cover. Even among our fellow atheists, it’s not unusual to hear religion criticized as a cloak for something else — religious wars being disguised land grabs, priests motivated by pedophilia, etc.

    One could argue that neither religion nor atheism prevent people from acting like twisted little assholes, but that nonetheless religion acts as a check on the extent of their wrongdoing, by channeling it into traditional paths, whereas atheism paved the way for greater innovation. Whether that’s true or not is, I think, an empirical question, and not likely to be settled by the kind of reasoning in this cartoon.

  17. Compare the actions and statements Hitler, Stalin, et al to those of aethists and secular humanists. Note the similarities. Not. Hitler and Stalin were not aethists. They believed they were god.

  18. I’m sure that if we looked hard enough, we would find commonality (other than religion) among people who do bad things in the name of religion. Hence, the mustache retort could work both ways.

    Atheism is not like math. Although the strict definition of atheism is devoid of moral implications, for many ex-religious, becoming atheist forces a reexamination of morality. It is entirely fair to ask whether such reexamination is associated with bad behavior. Even so, there is nothing to prevent someone from doing bad things in the name of atheism. Then we will be in the same boat as the religious: “They weren’t true atheists, because noone could rationally do such bad things in the name of atheism!”

  19. Don’t know what this implies (probably nothing) but it not rare to see that brutal dictators come from a minority.
    Napoleon was from Corsica, Stalin from Georgia, Hitler from Austria( I know, he was born at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but he wasn’t from Germany), Assad and Hussein too came from minorities inside their country.
    It looks like there is a pattern…

  21. I think the point about pointing out that people are wrong about Hitler could be fruitfully put as “a seed of doubt”: in the sense that, if you can successfully show to your conversation partner that they’ve been fed bullshit in one area, maybe they can come to see that maybe it is occurring elsewhere as well.

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