Isn’t that Torquemada calling the kettle black?
AP: Pope Benedict XVI strongly criticized atheism in a major document released Friday, saying it had led to some of the “greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice” ever known. Read more from the Associated Press. Read the encyclical “Saved by Hope” at the Vatican web site.
It is hard to believe that Benedict, touted as a great Roman Catholic intellectual, would put forth the worn argument that Stalin and Mao are proof that disbelief itself is a source of monumental evil in the world, but that is exactly the tired old horse he trots out. So much has been written about this, that I couldn’t have much to add, except to say that it seems obvious that cult of personality leaders of the 20th century were not so much anti-religionists as men who simply wanted to replace one god with another in the Big Power Equation — to replace the unquestioned divine right of kings with the unquestioned divine right of, well, themselves. Louis XVI would have understood Stalin perfectly. One was the Vatican-backed ruler of the Most Catholic France who starved, brutalized and executed his countrymen, the other a “godless” former seminarian who took over the oppression of Russia to starve, brutalize and execute his countrymen.
Also always appropriate to note while running over this rutted old road, adherents to this Stalin/Mao argument seem to be cafeteria critics, conveniently picking a few “godless” monsters to damn all disbelief by association, but as Christopher Hitchens points out, “No country has ever fallen into despotism because it has followed the teachings of Spinoza, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein .” [thx religionandatheism] It is as convenient for Il Papa to forget these as it is for him to forget Torquemada. It is easy for him to limit his discussion to the roots of evil in the 19th and 20th centuries, when the church had routinely tortured and burned people alive for the crime of dissent just a few generations earlier. Easy for him to ignore the fact that all of these atrocities have fanatical unquestioning belief — not disbelief — in common.
