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Evil
Committed In The Name of God Vs Atheism
By Mikel Del Rosario
I
recently saw an animated short created by an atheist on YouTube. In this
video, a bunch of theists were trying to tell an atheist about God.
But then
the theists began to threaten each other with weapons and argue over whose
religion was right!
Not
surprisingly, the atheist character came out as the level-headed one as he
tried to calm everyone down and stop the violence.
Although
this cartoon caricatured religious people, it did reveal a bit about how some
skeptics see religiously-motivated violence and why they so quickly reject a
belief in God.
Today,
it seems like a lot of the news stories we see tend to include
reports of violence that are somehow linked to religion.
So, it’s
no surprise that one of the objections skeptics raise, is the evil and
suffering that happens because of violent crimes motivated by religion.
In this
post, I’ll share a couple of ways to navigate conversations with people who
raise this kind of a challenge, but tend to lump Christianity in with every
other world religion.
How can
we respond when people say that the evils done in the name of God are the
reason, they say God isn’t real?
Can there
be a way forward that gets us into open conversations about evil, morality and
the existence of God?
Christianity and
World Religions
Maybe
you’ve encountered an atheist friend or co-worker who says that militants
working with ISIS, Al-Qaeda and other groups have very religious
motivations for violating human rights.
But this
seems to presents a false dichotomy which downplays the uniqueness of
Christianity.
Don’t go
there. Don’t let the conversation be framed as an “atheists vs. theists” kind
of thing. Don’t get stuck trying to defend religion in general.
As you
have the God conversation, it’s important to explain that Christianity isn’t
just one of many traditions out there.
While
religion itself isn’t evil, false beliefs about God and morality can have
devastating consequences.
One
religious person’s belief that “it’s good to be a terrorist” is
way different than another religious person’s belief that “it’s good to
be a pacifist.”
Do these
beliefs produce the same kinds of people?
As I’ve
previously noted in my 9/11 post on evil and religion, theists of any
kind who do evil in the name of God are directly disobeying Jesus’
commands to love not only our neighbors, but even our enemies (Matthew 5:44; Luke 10:25-37).
Of
course, someone can say they follow Jesus and then turn around and violate
someone’s human rights. But the Apostle John says you’re a total liar if you
live like that (1 John 2:4).
In fact,
Jesus’ commands have historically motivated his followers to establish
hospitals and alleviate human suffering through countless humanitarian missions
around the world.
So,
terrorists who wrap their evil actions up in religious terms don’t represent
everyone who believes in God and they especially do not represent the teachings
of Jesus.
Pointing
this out is one way to respond to the observation that evil people can
have religious motives for hurting others.
Evil and
Institutionalized Atheism
Beyond
this, an atheist who raises this challenge seems to ignore the fact that
there’s been terrible stuff done in the name of atheism, too.
While all
kinds of people are capable of great evil, this is especially obvious in the
record of institutionalized atheism under Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, Lenin and
Stalin and Khrushchev.
Greg Koukl noted this exact thing in his post, “The Real Murderers: Atheism or
Christianity?”
My point
is not that Christians or religious people aren’t [capable of] … terrible
crimes.
Certainly,
they are. But it is not religion that produces these things; it is the
denial of Biblical religion that generally leads to this kind of things.
The statistics
that are the result of irreligious genocide stagger the imagination.
In other
words, the capacity for evil is there in all of us.
But the
thing is, totalitarian regimes have perpetuated evils in a way that seems
totally consistent with a naturalistic worldview which rejects the reality of
objective good or objective evil.
Finding
Common Ground
Can we
find enough common ground to have a meaningful dialogue with our atheist
neighbors?
Consider
how non-religious motivations – like nationalism or racism – have resulted in a
fierce outpourings of persecution and unspeakable violence against religious
groups as well.
On an
episode of the Table podcast on challenges to the existence of God, Dr. Darrell
Bock shared a good example of this:
“The holocaust was a product in which religion — if I can say it this
way — was the victim. It took it on the chin in the holocaust because someone
was a particular race and held a particular religion. The goal was to wipe them
off the face of the earth. And that wasn’t religiously motivated, that was
motivated by something else. If we’re going to rank the most horrific things
that have happened in our recent memory, certainly the holocaust makes 9/11
pale in comparison.”
Indeed,
while the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C. resulted in
the deaths of about 3,000 people in the United States, the unspeakable evil
perpetrated by the Nazi regime against at least 6 million Jewish people easily
ranks as one of the greatest atrocities in history.
Interestingly,
Dr. Glenn Kreider replies to Dr. Bock’s comment on the podcast by suggesting
that even this recognition may help create a space for conversations on the
nature and origin of morality:
Most (atheists) would agree with us on that and would repudiate very
similarly. So, it’s a place where in the midst of a vitriolic attack, in the
midst of great conflict, to say, “We’re on the same page here.”
None of
us wants to be a defender of the misuse of religion – any religion – and so we
do have some common ground here in which we can stand.
If the
common ground he’s talking about is the universal outcry against all kinds of
injustice and oppression, then this realization seems to point to an objective
standard of goodness that goes way beyond what cultures and societies
construct.
Perhaps
this could this be a way forward, a starting point, for open conversation about
biblical teaching on good and evil.
In the
end, religiously-motivated evil isn’t an argument against the existence of God. And
unlike naturalism, the biblical worldview actually recognizes the reality of
objective evil.
And it
offers us a hope that looks forward to the final defeat of evil by a God whose
very nature is the moral grounding for objective good.
This
article was originally featured on the website of
Apologetics Guy and was republished with permission.
Mikel Del Rosario is a Ph.D. student
and cultural engagement specialist at Dallas Theological Seminary. He teaches
Christian Apologetics and World Religion at William Jessup University.
Reasons for Jesus is an apologetics-based
website dedicated to providing justification for a Biblical worldview and a
rational defense for faith in Jesus Christ. On this site we will be looking at
answers to questions, responses to objections, and positive reasons for why
Jesus is exactly who he claimed to be: The Son of God and only means of salvation.
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