More on the fallacy of using the Stalin card against atheists

Even Joseph Stalin wants you to stop using the Stalin card against atheism [source: Dictionary of Georgian National Biography]

On the subject of the usage of the Hitler/Stalin/Pol Pot card against atheists, my friend Ian Andreas Miller (ie. Diaphanus from Diaphanitas) left the following comment on my previous post, “Should Rory Fitzgerald (and Ed West) be carted off to some remote island for terminal idiocy?”. I thought it was worth its own post.

The biggest problem with the Argumentum ad Stalinum is that assumes that atheism has some sort of orthodox perspective on which anti-atheists can pin the blame for those horrible atrocities. It doesn't. It has no dogma, it has no tenets, it has no orthodox perspective that is comparable to what is found in religion. Any sort of "killing in the name of atheism" is actually killing in the name of some ideology that has hijacked the label of atheism.

And it is annoying that these anti-atheist types always name Stalin and the others when they provide examples of the evils of atheism. In Marx's communist utopia, there is no religion (nor the religious impulse) not because it was forcibly taken away, but because it died out. But the leaders of those totalitarian regimes that hijacked the label of atheism skipped some steps in the development toward that communist utopia. Instead of having religion die out on its own, they attemped to get rid of it, but since they did not actually do anything in getting rid of the religious impulse, there was the recognization that there was still the need for something religiousy (this is "belief in belief," as Daniel Dennett called it), so a religion substitute was put in place directed toward the party/leader. For this reason, these regimes, despite being of the "atheistic" variety, held the necessity for satisfying the religious impulse higher than those anti-atheists want to admit. The leaders of such regimes were (and are) atheists, but the problem is that they were faitheists.

But, don’t expect cranks to recognize this, of course. Hey, why let such trivial things as historical facts and accurate perspective get in the way of some good anti-atheist smears?