Comments on: The Atheist Body Count

By: jaqueline

jaqueline — Sat, 12 May 2012 15:11:36 +0000

.”..strong irrational or anti-modern element”

definitely…but rather than irrational, because Nazism was extremely rational and calculated, I would suggest it was anti intellectual.

The anti modern is interesting…I would agree, it seems to hearken back to an old form of societal ordering..a benign dictatorship ( yes Hitler did actually see himself and his fans saw him that way ) whose job it was to order the world and make everyone happy….but the modern element I see in the belief in the heroic, those who were kicked down rising above, doign away with the past and beginning anew etc…

By: John

John — Fri, 11 May 2012 21:50:36 +0000

Good points, Jacqueline – Marxism and Marxist-Leninism, in their old forms, were also pseudo-scientific. When I look back on both though, I do feel that Marxism has a greater veneer of rationality to it than Nazism. Marx never worked out how the classless utopia was to be implemented – this was left to Lenin and Mao and others. Probably this was because the element of actualizing history fell outside Marx’s attempts to treat history scientifically – I’m thinking of his doctrine of ‘historical materialism’ here – that human history is driven by discernible laws that can be reduced to material forces. Nazism couches its view of the world in pseudo-scientific ideas – primarily the notion that racism could be and was scientific – this was a popular idea all around the world until the Second World War, and until the world witnessed the horror of the Holocaust. But I’m also convinced that it had a strong irrational or anti-modern element as well. It rejected liberalism perhaps as fully as Marxism did, but in a very different way. Tough to sum all of this up in a blog comment – it really calls for a full-scale essay!

By: jaqueline

jaqueline — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:40:05 +0000

.”… the free marketeers and liberal imperialists of our own time are the new utopians.”

this is interesting…it seems to me that they are the new elitists definitely…but could their utopia be one for themselves and they are not interested in the common good ( ie rich and poor and in the middle ) in the way H and M and S seemed to have been even in their limited and bloody execution thereof? ( pun intended )

I heard the other day that the top 1- 10 % have more consumer power than the rest of the 90-99 % combined…so I thought, how useful are the rest of us to a world in which the ‘best’ wish to thrive ( and the rest of us will be manouvered or left to some sort of garbage dump of a world ) ? You know, who cares about Global warming when you can afford to live in the mildest locations on the planet and the let rest just die off .

By: jaqueline

jaqueline — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:30:59 +0000

Hitler’s vision was Utopian as well…according to Isaiah Berlin (and frankly as rational or more so than Mao or Stalin…as though any of them were ).

We just like to paint Hitler as a mad man because we cannot get out minds around it.

By: John

John — Fri, 11 May 2012 00:01:42 +0000

One theory out there, promoted most explicitly by the British philosopher John Gray, is that it is utopian projects in general that are the problem, and not religion or secularism in their own rights. The idea is put forward in his 2008 book “Black Mass.” In essence, religion provided the original blueprint – if you will – for utopianism, which drives people to seek mass means for transforming humanity in conformity with any number of visions of an ideal or purified future. The Enlightenment of the 18th Century substituted science and progress but retained the basic structures of a religious utopia. By this reasoning, Karl Marx is a child of the Enlightenment, as were the grand and often horrific experiments of the Communists. Mao in China is said to be responsible for the deaths of 80 million, Stalin in Russia for the deaths of at least 60 million. Harder to say if Nazism fits in here as well, as Hitler’s world view was as irrational as it was pseudo-scientific. in “Black Mass,” John Gray – who would probably describe himself as a liberal – argues that the free marketeers and liberal imperialists of our own time are the new utopians. Most people are not even remotely aware of the kinds of global violence their neo-liberal and/or neo-conservative ideologies have inflicted around the world – largely because most people are living unconsciously within this ideology.

By: timberwraith

timberwraith — Thu, 10 May 2012 12:37:56 +0000

Here are some of the questions you rarely see asked in such discussions:

-How many people has the world’s lust for consumer capitalism killed? How much of the world’s living mantle is being killed as this lust plays out?
-How many people have been killed by the world’s ruling class in the name of power, status, and the maintenance thereof?
-How much of the world’s ecosystem is being killed by our technology–the wondrous, daily products of science that we take for granted?
-How many people have died under the destructive actions of countries and corporations bent upon the exploitation of less powerful lands and people, all in the quest for natural resources and inexpensive labor?
-How many people have died because we see valor in military conquest and weakness in cooperation and diplomacy?
-How many people have died because tribalism infects so many of our institutions and understandings of the world (so, so much more than simply religion)?

When I encounter people arguing that much of the world’s ills derive from religion and that the world would be so much better off without religion, I think of these questions.