Briefly stepping out hiding, because this whole back-and-forth name calling (“Killer!” “No, you’re the killer!”) in lieu of substantive debate irritates me.

Dinesh D’Souza says, “Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history.” His basic premise is that religion is not responsible for the loss of very many lives, and even if it is, atheism caused even more people to be murdered. This is a far more complicated issue than can be dealt with here, but his essay points up something important to notice in the recent upsurge of “Evangelical Atheism.”

I think that some non-believers have spent a little too much time talking amongst themselves, or to the inarticulate portions of the faithful, because they occasionally make bad arguments.

One of them is the enumeration of “religion’s crimes.” As D’Souza points out, many so-called holy wars are really about some other issue; the religious veneer is just rhetorical. Then he goes on to talk about Hitler, Stalin and Mao and, rather than acknowledge the fact that their crimes have more to do with madness, megalomania, and lust for power than they do with a commitment to Godlessness, he blames their crimes on big, bad, Atheism — ignoring his own rather valid point in the process.

The fact is that evil exists and will use whatever justification it can find for it’s actions, whether it’s religion, political ideology, or bad weather. When atheists start blaming religion exclusively, however, for the very complex causes that have led to needless deaths, it opens up a very wide area for their opponents to counter-attack. Specifically, if you’re going to blame an entire belief for the crimes of individuals (even if it is thousands of individuals), then you have to accept their counter example; in this case, Global Communism.

Perhaps Mr. Dawkins & Co. are unused to hanging around with neo-conservatives, who are always ready, willing, and able at the drop of a hat to talk about Communism. Because, while Communism is chiefly a political and economic system, its officially-mandated godlessness is what people remember it for.

Just as religious people could never answer for the crimes of their spiritual predecessors (nor do I think they feel any need to even try), atheists could never completely divorce themselves from Global Communism in the popular imagination (nor do I think they’re really even trying).

We’ll try to address this more fully in future issues of Sloganeering.Org, but for now, we’ll just say this: The violent deaths of millions is an event too complicated to blame on individual factors, and ignoring that reality for the intellectually lazy assignation of blame teaches us nothing.