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“Some beliefs are so dangerous that killing people who hold these beliefs can be a moral act.”[1]

(Sam Harris)

When dealing with the issue of atheism, there is a common mistake, as the writer Abdullah al-Andalusi explains, which is the belief that atheism is opposed to religion, but the truth is that atheism means belief in the non-existence of God, and its opposite is theism, i.e. belief in the existence of God.

Accordingly, Al-Andalusi points out that belief in the existence of God or not believing in his existence alone does not lead to a change in behavior, but behavior changes negatively or positively with what follows these two ideas of cosmic visions, sayings and belief systems.

Thus, the state of belief in the existence of God does not represent a direct cause for the existence of the cosmic vision, as these visions do not stem from the abstract idea of ​​God’s existence, but rather must be based on religion and the various laws subsequent to this belief. The same applies in the case of atheism, as the cosmic vision emanates from materialistic philosophies that exclude divine intervention in the universe and the determination of our destinies as human beings, such as communism, social Darwinism, fascism, and so on. Al-Andalusi confirms the above by saying: “There is no believer who is killed in the name of (the presence of God), but he is killed in the name of religion. Likewise, there is no atheist who is killed in the name of (the non-existence of God), but an atheist kills in the name of materialistic philosophies and cosmic visions that he believes in according to his atheism”[2] .

The philosophical relationship between atheism and the crimes committed by its adherents was summed up by the American writer Dinesh D'Souza: "The crimes of atheism were generally committed through an arrogant ideology that sees man as the creator of values, not God. By using the latest technologies of science and technology, man seeks to displace God and create a secular paradise here on Of course, if there are some incompetent people, they must be eliminated in order to achieve this virtuous city (paradise), this is the price that atheist tyrants - and those who apologize to them - showed their willingness to pay, and here they confirm Fyodor Dostoevsky’s saying “if not There is a God, so everything is permissible” (3).

History judges..atheism is not innocent

In the same context, Navid Sheikh, professor of international relations and lecturer at the British University of Kiel, published an interesting study entitled (The Death Count: A Statistical Study of Political Violence in World Civilizations)[4] in which he reviewed all the wars that took place between states, including Civil wars, ethnic and collective massacres, and other violent events, whose death toll exceeded 10,000 in one event, to read these events that took place from the first year AD to the year 2008 AD.

Sheikh was able to count 276 huge violent events during this large period of time, then he classified the world's religions into 7 major religions and civilizations: atheism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hindus, Islamic, primitive, and Chinese. Putting according to his classification, each violent event in his civilization, with the number of dead in each civilization. The results of the study came in an interesting way, as the Christian civilization came to the fore as the largest cause of the harvest of human lives, and was immediately followed in the second place by the atheists civilization with a harvest of more than 100,000,000 dead, and the number of victims, according to the study’s estimates, may reach 150,000,000 dead! This is in complete contradiction to the propaganda of the non-stop atheistic peace paradise, which claims that it is a lofty message that came to save people from the violence of religions.

The communist countries represented the harshest model that adopts atheism. The communists in Russia and then in neighboring countries embraced the solid historical materialist belief, and it became a general doctrine for the country and the people, and because of it terrible crimes were committed against human beings, in Russia, China, Cambodia and others.

The "Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror and Repression", which was published in 1997, was documented by a group of academics who decided to research the number of victims of anti-religious communist ideology.

The first mass massacres in the modern era

“I command you to burn everything that is flammable, and to put the sword on every neck.”

(One of the generals of the French government during the Vendé massacre[5].)

Many historians consider the Vendéen genocide of 1793 in France to be the first genocide in modern times. After the French Revolution, some sectors of the French people began to revolt against the new secular government, and the government met these rebellions with brutal and immediate repression. In 1793, some peasants in the Vendi region began demonstrating against the grinding economic situation, and the religious Catholics allied with them, so the “Enlightenment” government applied very brutal policies to them, as a result of which more than 6,000 prisoners were executed, most of them women, children and the elderly, and more than 3,000 women were drowned in Water, infants were trampled under the feet of horses, in addition to burning homes, homes and farms completely.

By 1796 AD, the total number of dead, according to some statistics, reached about 500,000 people who had their heads burned, drowned, slaughtered, or run over under the feet of chariots and horses.

Despite the lack of fame of this event, British history professor Alan Forrest says that "so far the West remembers these massacres as a struggle between peasants and Catholics on one side, and between Republicans and atheists on the other side" [6].

Of course, as we mentioned at the beginning, killing these people was not in the name of atheism, but in the name of enlightenment, freedom and rationality[7].

It is worth mentioning that in 2007, a number of French parliamentarians submitted a bill requiring the French Republic to recognize the crime of genocide in Vendée and take responsibility for those atrocities[8].

So far, the French government still refuses to acknowledge this tragedy.

Hitler and Darwinism

"The support that I receive from Germany is the basis for which I hope that my theory will triumph in the end."

(Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species)

When Charles Darwin published his book (The Origin of Species) in 1859 AD, it was immediately translated into German and was widely accepted by the German cultural community.

Germany was at that time ready to receive the Daurian ideas because of the prevalence of three parallel intellectual trends: the first is Scientific materialism led by Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Vogt, and the second is Dialectical Materialism and its most prominent pioneer Karl Marx, and the last is the Hegelian Right [9].

These intellectual currents prepared the appropriate cultural ground for receiving Darwin's evolutionary ideas, not in their scientific aspect, but in their social employment, which is based on the fact that humans and other mammals are the result of what he called natural selection, that is, the blind struggle in which the fittest survives, and the least fit dies as a result. .

"In the not too distant future, the civilized races will exterminate and replace the savage races around the world."

(Charles Darwin, The Origin of Man)

Just as politicians and material interests employed ideas for their endeavours without any moral consideration, so did Dorn's ideas create a new generation of political leaders, social thinkers, and scientists, with what they saw as a biomaterial justification for German domination around the world, as history professor Richard Weckart notes: "Darwinism alone did not Nazism produces, but without it, neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have supported their brutal atrocities with sufficient scientific evidence to turn them into moral actions.”[10]

The religious position of Adolf Hitler appears to be a mystery at first glance. On the one hand, Hitler stated in more than one speech that he was a devout Catholic, but on the other hand, he was a true believer in social Darwinism, a philosophy steeped in materialism as it is known.

Hitler was not killed in the name of atheism, but he was not killed in the name of God as well. Rather, he was killed in the name of social Darwinism, which is a cosmic vision related to atheism, not to the existence of God, as it is a philosophy based on the negation of any role for God in the universe and therefore excludes the construction of any cosmic vision that considers that God has Interfering with the universe from near or far. He says, "The German doctrine of the brutality of natural selection based on fatal competitive struggle is the bible of German thinkers." Thus, it appears that either belief in God or atheism is not a reason in itself for committing massacres, as much as they represent the laws and the ideas and interpretations that follow them, and the behavior that follows them as a motive to justify the killing of innocents.