Bring up the wrongs of religion (be it the ‘relatively benign’ individual cruelties the churches and religious schooling have visited on the young and feeble – or the truly murderous), and the default knee-jerk retort, the most powerful in the whole arsenal or religion’s defense force, will be launched; a ‘weapon of mass distraction’:

  “Yes, but look at atheism’s murders”…  They’ll yell – and the rap sheet of totalitarian communism(?!) and it’s fascist cousins will be read out; “Mao, Hitler, Pot, Stalin.”

I’ve heard this “atheist murders” claim a thousand times, yet, the nonsense of it never ceases to stun me for a moment; can the faithful truly be that confused?  Or are they simply being devious?

Clearly, the motivation for communism’s opposition to religion has nothing to do with the motivations intelligent and informed atheists have against superstition.

Let’s get the facts and issues straight:

·       Communism is an economic doctrine; it is not a philosophic one.

·       More to the point: Communism is definitely not a scientific enterprise!

·       The proponents of communism did not come to an atheistic conclusion by following any ‘evidence’; they arrived at that conclusion by decree – a decree that is motivated by the grab for power.

In truth, Marxist communism and evolutionary knowledge are at opposite ends of almost any spectrum on which you care to plot them.

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