QUORA: ‘Do you think atheism or communism is the most evil ideology of all time?’
I posted the following answer:
The question is invalid. Atheism is not an ideology. Ideology is a system of abstract ideas. Atheism (in the conventional sense) is not a system of abstract ideas. Rather, it is merely the absence of belief in a supernatural God. But I’ll play along.
Communism is atheistic only in the conventional religious sense. It rejects the God of the monotheistic religions. But it doesn’t reject the belief in a “higher” being. It embraces it. It simply secularizes God in the form of a collective that possesses its own consciousness that stands above and separate from the individuals that comprise it, just as religion places its God above and separate from human individuals. This collective, the “community” or society as a whole, is the higher power whose general will is embodied in the state, just as God’s will is embodied in the church (or synagogue or mosque). In Communism's version, the state is in the role of the church, and somehow is able to decipher the will of the collective, and then to impose that will at the point of a gun (there is no other way to impose a collective will).
Of course, the collective doesn’t exist in reality. What exists are individual human beings. The “community” or “society” is an abstraction that, in proper usage, stands for a number of individuals living in a particular geographical region and/or living under a particular legal system. But Communism embodies the idea that the collective stands above and separate from its individual components, who are mere cells in the larger collective organism, and that possesses values and interests and a will that supersedes and are separate from the individuals’ values, interests, and will.
Of course, this cannot be true. The community has no brain or consciousness. It is not an entity. It can’t think, feel, value, or choose. Only actual individuals can do that. Enter the state. Somehow, state officials—holding to the faith of a community “consciousness”—just “knows” what the community thinks, feels, values, or chooses how to act. This is the basis upon which the state acts on what it claims is the community’s good, irregardless of what any of its individual citizens desire. The thoughts, feelings, values, choices, and rights of any particular individuals are irrelevant to the community’s supreme will. This justifies the state’s imposition of communism’s collective moral vision of how the community functions. Being supreme over its individual “cells”, the community is embodied in the state apparatus. The state’s officials or ruling elites consider themselves morally justified to sacrifice any individual’s (or faction of individual’s) interests, wealth, or very lives for the good of the community. This belief system can manifest in no other way.*
Communism, then, rejects the monotheistic God of Christianity or Islam or Judaism. But it does not reject the mystical belief of religion in a higher being. In this broader sense, Communism is not atheistic. It simply secularizes religion’s mysticism, substituting religion’s God with the Community.**
Mysticism is the common base of Communism and religion. A genuine atheist doesn’t believe in any being or deity higher than man.
To play along, as I said I would do at the outset, let’s reimagine the question. If the question where “Do you think religion or communism is the most evil ideology of all time?”, I would have to say Communism. If the standard is the sheer scale of raw brutality, I would have to say Communism is the most evil. Theocracy, the unity of church and state—which, like communism, also embodies the will of its deity—comes in second place on the scale of brutality.
* [This is why, by its very nature, Communism must inevitably descend into tyranny, poverty, slavery, and murder. Soviet Russia, Red China, Cuba, North Korea, et al, were not aberrations. They were the unavoidable result communist ideology.]
** [Fascism, the other major form of socialism***, also secularizes’s religion’s mysticism. Nazism’s supreme collective is the race. Italian fascism deifies society as a whole. Marxian Communism, for its part, deifies “the proletariat”, or “workers”.
*** [See my answer to Quora: “Is fascism a capitalist ideology?"]
Related Reading:
QUORA *: ‘Why do people find communism so terrifying as an idea?’
Nazism, Communism, Atheism, and the Enlightenment
Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice—Craig Biddle
Related Viewing:
Christianity: Good or Bad for Mankind? —A Debate with Dinesh D'Souza vs. Andrew Bernstein
Yaron Brook Answers: Communism vs. Atheism
