The GOD Delusion (41 page)

What
impels it in its consistent direction? We mustn't neglect the driving
role of individual leaders who, ahead of their time, stand up and
persuade the rest of us to move on with them. In America, the ideals of
racial equality were fostered by political leaders of the calibre of
Martin Luther King, and entertainers, sportsmen and other public
figures and role models such as Paul Robeson, Sidney Poitier, Jesse
Owens and Jackie Robinson. The emancipations of slaves and of women
owed much to charismatic leaders. Some of these leaders were religious;
some were not. Some who were religious did their good deeds because
they were religious. In other cases their religion was incidental.
Although Martin Luther King was a Christian, he derived his philosophy
of non-violent civil disobedience directly from Gandhi, who was not.

Then,
too, there is improved education and, in particular, the increased
understanding that each of us shares a common humanity with members of
other races and with the other sex - both deeply unbiblical ideas that
come from biological science, especially evolution. One reason black
people and women and, in Nazi Germany, Jews and gypsies have been
treated badly is that they were not perceived as fully human. The
philosopher Peter Singer, in
Animal Liberation,
is
the most eloquent advocate of the view that we should move to a
post-speciesist condition in which humane treatment is meted out to all
species that have the brain power to appreciate it. Perhaps this hints
at the direction in which the moral
Zeitgeist
might
move in future centuries. It would be a natural extrapolation of
earlier reforms like the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of
women.

It
is beyond my amateur psychology and sociology to go any further
in explaining why the moral
Zeitgeist
moves in its
broadly concerted way. For my purposes it is enough that, as a matter
of observed fact, it
does
move, and it is not
driven by religion - and certainly not by scripture. It is probably not
a single force like gravity, but a complex interplay of disparate
forces like the one that propels Moore's Law, describing the
exponential increase in computer power. Whatever its cause, the
manifest phenomenon of
Zeitgeist
progression is
more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be
good, or to decide what is good.

The
Zeitgeist
may move, and move in a generally progressive direction, but
as I have said it is a sawtooth not a smooth improvement, and there
have been some appalling reversals. Outstanding reversals, deep and
terrible ones, are provided by the dictators of the twentieth century.
It is important to separate the evil intentions of men like Hitler and
Stalin from the vast power that they wielded in achieving them. I have
already observed that Hitler's ideas and intentions were not
self-evidently more evil than those of Caligula - or some of the
Ottoman sultans, whose staggering feats of nasti-ness are described in
Noel Barber's
Lords of the Golden Horn.
Hitler had
twentieth-century weapons, and twentieth-century communications
technology at his disposal. Nevertheless, Hitler and Stalin were, by
any standards, spectacularly evil men.

'Hitler
and Stalin were atheists. What have you got to say about that?' The
question comes up after just about every public lecture that I ever
give on the subject of religion, and in most of my radio interviews as
well. It is put in a truculent way, indignantly freighted with two
assumptions: not only (1) were Stalin and Hitler atheists, but (2) they
did their terrible deeds
because
they were
atheists. Assumption (1) is true for Stalin and dubious for Hitler. But
assumption (1) is irrelevant anyway, because assumption (2) is false.
It is certainly illogical if it is thought to follow from (1). Even if
we accept that Hitler and Stalin shared atheism in common, they both
also had moustaches, as does Saddam Hussein. So what? The interesting
question is not whether evil (or good) individual human beings were
religious or were atheists. We are not in the business of counting evil
heads and compiling two rival roll calls of iniquity. The fact that
Nazi belt buckles were inscribed with
'Gott mit uns'
doesn't
prove anything, at least not without a lot more discussion. What
matters is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether
atheism systematically
influences
people to do bad
things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does.

There
seems no doubt that, as a matter of fact, Stalin was an atheist. He
received his education at an Orthodox seminary, and his mother never
lost her disappointment that he had not entered the priesthood as she
intended - a fact that, according to Alan Bullock, caused Stalin much
amusement.
¹⁰⁶
Perhaps because of his training
for the priesthood, the mature Stalin was scathing about the Russian
Orthodox Church, and about Christianity and religion in general. But
there is no evidence that his atheism motivated his brutality. His
earlier religious training probably didn't either, unless it was
through teaching him to revere absolutist faith, strong authority and a
belief that ends justify means.

The
legend that Hitler was an atheist has been assiduously cultivated, so
much so that a great many people believe it without question, and it is
regularly and defiantly trotted out by religious apologists. The truth
of the matter is far from clear. Hitler was born into a Catholic
family, and went to Catholic schools and churches as a child. Obviously
that is not significant in itself: he could easily have given it up, as
Stalin gave up his Russian Orthodoxy after leaving the Tiflis
Theological Seminary. But Hitler never formally renounced his
Catholicism, and there are indications throughout his life that he
remained religious. If not Catholic, he seems to have retained a belief
in some sort of divine providence. For example he stated in
Mein
Kampf
that, when he heard the news of the declaration of the
First World War, 'I sank down on my knees and thanked Heaven out of the
fullness of my heart for the favour of having been permitted to live in
such a time.'
¹⁰⁷
But that was 1914, when he was
still only twenty-five. Perhaps he changed after that?

In
1920, when Hitler was thirty-one, his close associate Rudolf Hess,
later to be deputy Fiihrer, wrote in a letter to the Prime Minister of
Bavaria, 'I know Herr Hitler very well personally and am quite close to
him. He has an unusually honourable character, full of profound
kindness, is religious, a good Catholic.'
¹⁰⁸
Of
course, it could be said that, since Hess got the 'honourable
character' and the 'profound kindness' so crashingly wrong, maybe he
got the 'good Catholic' wrong too! Hitler could scarcely be described
as a 'good' anything, which reminds me of the most comically audacious
argument I have heard in favour of the proposition that Hitler must
have been an atheist. Paraphrasing from many sources, Hitler was a bad
man, Christianity teaches goodness, therefore Hitler can't have been a
Christian! Goering's remark about Hitler, 'Only a Catholic could unite
Germany,' might, I suppose, have meant somebody brought up Catholic
rather than a believing Catholic.

In a
speech of 1933 in Berlin, Hitler said, 'We were convinced that the
people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the
fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few
theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.'
¹⁰⁹
That might indicate only that, like many others, Hitler 'believed in
belief. But as late as 1941 he told his adjutant, General Gerhard
Engel, 'I shall remain a Catholic for ever.'

Even
if he didn't remain a sincerely believing Christian, Hitler would have
to have been positively unusual not to have been influenced by the long
Christian tradition of blaming Jews as Christ-killers. In a speech in
Munich in 1923, Hitler said, 'The first thing to do is to rescue
[Germany] from the Jew who is ruining our country . . . We want to
prevent our Germany from suffering, as Another did, the death upon the
Cross.'
¹¹⁰
In his
Adolf Hitler: The
Definitive Biography,
John Toland wrote of Hitler's
religious position at the time of the 'final solution':

Still
a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite detestation of
its hierarchy, he carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the
killer of god. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a
twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of
god - so long as it was done impersonally, without cruelty.

Christian
hatred of Jews is not just a Catholic tradition. Martin Luther was a
virulent anti-Semite. At the Diet of Worms he said that 'All Jews
should
be driven from Germany.' And he wrote a whole book,
On the
Jews and Their Lies,
which probably influenced Hitler.
Luther described the Jews as a 'brood of vipers', and the same phrase
was used by Hitler in a remarkable speech of 1922, in which he several
times repeated that he was a Christian:

My
feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter.
It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few
followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to
fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer
but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read
through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His
might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of
vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the
Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I
recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for
this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I
have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a
fighter for truth and justice . . . And if there is anything which
could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that
daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.
¹¹¹

It
is hard to know whether Hitler picked up the phrase 'brood of vipers'
from Luther, or whether he got it directly from Matthew 3: 7, as Luther
presumably did. As for the theme of Jewish persecution as part of God's
will, Hitler returned to it in
Mein Kampf:
'Hence
today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the
Almighty Creator:
by defending myself against the Jew, I am
fighting for the work of the Lord.'
That was 1925. He said
it again in a speech in the Reichstag in 1938, and he said similar
things throughout his career.

Quotations
like those have to be balanced by others from his
Table
Talk,
in which Hitler expressed virulently anti-Christian
views, as recorded by his secretary. The following all date from 1941:

The
heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity.
Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of
the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced
into the world by Christianity . . .

The
reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it
knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity.

When
all is said, we have no reason to wish that the Italians and Spaniards
should free themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let's be the only
people who are immunised against the disease.

Hitler's
Table Talk
contains more quotations like those,
often equating Christianity with Bolshevism, sometimes drawing an
analogy between Karl Marx and St Paul and never forgetting that both
were Jews (though Hitler, oddly, was always adamant that Jesus himself
was not a Jew). It is possible that Hitler had by 1941 experienced some
kind of deconversion or disillusionment with Christianity. Or is the
resolution of the contradictions simply that he was an opportunistic
liar whose words cannot be trusted, in either direction?

It
could be argued that, despite his own words and those of his
associates, Hitler was not really religious but just cynically
exploiting the religiosity of his audience. He may have agreed with
Napoleon, who said, 'Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common
people quiet,' and with Seneca the Younger: 'Religion is regarded by
the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as
useful.' Nobody could deny that Hitler was capable of such insincerity.
If this was his real motive for pretending to be religious, it serves
to remind us that Hitler didn't carry out his atrocities single-handed.
The terrible deeds themselves were carried out by soldiers and their
officers, most of whom were surely Christian. Indeed, the Christianity
of the German people underlies the
very hypothesis we are discussing - a hypothesis to explain the
supposed insincerity of Hitler's religious professings! Or, perhaps
Hitler felt that he had to display some token sympathy for
Christianity, otherwise his regime would not have received the support
it did from the Church. This support showed itself in various ways,
including Pope Pius XII's persistent refusal to take a stand against
the Nazis - a subject of considerable embarrassment to the modern
Church. Either Hitler's professions of Christianity were sincere, or he
faked his Christianity in order to win - successfully - co-operation
from German Christians and the Catholic Church. In either case, the
evils of Hitler's regime can hardly be held up as flowing from atheism.

Even
when he was railing against Christianity, Hitler never ceased using the
language of Providence: a mysterious agency which, he believed, had
singled him out for a divine mission to lead Germany. He sometimes
called it Providence, at other times God. After the
Anschluss,
when Hitler returned in triumph to Vienna in 1938, his
exultant speech mentioned God in this providential guise: 'I believe it
was God's will to send a boy from here into the Reich, to let him grow
up and to raise him to be the leader of the nation so that he could
lead back his homeland into the Reich.'
¹¹²