Yahweh's Evolution: A Look at the Israelite Pantheon and the Journey from Polytheism to Monotheism (From Chapter 20: The Vacuity of Christian Faith of The Swedish Fish)
20
THE
VACUITY OF CHRISTIAN FAITH
We
begin chapter twenty “Would a Most Perfect Being Have a Most Imperfect Church?”
with the continued comparison of the Christian concept of God with the Greek
concept of Zeus.
While Zeus was created by other gods, Christians and Jews
always taught that Yahweh is the creator of all things … The difference between
various concepts of God is important for eliminating certain descriptions of
the most perfect being.
Remember
my earlier objection to the method of assigning templates to your chosen God concept as a way to
reject competing definitions as not compatible with your template? Holding up dissimilar God-concepts to your randomly selected template, and
then saying this definition fits but that other one doesn’t, is easy. But in
essence, all one has done is show that some definitions fit arbitrary religious
templates better than others. This is to be expected. But one hasn’t proved
anything yet.
As
for Randal’s point about Christians and Jews always teaching that Yahweh was
the creator of all things, as if the Christian concept of God and the Jewish
concept of God were identical, I feel obligated to mention that Israel and its
people were still a polytheistic peoples before the exile, roughly between the
10th century BCE and 586 BCE.[1]
It’s
no secret that the Israelites worshipped a pantheon of gods including El,
Asherah, Baal, Moloch, Kaus, and Yahweh, just to name a few.[2]
Most scholars consider El and Yahweh separate gods even though it would appear
that Yahweh later got hypostatized with El into one and the same deity by the
time the Torah was composed.[3]
Furthermore,
an archeological find at Kuntillet Ajrud in the northern Sinai desert in 1978
uncovered three anthropomorphic figures dating back to 800 BCE at the end of
the Iron age which referred separately to Yahweh, El, and Baal, implying they
were three distinct but equally revered gods.[4]
Despite
everything, I think it’s worth noting that the god Baal was one of the sons of
El, and represented the direct rival to Yahweh, which is why the Old Testament
god admonishes his followers not to worship the other gods, such as Baal. By the ninth century BCE we see telltale
signs of a gradual turn toward monotheism where the old gods of the Israelites
were supplanted and/or rejected in favor of a single, supreme god—i.e., Yahweh.[5]
The
new god Yahweh was a warrior god from the northern region of Edom and Midian,
near Judah, who grew in popularity until he eventually usurped El, the original
God of Israel, and took himself a consort, Asherah (originally El’s wife) who
is also referred to as the “Queen of Heaven” and who was worshipped alongside
both El and Yahweh by early Israelites from roughly the seventh to ninth
centuries BCE.[6]
With
Yahweh’s rise to fame, however, Asherah became the new Hebrew god’s consort
(Yahweh isn’t an adulterer so much as the Hebrews liked to pair Asherah with
their preferred god and the Canaanites liked to pair her with theirs, in this
case the god El). Meanwhile, Yahweh, the warrior god of the Hebrews, and Baal
(son of El),
[7]
the preferred god of the Canaanites, co-existed together for a time, but around
the tenth century BCE a shift occurred when Yahweh worship eventually became
the popular religion and fully usurped Baal worship, thus
leading to what would become the world’s major monotheistic religion.[8]
Evidently,
history teaches us a different story from the one Christian apologists want us
to hear. As it turns out, Yahweh didn’t create the other gods of the Israelite
pantheon as Yahweh was a rather late addition, only solidifying into a
monotheistic deity during the period of the United Monarchy (circa 1020 and 930
BCE). It was during this period that Yahweh assimilated the traits of all the
other gods in the Israelite pantheon and, ultimately, became the final
representation of the Israelite god.
Present
day monotheism, and so too the Jewish belief that Yahweh is the one true god (a
belief adopted by early Christians), however, is the end result of a long
process of religious evolution from an earlier, more robust Israelite
polytheism. A serious scholar, such as Randal claims to be, who writes on the
history of the Jews and the Israelites and their God should probably know all
this if he intends to be taken seriously as a scholar.
But
instead, he seems to reject all of this, if he even knows about it, as is the
way with apologists and inerrantists.
Concerns
of ancient history aside, we find that Sheridan has a new bother, mainly the
fact that Christianity frequently seems to sponsor rather imperfect if not
completely immoral behavior in its followers.
Sheridan
gives us an anecdote of a girl with liver cancer from Australia whose parents
fled to El Salvador to avoid having to give her the mandatory medical treatment
required by the Australian Law and so that they can, instead, pray for her
recovery in accordance with God’s will.
The
fact that God didn’t do anything to ease the young girl’s suffering is
essentially a version of the Problem of
evil, and it is a strong argument against the Christian God, but Randal
doesn’t seem to think so. Randal counters Sheridan’s example by asking, “But
how exactly does that work against Yahweh’s claim to be God?”
I
don’t know what happened here, but if I recall correctly I thought we were
talking about God being a so-called Perfect
being of classical Christian theology. Not God’s claim to be divine. This
is a dirty little trick apologists like to use whenever they have been bested
and have no good or ready answer for the hardened skeptic. They quickly change
topics, or raise other tangents (look over there, it’s a red herring!), so as
to bog down the conversation in a quagmire of confusing and unrelated
counterpoints, hoping to throw off the exacting scrutiny of the skeptic.
The
question I would have asked Randal is, “Wait a minute, weren’t you claiming
that Yahweh, the Christian God, is a Perfect God?” Subsequently, all one would
have to do is reference the numerous horrific acts of Yahweh in the Christian
Bible.[9]
End of debate.
Instead
of dealing with these hard hitting issues, real world Randal has his atheist
puppet do the same thing real world Randal likes to do, change topics.
Sheridan, for whatever reason, switches gears and starts harping on all of the
religious idiots which exist, saying that “as far back as you care to look your
God has been trailed by an unbroken chain of idiots.”
Randal
scoffs, “Idiots? The whole lot of us?”
No Randal, not all religious people are idiots.
That’s not even implied in what Sheridan said (how can you misunderstand your
own fictional character?), but there a many proud idiots who happen to be
devoutly religious, as correctly stated by Sheridan.
Coming
back to the suffering of the little girl, Sheridan points once again to the
parents’ negligence and asks, “Is it part of his [God’s] perfect plan that
children suffer agonizing deaths?”
Randal’s
defense is rather lame, but let’s allow him to make it anyway. Randal assures
us that “I don’t think those parents correctly understood God’s will…”
So, they’re idiots then?
Maybe
they just misunderstand God some of
the time. But what’s to say that Christians everywhere are not misunderstanding
God all of the time? What is Randal’s
criterion for separating the chaff from the wheat, so to speak, and discerning
who is good at understanding God and who isn’t?
Randal
dismisses Sheridan’s objection with a mere hand wave, informing, “Medical
quackery has nothing to do with the Christian view of God.”
Really?
So, does Randal consider the power of prayer medical quackery? Because many
Christians ardently believe in it, and many children die because of it.[10]
Randal then comes back with a comment so baffling, so absurd, that it quite
literally borders on the idiotic.
This tragic story could just as well have been about a
couple of atheist parents who favored quackery to proven medical treatments. I
am not sure why you’re blaming the Christian concept of God for the medical
ignorance and foolishness of some deeply misguided parents.
That’s
right. Because atheists have a devout belief in the supernatural power of
prayer, a kind of medical quackery according to Randal, and firmly feel
miraculous healing happens all of the time all around them. Further, these
atheists hang on every word of an old religious holy text which instructs them
on how to invoke the power of prayer to heal the sick if only they have enough
faith in their God.
No,
wait. That’s Christians.
Of
course, we should be fair and assume that Randal possibly meant others forms of
medical quackery—such as magic crystals, aura cleansing, astrology, and
homeopathy. Regardless, I think it’s safe to assume that most atheists
typically don’t believe in supernatural quackery because they don’t believe in
the supernatural powers behind it all.
If
atheists are being negligent in their lack of belief in the supernatural
things, then they technically wouldn’t be atheists since lacking evidence for
an overarching supernatural framework, no different from God in this respect,
you would have to wonder what their criterion was.
It
would be like an atheist not believing in God but believing in unicorns. It
doesn’t make much sense because you have to ask why are they skeptical about
God but not unicorns? The same could be said of atheists and magic. Why would
they deny the supernatural powers of an almighty God but believe in magic?
Although
there are uncritical atheists who believe in things like ghosts, conspiracy theories
and other strange things, such as the unquestioning “village atheist” that
Randal so loves to lampoon, most of the atheists I have met are atheists
precisely because they are the kind of person that likes to critically evaluate
their beliefs. So although there may be irrational atheists just as certainly
as there are irrational theists, what we can say for sure is that it is always
more rational to have doubts and that the person who never doubts never learns
because they cannot see the folly of their wrong beliefs. As Bertrand Russell
once quipped:
The
fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are
cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.[11]
As
for those more spiritual atheists who may believe in a soul or spiritual
essence of some kind but not believe in god, I really can’t say what would or
wouldn’t constitute medical quackery for them. But according to The Center for Spiritual Atheism, we
learn that
Generally, Spiritual Atheists are people who do not
believe in a literal “God” but still consider themselves to be (often deeply)
“Spiritual” people.… There is no consensus among Spiritual Atheists regarding
the literal existence of one’s own “spirit” or a collective “spirit”; however,
there is consensus that if any “spirit” does exist, it is not external to the
universe and it is not “supernatural.”[12]
They
go on to add that “Spiritual Atheists believe that nothing that exists or
happens violates the nature of the universe.” As far as anyone should be
concerned, this suggests that these “Spiritual” atheists would probably be less
inclined to believe in the sort of quackery Randal speaks about.
Personally,
I place medical quackery and the “power” of prayer in the same boat. If you’ve
ever wanted evidence for the inefficacy of miracles and the impotency of God,
quite frankly, there is no better example than the irrefutable failure of
prayer.[13]
Raising
the issue of negligence, Randal affirms, “Parents subject their children to
abuse and neglect for all sorts of reasons, not just religious ones.”
Of
course, it is easier just to blame the ignorance and callousness of the parents
than to talk about the failure of their religious beliefs to be substantiated
when it mattered the most, thereby alluding to the callousness and capriciousness
of God which, consequently, directly contradicts Randal’s notion of a Perfect
being who cares about forming a personal relationship with us because he loves
us and so answers the prayers of his devoted followers.
In
any case, people sometimes being negligent wasn’t actually the objection
raised, was it? Remember, Sheridan’s example was a direct objection to Randal’s
concept of a perfect God. If God was
perfect, and benevolent, then he’d answer all of those people’s prayers, he’d
heal the sick, and he’d work a few miracles to avoid all the needless suffering and a perfect being who was all loving
couldn’t, by his own nature, permit suffering (this objection is known as the
Problem of Evil).
The
point Sheridan raised wasn’t to say there isn’t child abuse in the world or
that parents don’t often act negligently; it was to say that if your preferred
God is a Perfect being and a loving being, and thus perfectly loving, then as a
Perfect being he would be obligated to ensure that all needless suffering be
avoided at any cost and, in the process, answer more of his followers’ prayers,
plain and simple.
Yet
this we do not find.
This
morbid notion that a perfect God who is also perfectly loving would allow for
any modicum of suffering, and subsequently all the needless deaths as a part of
his so-called perfect plan is not something a sane or rational minded human
being would care to defend.
Which
is probably why Randal denies that the religious
beliefs had anything to do with the
parents’ neglect.
Rather,
he shifts the blame onto the parents, saying it was the backwards thinking of the parents which is as
fault. Hold on a minute though, because we’d like to ask: don’t religious
beliefs often influence the religious person’s thinking? Randal, it appears, is
simply ducking the question.
Sheridan
tries to bring Randal back on track and states, “The fact is that belief in God
promotes fatalism.”
Quick
to counter this claim, Randal relays:
The Christians I know believe God works through modern
medicine and that he expects us to use our common sense … there’s no essential
link between theism and fatalism.
There
is absolutely no way that Randal can know God wants people to use common sense.
That’s just a wild assertion on his part. Also, one has to wonder if Randal has
ever heard of Christian Science, the Church of Christ Scientist, or Mary Baker
Eddy?
Meanwhile,
as to his claim that there’s no essential link between theism and fatalism, I
have to wonder if Randal hasn’t ever looked into the theological tenets of
Calvinist Christianity. Perhaps it would help to clarify. Fatalism is the belief that all events are predetermined and
therefore inevitable. It leads to a bleak outlook, because without free will,
without choice, what purpose is there to life?
At
the same time, Calvinist Christianity of the Reformed Church preaches the
doctrine of predestination, which holds that God predetermines certain events
such as your salvation. The five points of Calvinism, which go by the acronym
TULIP,[14]
also strongly suggest Calvinist theology is fatalistic in nature.
Randal
and Sheridan continue to argue at some length until Randal finally asks to
know, at least where depravity is concerned, “how often do Christians do these
things compared to non-Christians?”[15]
Aside
from Randal’s inability to Google, he claims that the reason Christians
frequently get caught doing abhorrent things is quite simple.
Christians outnumber atheists by multiple orders, so it’s
not surprising we’d have more examples of Christians committing evil acts—just
like we have more examples of Christians committing heroic and good acts…
Sigh. Yes, that explains the link
between faith and faith based actions precisely. No, wait. No it doesn’t.
Christians
may outnumber atheists in America, but not in Buddhist countries and cultures
and certainly not in secular dominated areas like the Netherlands and Japan. If
Randal’s logic is to be considered sound then we should expect to find the same
rate of “evil acts” in predominantly atheistic cultures as well. But to the
best of my knowledge, it doesn’t appear that we do.[16]
In
their book The Will to Kill (2000)
James Alan Fox, Jack A. Lenin, and Kenna Quinet found that all the nations with
high homicide rates were extremely religious, and that the nations with the lowest
homicide rates tended to be relatively non-religious. Such a find was
corroborated in a study led by Pablo Fajnzylber et al. (2002) published in the Journal
of Law and Economics.
A
2005 study by Gregory S. Paul and a 2006 study by Gary Jensen published in the Journal of Religion and Society the
authors state that, “In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a
creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult
mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous
democracies,” and “In all secular developing democracies a centuries long-term
trend has seen homicide rates drop to historical lows” with the exceptions
being the United States (with a high religiosity level) and “theistic”
Portugal.
Paul
and Jensen’s studies each detailed the complex relationship that exists between
religiosity and homicide finding that certain aspects of religiosity encourage
homicide and other dimensions discourage it, but that on average homicide in
religious countries far outweighed that of secular countries.
In
his book Society Without God Phil
Zuckerman blows up the idea that societies require God or religion for the
people to live good, peaceful, happy and productive lives. In fact, his
findings were that among all the nations of the world, the more secular the
better. Secular nations, on average, were wealthier, happier, and had lower
crime rates than religious nations.[17]
Just
to better illustrate how rare it is, I’ll use an example that happened here in
Japan, in the very city I have lived in for practically a decade. In fact, it’s
the only thing I can think of that comes close to the litany of Christian faith
healings we so often hear about.
In
2011 there was a forced exorcism of a thirteen year old teenage girl by
religious parents, Kazuaki Kinoshita and Atsushi Maishigi, which unfortunately
ended their daughter’s life.[18]
A sad story for sure, but in the decade that I’ve lived in Japan this is the
only time I’ve heard of such a shocking case of superstitious folly.
Randal
goes on to say the thing every religious apologist ignorant of history has
said, and continues to say, despite their being corrected numerous times by
well-informed historians.
How many of the hospitals and orphanages built in the
last two millennia were built by atheists? And don’t forget that the largest
mass-murderer of the twentieth century was an atheist.
Ooh,
yes. Evil psychotic mass-murdering atheists. I was wondering when he’d get to
this old canard.
It’s
not clear whether Randal means Stalin, Hitler or Pol Pot, as he fails to
mention which mass-murdering atheist he has in mind, but it doesn’t so much
matter since the comparison is completely invalid. It’s a fallacy of
association used by the apologist to make atheists look morally void by
invoking psychotic mass-murdering dictators and then citing their apparent
atheism as the leading cause of their moral corruption.
This
well-worn fallacy pops up everywhere in the religious debate, and it’s a shame
that religious apologists must resort to such appalling cheap shots simply to
make their position look that much better. Whatever else these cruel dictators
may or mayn’t have believed in, it certainly wasn’t their lack of belief in
things (including God) which compelled their heinous deeds.
A
couple of things need to be pointed out here, I think. First, Hitler, Stalin,
and Pol Pot were first and foremost mass murdering psychopaths, and their lack
of faith in things whether it was unicorns, little green men, or God didn’t
compel them to be mass murdering psychopaths, and secondly, they used religion
to a great extent as a means to help carry out their evil ambitions.
Additionally,
it’s worth noting that, as Richard Dawkins has so keenly observed, these
detestable men also sported mustaches. Does this mean anyone who has a mustache
is likely to be, in the immortal words of the British comedian Eddy Izzard, an
evil mass-murdering fuck-head? No, of course not.
Meanwhile,
it is quite well known by history buffs that Hitler was a Catholic and Stalin
trained in the Russian Orthodox faith.[19]
If these facts weren’t enough to console the worried believer who hangs on
every word of their favorite historically ignorant apologist, we can do even
better. Probing the Iron Chariots Wiki
page for details about Stalin, we learn that
As the de facto ruler of the USSR, he initiated many
purges. Many clergy were killed and this is often cited as Stalin’s
anti-Christian mark. However, like Henry VIII he did not simply remove clergy,
he replaced them. He established a new national church of Russia, which of
course answered to him. He considered the church very important to extending
control from Moscow to the satellite nations. Stalin’s church was called the
Russian Orthodox Church or The Moscow Patriarchate; and the suppressed church
was called the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia…
Stalin was many things, a former theologian, the head of
the national church, and one of the most brutal dictators ever. His own views
on religion are difficult to guess. Many scholars think of Stalin as a ruler
who envisioned himself as a god.
Furthermore, there is the concurrent claim that the USSR
was an atheist nation. While the Communist Party suppressed religious fervor,
it did so only out of jealously of loyalties. The Communist Party demanded
loyalty to itself above all others, even above God. Russia has always been an
intensely religious nation. They consider the leader of the Eastern Orthodox
Church to be equal to the Vatican’s Pope; or even above the Pope. To claim that
Russia became atheistic overnight in 1917 only to emerge deeply religious in
1989 is incredibly ignorant.
One may also note that almost all of the leaders of the
USSR, from Lenin to Gorbachev, except for Malenkov, were atheist or
non-religious or did not have their religion documented. Yet only Stalin
committed such historic atrocities. Gorbachev explicitly affirmed his atheism,
but he nonetheless campaigned for religious freedom and was very friendly
toward believers.”[20]
Before
concluding this chapter Randal informs us that
I certainly don’t find that the sins and errors of
individual Christians—or people who claim to be Christians—warrant the
conclusion that Yahweh isn’t God.
I
suppose I can go along with this reasoning, but only if you view people at
innately “sinful” and this seems to be specifically a Christian hang-up.
The
point is this, if Christians had a direct conduit to God, and truly had access
to a superior morality as they so often like to claim, then Christians would be
growing morally superior whereas non-Christians would be stuck in a morally
inferior state. But this we do not see.
Instead,
we find that Christians are not any better behaved than anyone else, including
atheists, so the idea that a person would lose his moral foundation without God
is clearly false.
As
a final point, before we move onto the next chapter, I have one nagging thought
that has been bothering me during this whole chapter. Randal has never
addressed whether or not a Perfect being would
even require worship to begin with or, for that matter, whether God is worthy of worship (if we were to believe
in Randal’s version of God). Although it wasn’t his intention to address this
point, it seems a viable question to ask. Perhaps even an important one.
Whichever
way you choose to look at it, the very notion of a deity requiring worship
limits such a being to a realm of imperfection. Perfect deities, after all,
have no reason to be lonely or desire exaltation through worship.
[1] See The Bible
Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its
Sacred Texts by Israel Finkelstein and
Neil Asher Silberman, pp. 241-42.
[3] See The Early
History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities in Ancient Israel, location 375
and 1167-1269; 1302 Kindle, ff. part 4. Asherah/asherah Revisited, by Mark Smith (2002), Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan
by John Day, p. 32, and Archeology and
fertility cult in the ancient Mediterranean, pp. 237-38, edited by Anthony
Bonanno.
[4] Ze’ev Meshel, Kuntillet
‘Ajrud: An Israelite Religious Center in Northern Sinai, Expedition 20
(Summer 1978), pp. 50-55.
[7] To learn more about Baal and the numerous reference to him
found in the Old Testament please see “The Worship of Baal” available online
at:
http://www.bible-history.com/resource/ff_baal.htm
[8] See the PBS interview with William Dever, Professor
Emeritus at the University of Arizona. See: “Archeology of the Hebrew Bible,”
and can be read online at:
http://pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/archeology-hebrew-bible.html
[9] Indeed, many have, and it has left us with even more
reasons to be skeptical. If you still don’t believe me, please see critically
acclaimed The Skeptic's Annotated Bible,
compiled and edited by Steve Wells, published by SAB Books, LLC, 2013.
[10] In 2009 Dale and Leilani Neumann, who believed in the
healing power of prayer, were sentenced to jail time for neglect and failing to
give their children proper medical care for treatable diabetes. See:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/oct/07/couple-sentenced-daughter-prayer-death
In 2010 an Oregon state judge was forced to give the state
custody of Timothy J. Wyland and Rebecca J. Wyland’s child and ordered medical
treatment as directed by doctors at Oregon Health & Science University when
they failed to do so for, you guessed it, their spiritual beliefs including the
belief in the healing power of prayer. See:
http://www.oregonlive.com/oregon-city/index.ssf/2010/07/judge_orders_state_custody_medical_care_for_faith_healers_child.html
In 2014 Herbert and Catherine Schaible, who believed in the
healing power of prayer, were sentenced to seven years in prison for letting
their eight month old baby suffer and die due to preventable medical
complications. But perhaps the more shocking thing is that this was the second
child they let die due to their religious beliefs. The parents were under a
judge appointed court order to give all of their children proper medical care
when a previous child died of untreated pneumonia in 2009.
This means the Schaibles conceived a whole new child from
the time of the death of the first one and again failed to provide proper
medical care, allowing another innocent child to die. See:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/19/faith-healing-prayer-children/5602533/
http://www.centerforabetterworld.com/SpiritualAtheism/about-spiritual-atheism.htm
[13] The John Templeton Foundation has made the 2005 Benson
Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) readily
available for free online at:
http://www.templeton.org/pdfs/press_releases/060407STEP_paper.pdf
[14] TULIP stands for Total depravity, Unconditional election,
Limited atonement, Irresistible grace and Perseverance of the saints.
[15] Here’s yet another example of child neglect for religious
reasons; this time two parents drove their injured child to a Church for prayer
healing instead of a hospital after a near fatal car crash:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/11/27/report-parents-of-injured-baby-choose-emergency-baptism-over-hospital-visit-with-fatal-consequences/
[16] Denmark, Sweden, Iceland and Japan consistently rank the
lowest in murders per capita and are among the least violent countries in the
world even though they are predominantly secular. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
Meanwhile, as of 2014, Iceland and Denmark ranked 1st
and 2nd while Japan ranked 8th on the Global Peace Index. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Peace_Index
UNICEF’s 2014 State
of the World’s Children report ranks Denmark, Sweden, and the similarly
non-religious Netherlands and Japan as among the best countries in the world
concerning “child welfare” (their safety, education, and health). See:
http://www.data.unicef.org/corecode/uploads/document6/uploaded_pdfs/corecode/SOWC2014_In_Numbers_28_Jan_12.pdf
[18] Needless to say, such occurrences in Japan, a secular
society with an impressively low crime rate, are extremely rare. But this just
goes to show that it’s not only one kind of superstitious beliefs that are
disadvantageous. You can read my initial thoughts and comments at:
http://advocatusatheist.wordpress.com/2011/09/29/buddhist-religious-superstition-kills-13-year-old-girl/
For an English report of the 2011 exorcism incident in
Japan please see the British online newspaper, the Telegraph, at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8792357/Teenage-girl-dies-in-Japan-exorcism.html
[19] I’ve written in detail on whether or not Hitler was an
atheist or not. If Randal means Stalin, then I recommend Christopher Hitchen’s
book God is Not Great: How Religion
Poisons Everything, in which Hitch tackles the subject of Stalin’s
homicidal motivations superbly. My article can be read online at:
http://advocatusatheist.blogspot.jp/2011/09/christan-nazism-or-nazi-christianity.html
http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Stalin_was_an_atheist
Also, don’t forget to check out Wikipedia’s in depth bio on
Stalin at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin
