As the place of religion in the conflicts of the past has gradually become obvious, to the detriment of the religions, a frequently used tactic has been to suppress atheism using smear tactics, by trying to associate it with totalitarianism and communism. One of the good things about socialism and communism is its claim to a rational, non-superstitious attitude to solving human problems. Even American style capitalism would see any democratic implementation of those political systems as a threat. The capitalist system and its collaborator, the Christian Church, cannot allow socialism or communism any credibility. With the ascendancy of religion goes the decline of democracy. Authoritarian philosophies cannot cope with change, least of all the notion that people are free to reject them. It stands to reason that if you think that god’s perfect creation can stand improvement — that his divinely appointed heads should roll —, that sets people thinking. And that’s not good for religion or dictators military or ‘elected’.

The most frequently used riposte to the catalogue of religiously inspired strife is to say that the great catastrophes of the 20th century, the Russian Revolution and the horrors of Joseph Stalin, and the world and Jewish Holocaust, were caused by atheism. It is commonly claimed that Hitler and Stalin committed their atrocities because they were atheists. Stalin was not religious, although he was brought up a Christian in a highly religious country. He was a cruel, psychopathic despot, but he did not claim that he acted in the way he did because he was an atheist or in the name of atheism. (He probably thought he was his country’s saviour!)

Hitler was a Catholic, and remained so until he died, as he told one of his generals, Gerhard. It has been noted that, in the 1930s, Nazi Germany was the most Church-affiliated nation in Europe. The German people were almost entirely Catholic and Lutheran. Despite that, they launched the Holocaust and World War II.

In 1933 a Concordat was signed between Hitler and the Vatican, which is still valid today. This pact between German Fascism and the Catholic Church ensured the latter a multitude of privileges, ranging from the monopoly on indoctrination at schools and universities to the imposing of Church tax by the German state [8]. This iniquitous compulsory Church tax is still imposed on all unemployed Germans, including non-Christians.

The prime motivation for both Hitler and Stalin and their regimes, was political, nationalist, and totalitarian, neither one was promoting atheism per se. Like all political elites, they used the divisiveness of religion in their plans for political domination. They also sought to crush any other organisations that might be used as a focus for opposition. In both Russia and Germany, where there was little opportunity for open political organisation in opposition to the regime, the Churches were indeed used as a cover or focal point for resistance, in some cases with the consent or even collusion of individual clerics but not of the Church hierarchy.

Stalin and Hitler’s early conditioning in their respective Christian denominations, Russian Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, would have included indoctrination in the belief that the ‘wicked Jews’ were responsible for the crucifixion of their idol Jesus. It is reasonable to suppose that the effects of religion in their upbringing contributed, along with their cultural values and the times and institutions in which they lived, to support the monstrous regimes they helped to create.

The compliance of those who eagerly promoted and ran these regimes, those who turned a blind eye or defended them, and those who just accepted them as their lot, were all products of their societies, heavily influenced by religion and the value of blind faith and hero worship. These influences would have shaped their attitudes and behaviour, which in turn would have influenced their reaction to these powerful father figures. People drilled in accepting, believing, in faith and unthinking obedience to an all powerful ‘god’ figure are all part of the same picture.

To associate atheism and free thought with such activity is as absurd as it is untrue.

One of the first actions of the Third Reich was to close down possible sources of opposition such as Trade Unions, and the halls of Organised atheism.

The Nazis used Christian symbols and signs. An important Nazi slogan was ‘Kinder, Kirche, Kueche’ (Children, Church, and Hearth). The fascists used the Christian ethos to promote their narrow view of family life (sex being for the procreation of the Aryan race), and Church going included anti-Semitism. They awarded the Iron Cross for bravery, and the belt-buckle that German soldiers wore said ‘Gott mit uns’ (God with us).

The record of the Catholic Church and its attitude to the Third Reich is murky to say the least! As was the response of Catholics and the Catholic Church in other European countries, including France, and it may perhaps help to explain the otherwise inexplicable collaboration of so many of their populations. The Church of Rome did not use its political weight or its moral influence against the Nazi regime, and recent evidence points to the collusion of the Church with the Peronistas in Argentina, protecting and using known Nazis in their cruel and oppressive activities.

Stalin was brought up in the Orthodox Christian Church, and according to many, in a harsh and abusive household and there are some reports that he was abused by priests, while he served as an altar boy.⁹

Russian history prior to the communist revolution was one of autocratic Tsarist rule, mass destitution and regular famines, and, associated with this, the role of the Russian Orthodox Church was to keep the population passive and subservient. Religion was seen as an aid to the suppression of the poor as it is in other parts of the world where there is mass poverty today. Placating people by giving them the promise of a wonderful afterlife if they behave, is part of religions hold over superstitious people!

"The rich man in his castle, the poor man at the gate"

"The meek shall inherit the earth" etc.

Religionists answer the secularists charge that religion has caused many wars, by saying that these regimes killed far more people than other wars. But the Crusaders and Conquistadors alone killed millions and would have killed vastly more people had they had 20th century weapons and technology. More people were killed in WW1 than WW2, and as in all wars, all the participants claimed to have god on their side. Most armies even those in secular states employ religious chaplains and it is assumed that God supports their motives and actions. It would seem that God does not discriminate ‘He’ is on everybody’s side!

In addition to ‘western’ military campaigns, there have been millions killed on every continent, in ‘tribal’ wars almost all of which have significant religious/superstitious elements. In the pursuit of spreading their religions and preserving their relationships with their state sponsors, violence, intimidation, oppression, genocide, and the separation of children from their families, has been the order of the day.

Religion and individual religionists are often credited with supporting freedom fighters and those opposing repression, but although there have been notable individuals in the Churches who have done so, there are far more who have not. The ranks of oppressors and collaborators are also largely made up of devotees of the religions of the time, and the Church hierarchies rarely if ever oppose such activities. In addition the religious teaching of meekness and passive acceptance of oppression, has served to quell rebellion, diverting feeling safely away from effective political action into worship and divine catharsis.

There are of course, many individual religionists who have campaigned heroically for human rights against political oppression. Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Archbishop Huddlestone. And there is a strong tradition of pacifism in the modern Quaker movement. However, the fact that the major religions and the majority of their adherents, had played a large part in the building and sustaining of those regimes seems to have escaped the notice of those who want to cite them as representative of religion in general, and Christianity in particular.

It is also interesting to realise how few (depending upon the criteria used), the number of such individuals is, as a proportion of the hundreds of millions of religious believers, and thousands of religious sects and cults, and their leaders, priests theologians and advocates and members.

Where are today’s Churches that hold such sway in Latin America, The Middle East, and Africa, and the United States? Mobilising their millions of followers against oppression and co-coordinating peace efforts? Spreading compassionate policies to eliminate poverty, fear, and disadvantage? No, They are, promoting prejudice and discrimination of biblical proportions against women, homosexuals, ‘scroungers’ single mothers and anyone who disagrees with their doctrines. They are conspiring against anyone who wants to see generous welfare and comprehensive health services. They are promoting their religions and fighting each other, colluding with oppressive regimes and political cabals to keep them in power, and their Churches own place in the scheme of things. There may be individual priests and other activists who are working for liberalisation at the margins of their religions, but their institutions are not.

This is not to undervalue the efforts of individuals, and their importance in their liberation movements. On the contrary, there were certainly people who campaigned for justice and human rights, individuals who rose from within the ranks of oppressed peoples whose only means of organisation was the very Churches that had colluded with their oppressors, but to take this as representative of religion is to cheapen them as human beings in their own right. It is also wickedly unjust to the many freedom fighters, reformers, and martyrs who were not religious, and who did not have the protection of the Church to fall back on for support and commemoration.

Missionary activity wreaked havoc with indigenous populations of the Americas — North and South —, the Pacific and Australia, Africa and Asia, in a process that is still going on. Proselytising missionaries no longer use beads as bait, but use ‘aid’ — education and health and welfare. They frequently describe themselves now as ‘Aid Workers’, thus besmirching secular Aid workers who give their services without religious motivation, attaching no cultural or religious strings.

British history has been a saga of power-broking, conspiracy, killings, and internal and external wars, as part of the European religious wars of colonisation. At home and abroad, the picture has been the same, with Catholics and Protestants committing atrocities against each other. From the earliest times, religion has gone hand in hand with the making and breaking of alliances, battles for supremacy over land and peoples, empire-building, and the carving up of countries and continents; from the earliest tribes of Britain, religion has gone hand in hand with the search for land and power.

Following the conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine (c274-337), Christian missionaries arriving in Britain first tried to suppress the existing Pagan religions, which, although they were superstitious, did not have the oppressive, narrow-minded attitudes that characterised the early Christians, who with official backing of the early Church, turned their full fury on the pagans and persecuted them. They proscribed the ‘old religions’, absorbing where necessary those parts of them that persisted among the people, such as long-standing fertility festivals, turning them from Pagan celebrations into Christian ones. Winter solstice, followed by the ‘birth of the new sun’ and the prospect of spring warmth and light, became Christmas. The worship of fertility goddesses known variously as Eostre, Ostare, Ostara, Ostern, Eostra became Easter from the ancient word ‘eastre’ meaning ‘spring’.

How much do we know about "the widespread un-belief of the 16th century"? Who has heard of the atheist ‘Socinians’? It appears that they have been successfully airbrushed out of our history. As have the words and ideas of other freethinkers of succeeding centuries who supported the rise of science and the Mechanico-Materialistic Philosophy. (P79)

Seventeenth- and 18th-century Europe was a time of conflict between more or less authoritarian Christian sects over which should dominate the state. It also saw a rise in the questioning of religion by thinkers and philosophers; it was a time of liberal thought, with figures such as Hobbes, Hume, Voltaire, and Thomas Paine. Many of the sceptics of the Enlightenment called themselves Deists and paid lip service to belief, possibly to avoid falling foul of the blasphemy laws for which they could be arrested and severely punished. The period did, however, see probably the first avowedly atheist, the Frenchman Baron d’Holbach.

The English Civil War was about the conflict between ‘the people’ and their parliament, and the rule by ‘divine right of kings’, - the absolute monarch, and was typical of the brutality and persecution by both sides and their supporting religions Catholic and Protestant. The 16th and 17th centuries saw one of the worst periods in British legal history, an example of which was the trials of Witches in East Anglia, hunted down by fanatical Puritans Hoskins and Sterne in 1645. Religious belief in the devil and its ability to possess people, led to the persecution of many, mainly elderly women, all over Christian Europe. In Britain the worst excesses were in East Anglia, where, on denunciation by an enemy, women and occasionally children and men were arrested, tortured and hanged. They were stripped and examined for warts, which were supposedly used to nurture ‘imps’! This period was one of the worst periods of English judicial history, and is considered to have been the forerunner of the Salem witch trials, so chillingly depicted in Arthur Millar’s play ‘The Crucible’, a play he in later life described as finding a parallel in the McCarthy trials of suspected Communists in America in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

(It has subsequently been discovered that the cause of so-called ‘madness’ was probably due to the toxic effects of eating bread, made from wheat infected by Ergo — a fungal infection that affected the wheat crop under favourable damp growing conditions in some years.)

Britain’s role around the world was coloured by its turbulent religious conflicts within Britain, and within Europe. The early colonisation of North America was an extension of the European wars, inspired by their conflicting religious ideologies Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Their mutual hatred and persecution on both sides at home led to the decamping of Puritans to the New World, and conflicting armies of Catholics and Protestants competing for supremacy. The fighting between the European colonists contaminated the new world with their attitudes towards the Native Americans whose culture they considered inferior to their own. The importing of black slaves further reinforced white domination.

At the heart of these conflicts were the notions of superiority and inferiority, one strand of which was (and is) Christianity. Members of the so-called ‘Great Religions’ believe that they are the chosen people, that they are special and that those who do not believe will be damned. To a greater or lesser degree, they see unbelievers as inferior and in need of saving. This underlying belief has affected the way religious people see others of different religions, and atheists or "infidels" (non-believers). Even today in Muslim countries non-believers or those who renounce their religion can be severely punished, in some countries even killed. Death is still the punishment for blasphemy in several Muslim countries. Fatwas – calls for the killing of individuals anywhere in the world are still issued by Muslim clerics on anyone who dares to offend their beliefs.

Christianity did not save the slaves of America as is often claimed, in fact it set back progress that was being made by other more liberal colonialists who allowed them to work or fight for their freedom and allowed them to marry and own land. In order to allow Christians to own slaves it passed legislation that maintained their rights, confirming that conversion to Christianity did not confer on them the supposed natural superiority and status of Christians.

In recent times we have seen some of the worst examples of religious zealotry.

In Africa, British and other European colonists created ‘countries’ whose borders were more to do with colonial administration than the use of land natural to its indigenous peoples. Their own cultures and superstitions were no better than supposedly civilised superstitions of European Churches, but at least they were their own.¹⁰

The notion that black, primitive peoples who were not Christian, and therefore were inferior, led to exploitation, the worst example being slavery. The supposed superiority of white European Christians justified their domination of the native peoples of ‘their’ colonies. Of course money was also a strong factor, and the plundering of natural resources made rich merchants even richer, but commerce and religion and power worked together. Much of the initial softening-up was done by Christian missionaries, and this ensured a compliant work force, drilled in the work ethic so beloved of the Christians.

More recently, this legacy of colonialist creation of countries, constructed without understanding the natural, historical patterns of the indigenous tribes, settled or nomadic, has led to fighting on a horrific scale, within and between countries.

The imposition of Western European ways, administration, values, and political systems has created urban poverty and an agriculture that cannot feed its growing populations. The religions too have seen Africa as a source of recruits for their Churches, and in the process have superimposed one set of harmful doctrines upon native superstitions. One such led to the blood bath in Rwanda, and the disgraceful inaction of the UN and western countries as the massacres took place, watched by us all on television. In this part of Central Africa there are still regular reports of children being exorcised or even sacrificed to placate the gods when thought to be harbouring devils and therefore responsible for bad luck or crop failure.

The relics of European Religious Wars continue into the twenty-first century for some in Northern Ireland between Protestant Orangemen and Catholic Republicans, the communities living in ghettos, segregating their children by religion and such is the rigidity of the religious mind-set.

Religion still shapes our lives and constrains our freedom in many ways at a personal, local, and national level as I hope to show. But it is at the international level, at the heart of government and in the individual politicians, and the extent to which they follow and support the pressure of Christianity and Judaism in the United States, that it is at its most dangerous. The pressure of the right-wing moral majority in the US, Catholicism and Islam world-wide, on the United Nations and the European Union is being used to promote the interests of American Capitalism and the oil corporations, around the world, as well as their own narrow doctrinal attitudes at home. Britain is being drawn in to support a world of conflict between Christianity and Islam, and Capitalism and Left/Liberal ideologies, which will have the most disastrous consequences.

While the religions and some sections of the media and government strive to calm anti-immigrant sentiment in the population by promoting ecumenism, other sections of the press and some politicians are using religion to exacerbate anti-immigrant fears.

The religions themselves are striving to divert criticism by divorcing themselves from the violent behaviour of their extremist members, while at the same time defending or justifying the political activities, and reactionary and divisive practices that lead to hostility towards them.

Instead of working to take their religions back into the sphere of private life, and refraining from trying to influence public policy, dropping provocative public display of their ideology, and accepting the rights of those who wish to live without supernatural beliefs — and the right of anyone to criticise others’ beliefs —, they continue to assert their privileged status.