| Society: The Fall of Communism, Fascism, and the Hippie Dream The collapse of atheism did not occur only in astrophysics, biology, psychology, and medicine; it also happened in politics and social morality. The collapse of communism may be considered one of the most important examples of this. Communism may be considered the most important political result of nineteenth-century atheism. The founders of this ideology, Marx, Engels, Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), or Mao Zedong (1893-1976), all adopted atheism as a basic principle. A primary goal of all communist regimes was to produce atheistic societies and destroy religious belief. Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's Communist China, Kampuchea (Cambodia), Albania, and some Eastern bloc countries applied immense pressure on Muslims and other religious people, sometimes to the point of committing mass murder. Yet, amazingly, at the end of the 1980s, this bloody atheist system collapsed. When we examine the reasons for this dramatic fall, we see that what collapsed was actually atheism. Patrick Glynn writes:
An interesting indication of the Soviet system's great "crisis of faith" was President Mikhail Gorbachev's (1931- ) attempted reforms. Ever since he became general secretary of the communist party (1985-91) and assumed the Soviet presidency in 1990, Gorbachev was interested in moral problems as well as economic reforms. For example, one of the first things he did was to initiate a campaign against alcoholism. In order to raise Soviet society's morale, for a long time he used Marxist-Leninist terminology. But seeing that this was of no use, he even began to mention God in some of his speeches, although he was an atheist. Naturally, these insincere words of faith were of no use, and the crisis of faith in Soviet society continued to worsen. Finally, the gigantic Soviet empire collapsed in 1991.
The twentieth century documented not only the fall of communism, but also that of fascism, another fruit of nineteenth-century anti-religious philosophy. Fascism is the outcome of a philosophy that may be called a mixture of atheism and paganism, and is intensely hostile to theist religions. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who may be called the father of fascism, extolled the morality of barbarous idolatrous societies, attacked Christianity and other monotheistic religions, and even called himself the "Anti-Christ." His disciple, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), was an avid Nazi supporter, and the ideas of these two atheist thinkers gave impetus to the terrifying savagery of Nazi Germany. The Second World War, which caused the death of 55 million people, is another example of the calamity that such atheist ideologies as fascism and communism have brought upon humanity. At this point, we must recall Social Darwinism, another atheist ideology that helped cause both world wars. In his Europe Since 1870, Harvard history professor James Joll states that behind each of the two world wars lay the philosophical views of Social Darwinist European leaders who believed in the myth that war was a biological necessity and that nations developed through conflict.34
Another social consequence of atheism appeared in Western democracies. In the present day, there is a tendency to regard the West as the "Christian world." However, since the nineteenth century, a quickly growing atheist culture has held sway with Christian culture, and today there is a conflict between them in what we call Western civilization. And this atheist element was the true cause of Western imperialism, moral degeneration, despotism, and other negative manifestations. In his God: The Evidence, American writer Patrick Glynn draws attention to this matter and, in order to compare the God-fearing and atheist elements in the West, takes the examples of the American and the French revolutions. The American revolution was realized by people who believed in God. The American Declaration of Independence states that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." Since the French revolution was the work of atheists, the French Declaration of Human Rights was different, with no reference to God and full of atheist and neo-pagan notions. The actual results of the two revolutions were quite different: In the American model, a relatively more peaceful, tolerant environment was created, one that respected religion and religious belief; in France, the fierce hostility to religion drowned the country in blood and unleashed a savagery that had no equal in French history up until that time. As Glynn says, "there is an interesting historical correlation between atheism, on the one hand, and moral and political catastrophe, on the other hand."35 Glynn notes that attempts to turn America into an atheist country also have harmed society. The fact that the sexual revolution, for example, that spread during the 1960s and 1970s caused immense social damage in terms of traditional moral values is accepted even by secular historians.36 The hippie movement was a demonstration of this social damage. Hippies believed that they could find spiritual emancipation through secular humanist philosophy, eastern philosophies, and by such things as unlimited drugs and sex. These young people who poured into the streets with romantic songs-like John Lennon's Imagine, released in 1971 and in which he spoke of a world "with no countries, and no religion too"-were actually undergoing a mass deception.
In fact, a world without religion actually brought them to an unhappy end. The hippy leaders of the 1960s either killed themselves or died from drug-induced comas in the early 1970s. Many other young hippies shared a similar fate. Members of the same generation who turned to violence found themselves on the receiving end of violence. The 1968 generation, which turned its back on God and religion and imagined they could find salvation in such concepts as revolution or selfish Epicureanism, ruined both themselves and their own societies.
33. Ibid.,
161-62.
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