Author documents the bitter fruit of atheism
By Michael Ashcraft —
The next time an atheist accuses Christianity of being responsible for untold mass murder throughout history, point out to him that atheism in the 20th Century alone killed 200 million people.
“Godlessness kills,” says Barak Lurie in his new book Atheism Kills. “Godlessness has resulted in far more mayhem and murders than all Judeo-Christian religion institutions combined. There is no comparison. Virtually every culture that has rejected God has collapsed or engaged in horrific mayhem. By contrast, virtually all cultures grounded on the Judeo-Christian tradition have flourished.”
Atheistic governments, seeking to impose their vision of utopia, feel compelled to eliminate any and all opposition, according to research from Atheism Kills:
- The French Revolution: up to 40,000 deaths.
- Stalin: 20 million deaths.
- Mao Tse-tung: up to 70 million deaths.
- Fidel Castro: up to 141,000 deaths.
- Ho Chi Minh: up to 100,000 deaths.
- Pol Pot: 2 million deaths.
- Kim Il-sung: 1.5 million deaths.
- Hitler: 11 million deaths.
The list goes on. “Being an atheist dictator advancing atheist doctrine has always led to brutality and killings,” Lurie observes.
By comparison, what is the tally of the bloodbath supposedly orchestrated by Christianity?
- The Spanish Inquisition: up to 5,000 killed.
- The Crusades: 1 million killed.
- The Salem Witch Trials: 19 killed.
- The Ku Klux Klan: 3,446 killed.
- Religious wars post Reformation: 11 million.
“Atheism killed hundreds of millions in the span of only 30 years,” Lurie writes. “The number of killings on (the alleged) behalf of Christianity (are) minor in comparison and ranged over approximately 800 years.”
Lurie decided to become an atheist at age 11 when he stumbled across the clever arguments wielded by atheists. Then he went to college and rediscovered God through philosophy classes.
Fyodor Dostoevsky was instrumental to his floundering faith in atheism. The Russian novelist explored the consequences of atheism — the resulting absence of all morals — in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.
“It was he who first made me see the dangerous world of my own atheism,” Lurie writes. “His books show the consequences of living according to dangerous beliefs.”
Lurie graduated with honors from Stanford University before earning a law degree from UCLA and a master’s in business administration from UCLA’s Anderson School of Business in 1989. He now is a managing partner of Lurie & Seltzer, a law firm in Los Angeles.
He finished Atheism Kills in 2017.
“Atheism Kills is a robust, relentlessly interesting and intellectually invigorating read,” says Dennis Prager in the foreword.
The book does more than just compare death census data. It also shows how atheism spawns bigger government, progressivism and eugenics (and its modern version: abortion).
The book exposes the flaws of atheism: Its moral relativity breeds evil. It deprives man of purpose and significance. It stymies arts and science. It has given no charitable organization to the world. It teaches man only to live for his own pleasure and not to risk one’s life to save another.
The author profiles one notorious incident, when Marc Lepine systematically shot and stabbed 14 women to death and injured 10 others at the University of Montreal in 1989. A misogynist, Levine released all the men from the engineering class — and they did nothing to try to stop him. The author maintains this cowardly posture is a natural outcome of atheism, Lurie says.
By contrast, U.S. Sgt. Roddie Edmonds, captured during the Battle of the Bulge during World War II, rallied his fellow Americans to support the Jews in his company. When the concentration camp ordered all the Jews to report for killing the next morning, Edmonds, a committed Christian, organized the entire group of POWs to “fall out” the next morning.
The Nazi commander was bewildered: “They cannot all be Jews,” the camp leader barked.
“We are all Jews here,” Edmonds responded. “If you are going to shoot, you are going to have to shoot all of us because we know who you are and you’ll be tried for war crimes when we win this war.”
The commander relented, and Edmonds saved 200 Jewish American soldiers.
This is what a belief in God leads to: convictions about what is evil and what is worth dying for, according to Lurie.
Atheism Kills also takes aim at the absurd passivity of progressive governments when faced with radical Islam. These liberal and atheistic — or atheistic-leaning — governments are in fact empowering today’s “greatest threat to civilization.”
Lurie sees in Western Civilization a slow degeneration much like the fall of Rome.
But he sees hope. Atheism must be attacked so that faith in God and the restoration of values can rescue America — and Europe.
“Without God there can never be any universal interpretation of what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil,” Lurie writes. “In a world where the human reigns supreme, you can expect only two outcomes: a world descending evermore into chaos or a world without liberty.”
Michael Ashcraft teaches journalism at the Lighthouse Christian Academy of Santa Monica.