The atheist socialist Eric Hobsbawm on the deaths of millions under the Marxists in the Soviet Union:
“In 1994, he shocked readers of the Times Literary Supplement when, in an interview with Michael Ignatieff, he said that the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens under Stalin, although ‘probably excessive,’ would have been worth it if a genuine Communist society had been the result.”
A theist conservative Declan Leary on the deaths of thousands under the paternalist-religious, government-church partnership in Canada:
“Whatever good was present at the Ossossané ossuary—where those who had not yet encountered the fullness of Truth honored their dead as best they knew how—is increased a thousandfold in the cemeteries of the residential schools, where baptized Christians were given Christian burials. Whatever natural good was present in the piety and community of the pagan past is an infinitesimal fraction of the grace rendered unto those pagans’ descendants who have been received into the Church of Christ. Whatever sacrifices were exacted in pursuit of that grace—the suffocation of a noble pagan culture; an increase in disease and bodily death due to government negligence; even the sundering of natural families—is worth it.“
It’s the exact same mindset: I have my ideology, and I’m willing to have lots of human beings killed for it. For this mindset, the metaphysical difference between theists and atheists is not important. What is important is their shared anti-individualism — their view of individual humans as mere sacrificial means to an end.
(Thanks to Timothy Sandefur for the Leary link.)
It’s all about values at the core, not whether one’s a theist or an atheist! The above demonstrates this clearly.