p13 Why We Fight

The Burden of Proof of Deity

By John Taylor; 2008 Feb 22, 16 Mulk, 164 BE

This year I feel a calling, the spirit calls one must answer. I feel a strange proximity with at least two inmates of the Great Beyond, William Hatcher and G.W. von Leibniz. Leibniz was a great genius, but I feel an affinity to him in one respect at least -- like him, I keep calling for planning, organization and a cooperative approach to planned knowledge, and all the while in my own writing I am the reverse, solitary, unplanned, and sadly disparate, not to say disorganized. Just like old GW. As one article about GW says,

"Leibniz called for the creation of an empirical database as a way to further all sciences. His characteristica universalis, calculus ratiocinator, and a "community of minds" intended, among other things, to bring political and religious unity to Europe -- can be seen as distant unwitting anticipations of artificial languages (e.g., Esperanto and its rivals), symbolic logic, even the World Wide Web." (Leibniz, Wiki)

Leibniz believed in that all-important goal: unity. He held that the more knowledge we have at our command the less excuse we have to be disunited. Nor had he given up on religious unity. All these were fundamental principles of the Master.

I have taken on the atheists because they consciously reject both planning and unity. They not only spit out the central organizing Principle of the universe, God, they also reject the basic faith that G.W. Leibniz stood for, the belief that ignorance divides and knowledge will ultimately unite. They and their false gods, materialist ideologies, such as nationalism, communism and capitalism, eschew all planning and unification. They not only do not aspire to that, they fight it at every turn. Having denied God, they made denial into an art form. They honed their skills on alcohol and cigarettes, and then they turned to the environment, the one issue that affects our long term survival most directly. Even as the evidence of climate change piles above our heads, they continue to deny and cast doubt on it. Power inebriates, and denial is upheld for its own sake. To deny a Good God is ultimately to deny all good, all compassion. To deny the Eternal is to end concern for anything to do with long term considerations.

I always return to the one example that, sooner or later, must turn into an atrocity on a scale to dwarf anything that Stalin, Mao, Hitler or any other atheistic madman has subjected us to so far. I am speaking of the Chicago School of economists, headed by atheist Milton Freedman, who were responsible for decades of aggressive enforcement of restrictive government policies of "belt-tightening" around the world. They forced, threatened and extorted governments to avoid investing in human supports or infrastructure. They are thus directly responsible for the marginalization of over a billion poor in slums and favelas, none of whom benefit from the advantages of schooling, paid work, basic utilities, health care or even housing, none of the things that put our pampered and learned unbelievers in their privileged position in the first place.

These souls have none but God to protect them, and I pray for them constantly. The kids, during our children's Baha'i class, asked me once why I am so concerned about atheism, and as I explained why, the anger rose and I almost broke down in tears.

The position of these billions is so precarious, and as the seas rise around the planet, this is a humanitarian disaster in the making on a scale unheard of in history. As they start to die, keep in mind the scale involved. Hitler, Stalin and Mao, the three worst killers among atheist leaders, were only able to murder, directly and indirectly, quite a bit less than a hundred million souls each. Now our learned Chicago economists bid fair to kill billions, which will beat them out by an entire order of magnitude. Yet you just have to pick up a newspaper to find open admiration of callous and blatant selfishness. It is enough to make you want to vomit.

One of the issues in the believer-atheist debate is the question of weight of proof. Who has the burden of proof, the believer or the atheist? Is God the default, or doubt? I came across this, from the Universal House of Justice, writing in the mid-1980's, which makes it pretty clear where they stand on this question.

"The time has come when those who preach the dogmas of materialism, whether of the east or the west, whether of capitalism or socialism, must give account of the moral stewardship they have presumed to exercise. Where is the `new world' promised by these ideologies? Where is the international peace to whose ideals they proclaim their devotion? Where are the breakthroughs into new realms of cultural achievement produced by the aggrandizement of this race, of that nation or of a particular class? Why is the vast majority of the world's peoples sinking ever deeper into hunger and wretchedness when wealth on a scale undreamed of by the Pharaohs, the Caesars, or even the imperialist powers of the nineteenth century is at the disposal of the present arbiters of human affairs?" (The Universal House of Justice, 1985 Oct, The Promise of World Peace, paragraph 21)

Having read the squirming of atheists to avoid the burden of proof for so long, I can see clearly how in this passage the UHJ completely reverses the weight of proof. It is up to the ideologues to justify what they have done to the suffering masses of humanity. God has never had a chance to run things, and never will until the masses finally start thinking for themselves and hold to account their mesmerizers.

It was therefore with great interest that I started to read the chapter on the "failed god of communism" in Christopher Hitchins' book, "God is not Great." Surely here I would hear their side of the debate. After all, Hitchens is a former Marxist, and only when that failed did he become one of the "unholy trinity" of anti-theists.

I was sorely disappointed.

I read it carefully, and read between the lines, and the only thing he seemed to be admitting was, "Marxism failed because it became a religion; religion is everywhere, and it is evil." He mentions Doris Lessing, who renounced Marxism when she heard that the Kremlin had broken into the Imperial museum and was putting the old regime's instruments of torture back to use.

As he points out, the same process happens everywhere, in Korea, in Albania; the longer atheist communism keeps its stranglehold on the people, the more religion-like it becomes. Thus, however much Hitchins demonizes religion, he has no choice but to admit that faith is an ineradicable, if not natural, part of the human condition. Even when atheists stay completely at the helm over many decades they must use the techniques of religion, or they fall apart. Even then they fall apart. They have no choice, since this benighted human race must flex its spiritual reflexes, or we die.

We die anyway, but I mean sooner.

Communism became a quasi-faith to keep its hold on the hearts as well as the bodies of large numbers of people, and it failed. The longer the experiment failed, the more obvious the need for faith became.

One point I have not seen brought up in this debate is the psychic damage that communism had on the people who lived through it. This is obvious to me, since I am married to one of its victims. For one thing, post-communism birth rates in these places remain ridiculously low to this day, almost two decades after the fall of the wall. This ideology bred an evil that is still wiping the people out, albeit in a less bloody manner. Official atheism gave women a visceral feeling that bringing a new life into the world is not only not worth the sacrifice; it is a positively immoral act. And at the same time that birth rates were dropping through the floor, alcoholism was shooting through the roof. Atheism is bad for the liver; it gives men the idea that our only hope is in a bottle.

Yet the mild and mealy-mouthed defenders of God in these debates continue meekly to sit back and defend. They let the burden of proof shift onto their side. They quake from taking the atheists of both right and left to task for their centuries-long failures. The center is falling apart, why will the center not hold? Give me Shoghi Effendi -- the one the Master called the "sign of God" -- on ideologies and atheism any day. He wrote in no uncertain terms,

"The Hegelian philosophy which, in other countries, has, in the form of an intolerant and militant nationalism, insisted on deifying the state, has inculcated the war-spirit, and incited to racial animosity, has, likewise, led to a marked weakening of the Church and to a grave diminution of its spiritual influence.

"Unlike the bold offensive which an avowedly atheistic movement had chosen to launch against it, both within the Soviet union and beyond its confines, this nationalistic philosophy, which Christian rulers and governments have upheld, is an attack directed against the Church by those who were previously its professed adherents, a betrayal of its cause by its own kith and kin. It was being stabbed by an alien and militant atheism from without, and by the preachers of a heretical doctrine from within.

"Both of these forces, each operating in its own sphere and using its own weapons and methods, have moreover been greatly assisted and encouraged by the prevailing spirit of modernism, with its emphasis on a purely materialistic philosophy, which, as it diffuses itself, tends increasingly to divorce religion from man's daily life." (Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha'u'llah, 182-183)

The Guardian died before post-modernism came to the fore, with its deification of division and its sick moral relativism. This movement is too distasteful to have a wide appeal, but it is all too influential in the halls of academe. It, and movements like it, has successfully neutralized any strong guidance or positive action that the learned might have taken to plan our way out of this mess. Shoghi Effendi remains perfectly correct that the only hope we have is the Plan of God, even expelled and exiled from where it should have been embraced long ago, in the universities, laboratories and in the hearts of the ravaged peoples living in the West's centers of materialism,

"May this Crusade ... teaching Plans, and the concerted efforts of Baha'i communities in both the East and the West, provide, as it unfolds, an effective antidote to the baneful forces of atheism, nationalism, secularism and materialism that are tearing at the vitals of this turbulent continent, and may it re-enact those scenes of spiritual heroism which, more than any of the secular revolutions which have agitated its face, have left their everlasting imprint on the fortunes of the peoples and nations dwelling within its borders." (October, 1953, Shoghi Effendi, Dawn of a New Day, 171-172)