Chapter 11: Can Atheism Make the World Better?
In this chapter Marshall’s goal is to convince the reader that secularism and atheism have been responsible for certain individuals’ crimes; that the lack of morality evident in these secular philosophies can drive people to do bad things, and that atheism as a whole is bad for a society. Marshall writes,
But Stalin wasn’t the only atheist of modern times. Nor did he emerge from a vacuum. What have atheism and Darwinian ethics done for the human race in general? Are there signs that, once freed from the “delusions” our ancestors suffered under, the human race will breath a big sigh of relief and finally make progress? Or does the “death of God” mean, as Dostoevsky warned, that “everything [including Gulags] is lawful”? (190)
The only “secular” terrorist Marshall mentions is Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. Marshall writes,
Ted Kaczynski was among the brightest of the brights: a Harvard grad who earned a Ph.D. Degree with a dissertation at Michigan State that won a prize for the best in math. He taught at the University of California Berkeley, then retied to the woods of Montana, from where he mailed incendiary devices to people working in technology. Over the years, his homemade explosives killed three people and maimed 23. (190-191)
Marshall continues to talk about what he believes influenced Kaczynski,
In Harvard and the Unabomber, Alston Chase, who took some of the same courses as Kaczynski, noted, “The Gen Ed courses in social science quickly introduced us to the relativity of morals and the irrationality of religion.” Readings included Marx, cultural relativist Margaret Mead, existentialist Jean-Paul Saetre, positivist A.J. Ayer, Sigmund Freud’s antireligious (and naïve) venture into anthropology, The Future of an Illusion, and “countless other writers who had absorbed the messages of these doctrines.” The future Unabomber took German, where Nietzsche, who announced the “death of God” as clearly as anyone, was on the menu. […] Kaczynski wrote in what became known as The Unabomber Manifesto, “There is no morality or objective set of values.” (191)
There are a few problems with this claim. First, after getting a copy of Harvard and the Unabomber, Chase did not cite the Manifesto, but an essay Kaczynski had written for the psychology professor at the time, Henry Murray. This further shows Marshall’s lack of scholarly talent. Second, these philosophers who Chase claims Kaczynski studied did not propose a world lacking in morality so it seems to me that Chase’s thesis is unconvincing. Most of those philosophers were humanitarian in their views, and did not believe there was no morality, so it is hard to see how this bleak view could be learned from these individuals. Some of these individuals were also scientists and yet Kaczynski felt that science was partially responsible for the decline he believed he saw in society. Chase also cites the forensic psychiatrist Sally C. Johnson who said that Kaczynski was very angry at his family and that society is bad and he should rebel against it, and that these two beliefs “intertwined” while at Harvard. [1] Again, correlation does not prove causation and Chase fails to cite any concrete evidence that those courses prompted him to do anything. Third, and the most damaging to his case, is the fact that the 1953 general education syllabus Chase describes did not have the same reading list as the one Kaczynski had several years later. According to Todd Gitlin,
As for the Humanities 5 Gen Ed course (“Ideas of Man and the World in Western Thought”) that Kaczynski took (I took it a year later), we read Aeschylus, Plato and Aristotle, the Gospels and St. Augustine, Descartes and Shakespeare, Kant and Hume, Dostoyevsky and Camus. (Chase does not trouble to investigate Kaczynski’s 1958-59 reading list; he is stuck on his own 1953 version, which included Freud, Marx, Sartre and Camus. Of these, the only one to survive into the 1959-60 syllabus was Camus.) Scraping the bottom of a barrel of insults, Chase considers such a course “elitist.” (What is Harvard supposed to be, populist?) He clucks at Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus because Camus observed that “the absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.” But he overlooks Camus’s refusal to succumb to the absurd; he extracted moral beauty from the effort, however doomed, to overcome it. [2]
Even if we ignore these damaging facts against Chase’s case Marshall has not explained why, if this education is so damaging, more people do not act as Kaczynski did. Can Marshall only find a single secular terrorist?! If so, that would make Marshall a tremendous hypocrite since earlier he chastised Dawkins for supposedly only being able to find one “Christian terrorist.” However, religion has been linked to hundreds, if not thousands, of acts of violence throughout history. There is simply no comparison.
After making the previous argument about Kaczynski he moves on to Hitler and argues that social Darwinism was an enormous influence in his thinking, citing Richard Weikart’s From Darwin to Hitler. Marshall writes,
What caused the Holocaust? Simple. Having rejected Christian morality, some of Darwin’s followers derived their ethics from evolution with a positive sign.
Richard Weikart tells the story in From Darwin to Hitler.
Ernst Haeckel, the leading popularizer of evolution in Germany, argued that evolution held five implications for ethics: (1) Evolution proves mind is a part of body; (2) it implies determinism, since the soul can be explained by the laws of nature (as Dennett tries to do); (3) it implies moral relativism, since standards change over time (we “move on,” as Dawkins put it); (4) moral character must be at least partly hereditary; and (5) natural selection must somehow produce morality. […] Hitler was not, then, a bolt out of the blue. In a society that had been seduced by Arthur Schopenhauer’s “will” and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s “will to power” and contempt for Christian kindness, many Germans still went to church, but the fashionable ideas that moved society derived from evolution and the death of God. (194, 195)
First of all, this is a common argument that Hitler was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche. If he was he distorted Nietzsche’s views, no thanks in part to his sister who didn’t seem to understand her brother’s ideas and who did a great disservice to him by publishing various books that were a patchwork of Nietzsche’s notes. Second, this caused several issues. It created many misunderstandings of Nietzsche’s actual beliefs, which made his philosophy seem scattered and contradictory, and imparted views to him that he did not hold. [3] Nietzsche was not an anti-Semite and even advocated the mixing of races. He once wrote,
The Poles I considered the most gifted and gallant among the Slavic people; and the giftedness of the Slavs seemed greater to me than that of the Germans – yes, I thought that the Germans had entered the line of gifted nations only through a strong mixture with Slavic blood (XI, 300) [4]
This view can be found throughout “almost all” of Nietzsche’s writings: “[T]he belief in the heredity of acquired characteristics and the conviction that race mixture might favor the attainment of culture – both in nations and in individuals.” [5] Clearly, this view is nowhere near those held by the Nazis.
Another common error regarding Nietzsche was his idea of the “will to power,” which Marshall seems to believe attributed to the Nazi atrocities. It is hard to see how this “will to power” influenced the Nazis (unless they just didn’t understand it) because it was nothing more than a concept he developed to describe the psychology behind mens’ actions. Nietzsche saw the “will to power” from two different perspectives,
First, he thought of it as a craving for worldly success, which he repudiated as harmful to man’s interest in perfecting himself. Secondly, he thought of the will to power as a psychological drive in terms of which many diverse phenomena could be explained; e.g., gratitude, pity, and self-abasement. The phrase “will to power” is not yet used, except in one note, and Nietzsche far from approves of this urge. While one cannot, on the basis of the evidence so far considered, make any sweeping statements about Nietzsche’s philosophy, it seems worth insisting that, at least at first, Nietzsche used the will to power as a principle to explain behavior – as a psychological hypothesis. More often than not, he used it to explain behavior he happened to dislike. (emphasis mine) [6]
It should be clear how badly Nietzsche’s views have been distorted and it’s unfortunate that Marshall aids in this distortion, and perpetuating long-debunked myths about how Nietzsche’s philosophy supposedly influenced the Nazis.
Regarding the influence of evolution on Nazi thought, this is another claim that cannot be substantiated with any concrete facts. To quote Hector Avalos,
Contrary to Dr. Weikart’s claims, none of the seven major aspects of Nazism he has identified can be attributed to Darwinism as he has initially defined it: “the theory of evolution through natural selection as advanced by Darwin in The Origin of Species.”
Some Nazi policies may, indeed, have received Darwinian interpretations, but Dr. Weikart attributes to Darwin what clearly has a longer Christian history (e.g., Jews are condemned to inequality in Christian societies) or generalized history (e.g., territorial ambitions have been part of history for millennia). Such features have nothing or little to do with anything Darwin advocated in The Origin of Species, or in any of his other well-known works.
Dr. Weikart’s dichotomy between Darwinian materialism and spirit-centered Judeo-Christian ethics certainly cannot withstand scrutiny. There was no such thing as “the sanctity of life” in Judeo-Christian societies, if that means all lives were regarded as equally deserving of the same privilege to life. For example, the “sanctity of life” for homosexuals was no more guaranteed in some parts of the Bible than it was in Nazi policy.
The valuation of the immaterial part of persons may itself have contributed to the devaluation of human bodies in Christians societies, something evident in the practice and glorification of martyrdom.
Numerous exceptions, qualifications, and theological rationales could allow abortion or the killing of what we would now recognize as disabled persons in Christian societies.
Jews, in particular, were seen as unequal to Christians, and Jews were routinely killed or exiled for not being Christian. So how does the inequality of Jews in Nazi Germany differ from the inequality that Jews had experienced for at least 2000 years in Christian societies?
The survival-of-the-fittest idea was not only not uniquely Darwinian, but it was a routine part of American socio-religious and government policy toward indigenous populations. Many Nazis specifically referred to American practices, rather than to Darwin per se, to draw their inspiration.
To explain Nazi Germany one needs to focus on the sort of moral authority that would have motivated average Germans who carried out these policies. Clearly, the Bible and Christian history would have more authority than Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which Weikart makes the centerpiece of his formal definition of Darwinism. [7]
Finally, Marshall gets to his discussion of Stalin, Communism, and atheism, a claim I’ve dealt with on numerous occasions. Marshall writes,
The New Atheists understandably want to think atheism had nothing to do with all this [the destruction of “China’s spiritual treasures” by Chairman Mao]. “There is no evidence that his atheism motivated his brutality,” Dawkins says confidently of Stalin:
Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of religion. Stalin and Hitler did extremely evil things, in the name of, respectively, dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism, and an insane and unscientific eugenics theory tinged with sub-Wagnerian ranting.
With due respect to Dr. Dawkins, but more to the living and the dead, he should find another debating point.
First, why is it “insane,” from an evolutionary point of view, to kill people outside your genetic or community line? Male tigers do it all the time, and Dawkins tells us Jesus wanted us to do it, too. He’s confused about that, but he knows it follows from his own premises.
Second, has Dawkins never heard of the term “dialectical materialism”?
Stalin didn’t kill alone. Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, both Kims, Ho, Castro, Ceausescu, and Honecker were also atheists. In one-third of the world, Communist parties announced the death of God on billboards, chalkboards, radio waves, and blank walls. Secret worship services in homes, forests, and caves were forcibly broken up, along with the faces of many who attended. Millions were Tortured for Christ, as the title of a book by Baptist ex-con philosopher Richard Wurmbrand succinctly put it. They had rats driven into their cells, were made to drink urine for communion, or were put into the “carcer” (a cupboard with sides studded by steel spikes) for writing the name Jesus on a cell wall. Children of religious parents were kidnapped by the state and taught atheism in truly “Darwinian” state orphanages. None of that counts against the atheist record, according to Dawkins, because in some undefined sense these crimes were not “for the sake of atheism.” (197-198)
Marshall then brings David Aikman into the discussion, arguing,
David Aikman, former Beijing correspondent for Time magazine, wrote his doctoral dissertation on atheism in the Marxist tradition. Aikman examined the spiritual lives of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin, the founders of communism. He showed that the “systematic assault upon religious belief in Communist countries” had deep roots in the anti-God culture in which these men developed their ideas.
Marx was the prototype of all young men who go away to college and lose their faith under the influence of godless professors. The young Marx was sunny and pious. In college, he read Shelley and the romantics. Then he transferred to the University of Berlin and lost his faith in God. He was particularly enchanted by two popular romantic stories. The first was the tale of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods for the benefit of man and was punished for his impiety. (In his doctoral thesis, he quoted Prometheus: “In a word, I detest all gods.”) The other was the story of Faust, who sold his soul to the devil. References to these deeply anti-Christian myths are scattered throughout Marx’s writings, but are most vividly reflected in his early poems. The motifs that occupied Marx, Aikman relates, were “doom, revenge, damnation, reaching for heaven, vying with God.” (198-199)
Earlier Marshall said “[n]one of that counts against the atheist record […] because in some undefined sense these crimes were not ‘for the sake of atheism,’” but if anyone isn’t properly defining their terms, it’s Marshall and especially Aikman, whose work I’ve refuted in the past. (emphasis mine) [8]
In his dissertation, The Role of Atheism in the Marxist Tradition (1979), Aikman argues that anti-religious views or hostility towards god and/or religion is synonymous with atheism, which is why Marshall put so much emphasis upon the “anti-God” culture of the Enlightenment. For example, in his dissertation, Aikman writes,
This, indeed, is the case. The hostility towards religion in the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and many other Marxist writers, is a well-known characteristic of Marxist philosophy. Some scholars even when approaching the issue from a variety of perspectives, have concluded that anti-religion is the dominant characteristic of Marxism. H.B. Acton, for example, a distinguished professional philosopher, has put it this way:
“Marxism is an anti-religious philosophy first formulated by Marx and Engels, who did not, however, attempt such a closely reasoned account of their view as a whole as Plato and Epicurus or Spinoza did of theirs.” (emphasis in original) [9]
Another example,
The anti-religious and anti-Christian expressions of Marx’s thought, in their overt and explicit forms, are scattered throughout many of his writings of the post-1848 years, both in his correspondence and in his major works like Capital. They indicate that his atheism, though it ceased to be the specific topic of his writings, is a constant in his world view. [10]
And once more, Aikman says of Marx’s poems written months before he converted to Hegelianism,
It is the thoughts they express, especially towards their own spiritual fates [the characters in Marx’s play], that make Oulanem such a rich source for the understanding of Marx’s own emergent rebelliousness towards God. (emphasis mine) [11]
Even in his 2008 book, The Delusion of Disbelief: Why the New Atheism is a Threat to Your Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness, Aikman argues that,
[…] the twentieth-century ideologies that produced the greatest totalitarian evils, communism and Nazism, both grew out of a sustained philosophical rebellion against religious faith – in essence, atheism. That philosophical rebellion was birthed in the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment and first gained expression in political life during the 1789-1799 French Revolution; it attained its apotheosis in the Bolshevik regime that came to rule Russia after October 1917. (emphasis mine) [12]
It should be more than clear the problems with this argument. First, atheism is defined as the lack of belief in gods: a “without” or “not” and theos “god.” [13] Where does opposition to god/Christianity come into the picture? Atheism is nothing but a negative and contains no positive assertions, such as “I hate religion,” or anything else. Second, even without making use of this philosophical and logical blunder, Marshall and Aikman completely ignore evidence as to what caused the Communists to act as they did: their Marxist ideology.
Before I get to this, however, I want to address Marshall’s misunderstanding of what dialectical materialism is. He seems to believe this somehow links atheism to Marxism but it’s obvious Marshall doesn’t understand what this term means. Dialectical materialism is simply a belief that:
1. Nothing but the material world exists, which doesn’t even imply atheism anyway since atheism is only the absence of god belief, not the immaterial world. If it were true that atheism was synonymous with materialism we wouldn’t see any atheistic religions, such as animsim, that also contain beliefs about an immaterial realm. This early religion doesn’t contain beliefs in gods (theism) but does contain a belief in an immaterial dimension. Some atheists even believe in the supernatural, disproving the notion that atheism and materialism are one and the same. They are separate issues.
and,
2. Historical change takes place based upon the tension between thesis and antithesis, which results in an advanced synthesis. This belief about history doesn’t even need to be materialistic, but for Marx it was. In other words, materialism doesn’t even logically follow from this dialectical philosophy.
Regarding the evidence that it was the Communists’ ideology and not atheism all one has to do is look at history, and not the distortion of history as it’s presented by these Christian apologists in Marshall and Aikman. When you look at the quotes of the Communists themselves you can easily see this influence. Here is Lenin speaking about the “combating of religion,”
The combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching…It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion…It means that Social Democracy’s atheist propaganda must be subordinated to its basic task – the development of the class struggle of the exploited masses against the exploiters. (emphasis in original) [14]
Here is another quote of Lenin’s from a pamphlet titled Socialism and Religion from 1905,
Economic slavery is the true source of the religious humbugging of man…The proletariat of today takes the side of socialism, which enlists science in the battle against the fog of religion and frees the workers from their belief in life after death by welding them together to fight in the present for a better life on Earth. (emphasis mine)
Here is one more,
Religion is by no means the result of exceptional ignorance and darkness, just as it is not a question of simple logic, the result of false thinking. It has its roots in the social life, in the conditions of existence; it grows upon the soil of definite social relations and is determined by the class position in society of the one or the other group. – Communist Party Conference on Antireligious Propaganda, Article IX, April 1926 [15]
Last one,
To the query, “Does modern civilization need religion?” the Communist answer is “yes,” so far as decaying capitalist civilization is concerned. There, under the pressure of crisis, in an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear, religion serves as an escape mechanism for the classes which history has already condemned. – Julius Hecker, 1933 [16]
It was believed that religious belief was a necessary aspect of pre-socialist life but was not needed after the society transformed into a socialist one. The Communists’ attempts to create such a socialist society resulted in Stalin’s “Great Terror” and other atrocities since the population did not want to work on collective farms, and the Communists’ attempts to do away with all things they believed would hinder or be unnecessary in a socialist society, which included religion.
One thing you must ask yourself as you read through the above quotes: Do any of these mention atheism as the cause of their dislike of religion? No. It was their Communist ideology which caused them to believe that religion was a hindrance to their socialist utopia and therefore it had to go.
Aikman and Marshall’s argument fails not only on logical grounds, but also historical.
Next, Marshall argues that secularism has been a bad influence upon the sexual mores of society, making use of Alfred Kinsey and Margaret Sanger, who he argues influenced society for the worst, by destroying the restraints placed by religion on our “libido.” (203-204)
Marshall writes,
Alfred Kinsey, another believer who lost his faith under the tutelage of a godless professor, cast off the inhibitions of his pious youth under the intellectual influence of William Wheeler (a Harvard etymologist who, like Edmund Wilson, followed Solomon’s advice to “study the ant”). Kinsey’s studies of human sexuality were published in what are called the Kinsey Reports, best-selling scientific books that helped launch the sexual revolution. Kinsey was a dedicated researcher, filming his wife in bed with students, among other innovations. His research methods have been panned for poor sampling (too many prison inmates and pedophiles) and gross ethical lapses. His results – he claimed ten percent of males were homosexual – inflated margins at the expense of the center.
Margaret Sanger, the founder of what became Planned Parenthood, published a magazine called The Woman Rebel, whose slogan “No Gods! No Masters!” succinctly summarized her philosophy. She believed that “ethical dogmas of the past” blocked evolution and “the way to true civilization.” This would come through sex, by which “mankind may attain the great spiritual illumination which will transform the world.” The rebel woman had “the Right to destroy” and “the Right to be an Unmarried Mother.” If Kinsey was the father of sexology, Sanger can be seen as the mother of the single-parent household – though she spent her own spare time chasing lovers across oceans. (204)
First of all, I would consider Marshall’s take on Kinsey to be a biased personal attack. Second, the criticism of Kinsey’s sampling has been addressed by one of the fellow researchers, Paul Gebhard, who in the 1970’s removed all “suspect data” (prison inmates and pedophiles for example) from the results of the percentage of homosexuality and surprisingly came out with figures that were very close to the original. The original percentage was 37%, while Gebhard’s newly figured percentage was 36.4%. [17]
As for Margaret Sanger, I’d agree she didn’t always advocate the best ideas, such as eugenics, but overall, her mission was freedom and equality for women, which continues with Planned Parenthood, which does its best to help pregnant women and promote safe sex practices.
For Marshall to focus on only the negative (and in the case of Kinsey getting his facts completely wrong) and attack the character of these two individuals is despicable, rather than argue how their views somehow harmed society.
If their views somehow harmed society wouldn’t we find the most Christian nations with the lowest incidences of STDs because of the Christian virtue of sexual abstinence? No, we actually see the opposite. According to the 2010 Human Development Index the least religious countries have the lowest rates of HIV infection in the world, such as Norway and New Zealand. [18]
Regarding the issue of single parent families, which countries host the most number of households that contain both parents? How does the united states, one of the most Christian countries compare to some of the least religious countries? Once again, Marshall would rather spew his propaganda than look at the facts. In 2007 the percentage of both parents living together with their children in the united states was roughly 70%. In some of the least religious countries, such as Finland the percentage was roughly 95% and in the Netherlands the percentage was roughly 83%. [19]
To sum up his chapter Marshall says,
In conclusion, I see no evidence that the world will be better without God. We can try to persuade ourselves Communism was a fluke, that it was “lack of reason,” not faith, that sent a third of the world into a murderous tailspin. We do share “deep conscience.” But the logic of ideas – you only go around once, moral relativity, we’re all material girls and boys, man as a “survival machine” for genes, survival of the fittest, the relativity of morality, [didn’t he already say this?] the tendency to exalt government to the throne of God – can and do subvert what we know is right. (206)
As I’ve demonstrated, the “facts” Marshall presented were entirely wrong. The facts actually prove the opposite conclusion as I’ve shown. With more secularism and less religion comes more social progress. Sociologist Phil Zuckerman points out this fact,
If this often-touted religious theory were correct – that turning away from god is at the root of all societal ills – then we would expect to find the least religious nations on earth to be bastions of crime, poverty and disease and most religious countries to be models of societal health.
A comparison of highly irreligious countries with highly religious countries, however, reveals a very different state of affairs. In reality, the most secular countries – those with the highest proportion of atheists and agnostics – are among the most stable, peaceful, free, wealthy, and healthy societies. And the most religious nations – wherein worship of god is in abundance – are among the most unstable, violent, oppressive, poor and destitute. [20]
As we’ve seen throughout this review Marshall more often than not didn’t seem to do his homework very well and his assertions have been continually shown to be contradicted by the facts. Atheism and evolution did not cause the Communist and Nazi atrocities and it’s been shown that the less religious countries have the greatest societal health.
Conclusion
The twelfth chapter, Consilience, didn’t contain anything there that I felt merited a response. Most of it was Marshall repeating things I’ve refuted above and talking about the “limits” of science and other nonsense. However, I will say this. The fact is that science does a much better job of describing the world than religion ever has, or will, and as I noted above, these questions will never be solved with this childish and nonscientific “god of the gaps” mentality. Science will advance, slowly but surely, and will most likely answer most, if not all, of humanities’ questions. Religion will only hold us back, just as it has over the centuries.
The Truth Behind the New Atheism was one of the first books published tackling the book explosion of the New Atheism and, after reading and reviewing a good number of these responses, I believe it is one of the worst argued.
My first review of this book was published on Arizona Atheist October 22, 2007 and it has gone through five major editions, with the present edition being the final one. In this final edition it was my goal to better investigate the arguments of David Marshall’s and even though I’ve read the book cover to cover three or four times my research this time exposed even more blatant errors than I had previously been aware of. Why didn’t I catch these errors a long time ago, you ask?
It’s very simple. Over the years I’ve gained more knowledge and, as I alluded to in the introduction, I’ve gotten more skilled at writing these reviews and more skilled at doing better, more thorough research, which is the reason I wanted to rewrite this review one final time. With this review it was my goal to expose David Marshall’s dishonesty, horrible scholarship (I’m not sure that word even applies here), and expose his many errors for the world to see.
When I first read The Truth Behind the New Atheism I had only been exposed to the arguments of Christian evangelist Ray Comfort and most of the arguments presented in this book I had never come across before. Now that it’s been several years and I’ve read many more books and exposed myself to various Christian apologists these arguments seem like child’s play and I’ve come to realize their flaws and how easily they are refuted.
With the new knowledge I’ve gained over the years I’ve attempted to convince Marshall to debate me and write a response to my review, to which he has declined each time. However, as I was finishing the touches on this final edition he contacted me and tells me he has finally addressed (in the previous edition) the first chapter of my review. I was not impressed in the least with his response. If Marshall could not deal with my arguments in the previous edition he surely will not be able to handle my counter-arguments in this improved edition.
It has been a long road, but I’ve finally reached the end. I now lay The Truth Behind the New Atheism to rest. There it will lay, deconstructed and exposed, never again to be taken seriously by anyone. Amen!
Chapter 11: Can Atheism Make the World Better?
1. Harvard and the Unabomber, by Alston Chase; 18-19
2. Gitlin, Todd. “A Dangerous Mind: ‘Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist’
by Alston Chase” The Washington Post. March 2, 2003 – accessed 7-28-11
3. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, by Walter Kaufmann, Princeton University Press, 1974; 3-18
4. Ibid.; 284
5. Ibid.; 287-288
6. Ibid.; 185
7. Darwin and Hitler, by Dr. Hector Avalos – accessed 8-3-11
8. The Delusion of David Aikman: A Refutation of The Delusion of Disbelief
9. The Role of Atheism in the Marxist Tradition; 2-3 – accessed 8-3-11
10. Ibid.; 210
11. Ibid.; 124
12. The Delusion of Disbelief: Why the New Atheism is a Threat to Your Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2008; 101
13. The Tao of Arizona Atheist: Atheism
14. And God Created Lenin: Marxism vs. Religion in Russia, 1917-1929, by Paul Gabel, Prometheus Books, 2005; 90
15. Ibid.; 75
16. Ibid.; 75
17. Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things, by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Indiana University Press, 2004; 285
18. Human Development Report 2010: The Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development,by the United Nations Development Programme, 2010; 197
19. Single Parents, Around the World, by Catherine Rampell, originally published on March 10, 2010 – accessed 8-3-11
20. 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a god, by Guy P. Harrison, Prometheus Books, 2008; 296
