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Kate Cohen believes America doesn’t need more God. Instead, the author and occasional Washington Post columnist believes America needs more atheists. Cohen’s October 3 thesis in the Post covers a lot of ground so it’s difficult to divine her preeminent rationale for increasing atheism but one of her prime reasons is to ensure the survival of American democracy.
In urging people to proclaim atheism, Cohen advises, “Consider that the United States – to survive as a secular democracy – needs you now more than ever.” Apparently, Muslims, Jews, Christians and others who believe in God pose a threat to democracy, though Cohen’s column stopped short of explicitly claiming this threat to be existential.
Cohen is adamant in her desire for more people to identify as atheists. “We can tell people we don’t believe in God,” she writes. “The more people who do that, the more we normalize atheism in America, the easier it will be – for both politicians and the general public – to usher religion back out of our laws.” Cohen also worries that, “Religious belief is – more and more, at the state and federal levels – a way to sidestep advances the country makes in civil rights, human rights and public health.”
If Cohen is concerned that belief in God might erode civil rights, human rights and public health, she might consider how these and other rights could be affected by an atheistic society and government. No speculation is needed to understand the results of this approach to civic life; it’s been tried before, many times, with remarkably consistent results.
In the late 18th century, France ushered in the atheistic Cult of Reason, one of many mechanisms for excising God from the public square. Tens of thousands of clergy were murdered or exiled, church property was stolen by the government and the Reign of Terror sent many thousands more to their deaths at the guillotine.
Mexico experimented with atheism in the early 20th century. President Plutarco Elias Calles sought to eradicate religion in the 1920s, outlawing monastic orders and suspending basic rights for Catholic clergy. When citizens took up arms in protest of Calles’ abuses, a bloody war erupted, prompting the government to line up thousands of believers in front of firing squads.
Beginning in the early 1960s, Fidel Castro’s Cuba killed, imprisoned or exiled untold numbers of Catholic priests, and closed or destroyed Methodist, Pentecostal and Baptist churches. Religious schools were shut down and seized by the ruling government atheists.
Albania proclaimed state atheism in the 1960s and enforced it through executions and exiling monks, priests and nuns. The government also appropriated churches, mosques, monasteries and other religious properties, closing them or converting them to gyms, warehouses and centers for other secular purposes.
More recently, Cambodia tried state atheism beginning in the second half of the 1970s. Cambodian atheists murdered tens of thousands of Buddhist monks while destroying their temples and monasteries. The ruling Khmer Rouge banned all religious practices and sought the extermination of certain Muslim sects.
Murder, theft, and starvation were also rampant in other, better known atheistic regimes. The histories of the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and similarly instituted nations are replete with abuses of civil rights, human rights and public health, and require no amplification here.
Given this well documented history of what happens in societies anchored in atheism, it’s not unreasonable to wonder why anybody would advocate for more of it and the totalitarianism that invariably accompanies it. Atheism being a core component of Marxist-Leninism and similar civic constructs, it begs the question of why Cohen is advocating a social structure that is fundamental to those ideologies. That question was not addressed in her column.
It’s inevitable that some people will read Kate Cohen’s Washington Post column and think, “Yeah, that’s a good idea. I’ll start telling people I don’t believe in God so we can normalize atheism.” That is their right. But we should be wary of people embracing the philosophies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro and their fellow travelers. Like Cohen, many of these tyrants held a belief in God before being led to atheism, and history is unambiguous on what happened next.
If America is to remain a democratic republic, we cannot ignore Cohen and those like her. Truth is, America needs more God and fewer atheists, and we can take our cues from George Washington. In his 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation, Washington wrote, “It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor.” Washington’s counsel was wise because he knew that democracy dies in atheism.
Even as a pragmatic atheist I agree with this, insomuch, if you banish god what or who do you replace it with ? Climate change, Globalism LGBTQ rights ?
All,
Democracy dying in atheism is not a bad thing, the US is not a democracy, but, a constitutional republic.
Who’s God? The Muslims have a God, they call him Allah, do you want to believe in that God?
Deism is not Christianity, a man can believe that the universe was created by an Almighty Creator, while not believing one word of Christianity. Christianity is way, way, more than just Deism.
The Jews believe in a God but not that Jesus of Nazareth was that God. So whose God is Mr. Hogenson talking about? His God, his interpretation of the Christian God, his interpretation of Christianity. But there are many and contradictory interpretations of what the Christian God wants and wills. There are Social Justice Christians on the Left who sincerely and intransigently believe that what Jesus would want is to spread the wealth. George W, Bush’s faith-based initiatives were just that a Social Justice Christian who believed that Christianity means spreading the wealth by force.
There are Christians on the Right who believe that Jesus wants Laissez-Faire Capitalism. So, who is correct? The Christians on the Left or the Christians on the Right?
Obviously what Scott Hogenson is really implying is that without Christianity a society will collapse into barbarism and totalitarianism.
But if Christianity is a religion of peace, love, understanding, tolerance, science, technology, the pursuit of happiness on earth, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism, its history shows just the opposite. When Christianity ruled the West it resulted in a stagnant, repressive, brutal, Roman Catholic theocracy.
When finally the Renaissance (the rebirth of reason) led Christians to begin to question and seek freedom again that resulted in centuries of intra-Christian wars and persecution. Catholic killing Protestant, Protestant killing Catholic, and Protestants of different denominations persecuting and killing Protestants of other denominations.
Only if a Christian whitewashes and evades the actual bloody and brutal history of Christianity can he then claim that Christianity is a religion of peace.
Scott Hogenson is absolutely correct. He is saying that without Christianity a society will collapse into barbarism and totalitarianism. We have seen it over and over again in the Communist and Totalitarian (socialist) countries
Maybe someday you will man up and admit to your own atheism and the 100 million deaths at the hands of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Castro and Rand (yes she is a contributor).
Maybe someday you will man up and admit to your hand in the death of our Constitutional Republic because of your obsession with the Objectivist religion, and it’s attendant religious bigotry.
Christianity and Judaism will survive your puny ineffectual attempts to wipe them out. Israelis will have to do their part in putting Islam back in its box. For now we don’t have the will at the Progressive Federal government level to do what needs to be done….even when you pound your sunken chest and yell “Kill them all!” After all we did waste 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And even if the Feds had the stones to do it and actually win, would you join up? Something tells me no. You would rather sit on your Lotus Flower up on Mt. Rand breathing in that rarified air of faux superiority, as you try to teach us how wrong we are.
Christians behaving badly, wow, shocker. not. >:-O
Judas Iscariot was a follower of Jesus until he wasn’t.
With each post, you reveal your ignorance of Christianity. Ayn Rand is dead. Mohammed – dead. Hitler – dead. Stalin – dead. Pol Pot – dead. All prophets die, but Jesus lives.
To paraphrase G. J. Chesterton – The real tragedy of a man who does not believe in God is not that he believes in nothing but rather that he will believe in anything. (Read climate change.)
Democracy isn’t the only thing that dies in atheism. Remember Dostoyevsky. If there is no God … all things are permitted. All things. That’s usually why people become atheists. They want permission. They don’t necessarily want permission to commit mass murder. A hip professor may just want permission to sleep with the cute graduate student the department assigned to help grade papers. No need to tell the wife. But if atheism is true, mass murder is exactly what they (and everyone else) has permission to do. Eventually they all get around to it. The fact that Kate Cohen of the Washington Post doesn’t say what her ultimate goal is, I think we can understand why. Such people are rarely honest about their ultimate aims. Remember they have permission to lie.
Like everyone else at the Post, she’s a leftist. Maybe what she wants is communism, and to get it she’s willing to burn the country to the ground.
To the above question, “Who is God”? “God” is but a title for all deists. His actual name for Jews and Christians is Yaweh. Hope this helps.
When those Western Communist atheists come to the defense of the IslamoNazis whose “Allah” commands the death of non-Muslims, those atheists will be killed as filthy kafirs when they are no longer needed as useful idiots by the IslamoNazis in their joint effort to destroy Judeo-Christian Western Civilization.
The signs show the times we are in.
The predicted events the bible has shown us are exploding. All things are declining and even nature is screaming that Jesus is coming soon!
Most people who see these things in their lifetime know they are astonishing.
the re-birth and prospering of the nation of Israel.
The rise of artificial intelligence
The preparation of the coming digital currency.
The use of a pandemic to hasten global government
The rise of the Mark of the Beast technology.
The rise of apostasy in the church the last 60 years.
The death of discernment.
Talk of the third temple in Israel.
The scoffing of Bible prophecy.
A cancel culture that cancels Christians and Jews.
The exponential rise of evil.
The rise of anti-semetism with irrational hatred. A headline on the Drudge Report said it all: “Global Economy struggles amid inflation, pandemic aftershocks, and war.” THE WORLD IS A MESS.
The problem is that if a certain peaceful religion takes power in a country, it establishes a theocracy and suppresses the other religions. I would guess that the atheist regimes are not just atheists but also communists or totalitarians in their ideologies. They are not just humanistic atheists, they are also something additionally