While I admittedly can’t provide any empirical “evidence” as to the existence or non-existence of God, as an Agnostic (yes, I know the difference between Atheist and Agnostic) and a fervent Anti-Anti-Theist, here is some conclusive and indisputable evidence of the existence of ill effects of mandated Atheism…
“Hundreds of thousands of the new people, and later the depositees, were taken out in shackles to dig their own mass graves.
Then the Khmer Rouge soldiers beat them to death with iron bars
and hoes, or buried them alive. A Khmer Rouge extermination prison directive ordered, “Bullets are not to be wasted.” These mass
graves are often referred to as “The Killing Fields”…
The Khmer Rouge also classified people by religion and ethnic
group. They banned all religion and dispersed minority groups,
forbidding them to speak their languages or to practice their customs. They especially targeted Buddhist monks, Muslims, Christians, Western-educated intellectuals, educated people in general, people who had contact with Western countries or with Vietnam, disabled people…
Confessions forced at S-21 were extracted from prisoners through
such methods as raising prisoners by their arms tied behind and
dislocating shoulders, removing toenails with pliers, suffocating a prisoner repeatedly and skinning a person while alive.” – Wikipedia
on Pol Pot, Atheist.
“Mussolini was an admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche. According to Denis Mack Smith, “In Nietzsche he found justification for his crusade against the Christian virtues of humility, resignation, charity, and goodness.” He valued Nietzsche’s concept of the superman, “The supreme egoist who defied both God and the masses, who despised egalitarianism and democracy, who believed in the weakest going to the wall and pushing them if they did not go fast enough.”
He believed that socialists who were Christian or who accepted religious marriage should be expelled from the party. He denounced the Catholic Church for “its authoritarianism and refusal to allow freedom of thought…”” – Wikipedia on Benito Mussolini, Atheist.
I find the comments about “freedom of thought” particularly ironic given Mussolini’s fascist ideology.
“Although raised in the Georgian Orthodox faith, Stalin was an atheist. Stalin followed the position adopted by Lenin that religion was an opiate that needed to be removed in order to construct the ideal communist society. His government promoted
atheism through special atheistic education in schools, anti-religious propaganda, the antireligious work of public institutions…
discriminatory laws, and a terror campaign against religious
believers. By the late 1930s it had become dangerous to be publicly associated with religion. Stalin’s role in the fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church is complex. Continuous persecution in the 1930s resulted in its near-extinction as a public institution: by 1939, active parishes numbered in the low hundreds (down from 54,000 in 1917), many churches had been leveled, and tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns were persecuted and killed. Over 100,000 were shot during the purges of 1937–1938” – Wikipedia on Joseph Stalin, Atheist.
