Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.2008, Side 21

brutal and bloodthirsty as any other human ideology. It’s just fine when it
remains nothing more than ideas, discussed in university seminar rooms.
But when it grasps political power, it turns out to be just as bad as anything
else.
This hardly fits in with another of Dawkins’ puzzling creedal statements: “I
do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca - or
Chartres, York Minster, or Notre Dame.”21 Sadly, this noble sentiment is a
statement about his personal credulity, not the reality of things. The history of
the Soviet Union is replete with the burning and dynamiting of huge numbers
of churches. So is the postwar history of the German Democratic Republic.
Is Dawkins so culturally ignorant that he knows nothing of the dynamiting
of the University Church in Leipzig on the orders of the atheist authorities
in 1968? Completed in 1240, this architectural masterpiece was demolished
to avoid the awkwardness of symbols of the divine in the new “Karl Marx
Platz” (now happily renamed the “Augustinerplatz”, following the collapse of
the Marxist state). Dawkins’ special pleading that atheism is innocent of the
violence and oppression that he associates with religion is simply untenable,
and suggests a significant blind spot.
Dawkins’ childishly na'ive view that atheists would never carry out crimes
in the name of atheism simply founders on the cruel rocks of reality. Let
me give an example from the pen of another Oxford scholar, who comes
to very different conclusions to those asserted (not argued) by Dawkins.
In his outstanding study of the Romanian Christian dissident intellectual
Petre Tutea (1902-91), the Oxford scholar Alexandru Popescu documents
the physical and mental degradation Tutea suffered as part of systematic
persecution of religion in Romania during the Soviet era until the downfall
and execution of Nicolae Ceaucescu.22 During this period, Tutea spent
13 years as a prisoner of conscience and 28 years under house arrest. His
personal story is enormously illuminating for those who want to understand
the power of religious faith to console and maintain personal identity under
precisely the forms of persecution that Dawkins believes do not exist.
21 Dawkins, The God Delusion, 249.
22 Alexandru D. Popescu, Petre Tutea : between sacrífice and suicide. Williston, VT: Ashgate,
2004.
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