News from America: in the world’s supposedly leading nation, whose fine constitution is founded entirely on Enlightenment values, the tiny atheist minority are pariah, a study finds.

While I knew that declared atheists are unelectable for office above county level in the USA, I naïvely thought George Bush sr. went out on a limb when he opined (and yes, he really did) that atheists shouldn’t be regarded as citizens. Apparently he was expressing common sense.

Salman Rushdie — himself not unacquainted with the zealous mindset — sums up the attitude in question:

I wonder what blinkers such faithful bigots don to sustain their delusion of superiority. Aside from the philosophical hollowness of deriving ethics from the command of supernatural beings — exposed in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro some 2,400 years ago — the idea sits rather poorly with the facts. Let us briefly consider the evidence.

The 1994 Rwandan genocide, wherein 800,000 men, women and children were slashed to pieces with machetes (or, if babies, bashed SS-style against the trees) took place in a devoutly Catholic country. The faith was introduced by the same Belgian colonialists who, moved by a mix of race theory and divide et impera, did such a splendid job of setting the Tutsis up against the Hutus, after their impeccably Catholic king had transformed the neighboring Congo basin into Hell. The US President who literally spent more time at the office pushing cigars up his intern’s vagina than stopping the butchery — though the latter was within his powers — is a Southern Baptist whose speeches brim with spiritual uplift. In Sudan another genocide is in its fourth year, conducted at the hands of glowing theists, who, rather like the Hutus, find the work fulfilling. Sudan’s 21-year, two million-victims civil war wasn’t waged by atheists either. And in northern Uganda “the Lord’s Resistance Army” has spent two decades turning children into monsters. Joseph Kony, its sadistic, child-raping leader, communes with the Holy Spirit; his political platform is the Ten Commandments. While true, it is beside the point that he makes a mockery of Christian doctrine. The point is his well-documented innocence of atheism — and of little else.

In Algeria a few years ago, some 70,000 civilians were slaughtered by insurgents of the kind that enjoys playing football with human heads. If these gentlemen were atheists, it is news to me.

Tony Blair, a passionate Evangelical who sees everything as a struggle against wickedness, thinks God will judge his effort to throw Iraq into civil war; and presumably, give it rave reviews. His American partner in war crime was born again with televangelist Billy Graham as a busy midwife. Graham, whom Bill Clinton has called “the man I love,” prayed with US Presidents before just about every commencement of hostilities from Vietnam to Iraq and will surely do so again when God instructs Bush the Lesser to smite Iran.

Ah yes, Iran. This safely non-atheist country — the only one besides the Vatican to be run by clergy — executes sexually active 16 year old girls and homosexuals by slow asphyxiation. As Pascal, who lived through the most horrific wars of religion in Europe, observed: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” I recently forced myself to watch this movie of a stoning to death in the mullah’s paradise. Swaying back and forth in agony, the victims’ heads are mashed into bloody pulp to enthusiastic cries of Allahu akbar (”God is greater”). Well, if an allmighty sky-god exists — which I doubt even more after watching this savagery — I should hope he is greater than that.

Thirty years ago today there was a military coup in Argentina, upon which at least 10,000 people were murdered, often after rape and torture. Not noted for their atheism, the coupmakers spent most of the preceding day with Argentina’s leading bishops, who gave their blessings. And though some priests later joined the resistance, the Church condoned the regime, as it had those of Mussolini and Franco.

A woman to be stoned by confirmed non-atheists

Of course, none of this suggests that moral behavior necessarily goes with the absence of belief in deities. The two most prolific mass murderers of all time, Stalin and Mao — probably also Hitler, the bronze medal winner — are enough to invalidate that notion.

It does suggest, however, that indulgence in revealed religion is pretty useless as a bulwark against evil. The bigots among the believers, then, can take their smug condemnation of us godless people and stick it.

Update: My favorite blogger, Digby, tackles the subject here and here.