A Theology of Death: the Slave Trade, the Holocaust and Abortion – the Delusions of Religious Atheism

Abstract

How long, O people, will you turn my glory into shame?How long will you love delusions and seek false gods?PSALM 4:2AbstractA central thesis to the writings of the so-called New Atheists is that the advocates of all religions will eventually oppress and even kill their opponents; however, they fail to apply this proposition to themselves, to their own anti-theistic religiosity. The aim of this paper is to explore how an Enlightenment theology of death is rooted in religious atheism, a belief system that beguiles and deludes a particular group of people into defining another group of people as non- or sub-human, and open to exploitation and destruction. This has led, post-Reformation, to three Enlightenment mega-holocausts through the slave trade, through the holocaust of the Jews, and now through abortion. The roots of this are in the judgemental religious terrorism evidenced on both sides in the Reformation. This paper concludes that religion may be bad, atheism worse, but religious atheism is to be seen as the worst of all options: we must trust in the blood of the lamb, the one true living God incarnated in the Christ (who was fully human and at one with humanity from the moment of his conception) not in the blood of Enlightenment sacrifices numbering tens of millions.