I have had to point this out before, either you believe in egalitarian democracy or you favor some form of gangster government, mildly bad to the worst humans are capable of forming, those are the two alternatives. Any "democratic" scheme which is non or anti-egalitarian is merely a somewhat tempered form of gangsterism, the original Athenian "democracy" was, in fact, an oligarchic gangster government under which women and slaves and foreigners were excluded and treated as the chattels of the ruling class of male Athenian citizens, the only ones who got to vote and decide things. That is what the original Constitution of the United States tried to impose here, the extent to which the wealthy, aristocratic Founders dared under those circumstances I noted here the other day. Too many poor white men had been gulled into fighting their revolution with promises of equality - many of them trained as soldiers - for the aristocrats to try to totally stiff them. That is an insight that it took me many years to see past, getting past the framing of such issues around ideologies that pretend that their preferences are not anything from mildly bad to the worst humans can do. That the farming of the ideologies makes understanding how they harm egalitarian democracy a little or completely essential to understanding what we face, though as we have all been gulled into looking at things through them, it is hard to break out of the "which side are you on" stupidity.
Marxism, sold to the materialist-scientistic 19th-21st century mindset as the best turned out to be among the worst in human history, not that those tens of millions of murder victims and the hundreds of millions, billions oppressed, terrorized, enslaved and maintained poorly as a resource by the gangster class have much bothered western academics and writers and journalists and movie makers who chose, so notably, NOT to live under it.
And, well, that's Marxism. The other extremes run from Nazism, the announced murderers whose explicit intent was their choice to replace their selection for what of "natural selection" they assert civilization inhibits Their nightmare scenario of people and institutions, religious organizations and - worst of all in their thinking - governments keep the "unfit" alive.
It's worth pointing out that the Nazis embodying all that is morally depraved is based directly and logically in their conception of natural selection. That imagined inhibition of "natural selection" consists of pretty much every truly moral act, doing to others as they would have done unto them, feeding the poor, clothing the naked, treating the imprisoned with decency and - worst of the worst- caring for and treating the sick and disabled. Not to mention killing those they designated as "the stranger" among them.
Trumpian Repubican-fascism is merely somewhat diluted form of that, diluted for at least as long as they figure they can't get away with going farther. Most in the news these days is a pretty shocking example of how far they are willing to take it, his and Republicans's determination to not only not treat the sick and disabled, it is to actively PROMOTE the spread of pandemic illness, choosing to treat it by not diagnosing and counting the numbers of them as they become sick and die. Those in nursing homes and other such institutions and in prisons among the worst hit, Black, Native American and other "strangers" among the affluent white among those left to die in far higher percentages. This pandemic could be suspected to be a divinely provided preview of how the worst could happen here under an elected fascist as it did in Central Europe within the just barely living memory of some dying of Trump's pandemic.
Scientism, the framing which produced both Marxism and Nazism, will inevitably harm egalitarian democracy, though that's more an accident of culture - the manditory adoption of Darwinism to be respectable - than it is a direct consequence of science. The extent to which "science" upholds the myth of natural selection, to that extent it is a danger to egalitarian democracy. As Ernst Haeckel said in a book translated by one of his earliest followers, prefaced by his "bull dog" Thomas Huxley and which Charles Darwin, himself, endorsed completely, Darwin's foremost champion in Germany, Ernst Haeckel made the obviously true conclusion you have to draw if you believe in natural selection:
Darwinism, I say, is anything rather than socialist! If this English hypothesis is to be compared to any definite political tendency—as is, no doubt, possible—that tendency can only be aristocratic, certainly not democratic, and least of all socialist. The theory of selection teaches that in human life, as in animal and plant life everywhere, and at all times, only a small and chosen minority can exist and flourish, while the enormous majority starve and perish miserably and more or less prematurely. The germs of every species of animal and plant and the young individuals which spring from them are innumerable, while the number of those fortunate individuals which develop to maturity and actually reach their hardly-won life's goal is out of all proportion trifling. The cruel and merciless struggle for existence which rages throughout all living nature, and in the course of nature must rage, this unceasing and inexorable competition of all living creatures, is an incontestable fact; only the picked minority of the qualified "fittest" is in a position to resist it successfully, while the great majority of the competitors must necessarily perish miserably. We may profoundly lament this tragical state of things, but we can neither controvert it nor alter it. "Many are called but few are chosen." The selection, the picking out of these "chosen ones," is inevitably connected with the arrest and destruction of the remaining majority. Another English naturalist, therefore, designates the kernel of Darwinism very frankly as the "survival of the fittest," as the "victory of the best." At any rate, this principle of selection is nothing less than democratic, on the contrary, it is aristocratic in the strictest sense of the word. If, therefore, Darwinism, logically carried out, has, according to Virchow, "an uncommonly suspicious aspect," this can only be found in the idea that it offers a helping hand to the efforts of the aristocrats.
The extent to which scientism adopts the ideology of materialism, and it pretty much all does, that, itself poses as basic a danger to egalitarian democracy as natural selection does because materialism inevitably must insist that freedom of thought and freedom of conscience are illusory, that material causation governs what we experience of our minds, that any equality of people is as illusory and, inevitably, some form of economic valuation will unequally sort the human population on pretty much the same lines as that quintessential proponent of scientistic materialism, Haeckel, asserted in that anti-democratic passage which Darwin endorsed completely. Anyone who believes in natural selection holds any notions of democracy as an internal contradiction as much as any Biblical fundamentalist holds notions compatible with it in contradiction, as well. I've noted that many of the greatest political exponents of Darwinism in practice are, for the record, haters of the idea of evolution which he has been made the figure-head of.
That you can believe in evolution while rejecting natural selection, that's always been quite possible, should be mentioned, since in the muddled thinking of, especially, the college credentialed, seeing that they are not the same is an unimaginable truth. But that's a longer issue.
That's just the background for your complaint that I'm being unfair to those trolling atheists the other night who insisted on inserting their, not only entirely irrelevant anti-Christian, anti-religion shtick into a discussion of how to defeat Republican-fascism, but visably turning off others discussing how to defeat fascism with their self-indulgence in their own personal hatred. And on top of that the total cluelessness as to how their insisted on ballot-box poison issue - most people in the United States rejecting atheism and, in fact, most of them if not actual Christians, not hostile to it - helps the fascists at the ballot box THE REASON THAT THE ANTICHRIST, HIMSELF, TRUMP AND THE WHORE OF THE DOJ, BARR ARE TRYING TO CLAIM THE ISSUE FOR THEMSELVES.
I have looked very hard at the role that atheists have played in American politics and it's clear that they have been one of the most damaging forces on the American left. Whether in the form of Marxists or the non-Marxist materialists and those whose faith isn't science but scientism - they generally choosing not to learn enough math to do any science - have consistently, especially in the post-war period, been the most useful means of the fascists to discredit Democrats and that's when the Marxists, Greens, etc. haven't been joining with the Republican-fascists to defeat Democrats, at times taking Republican-fascist money to do it. And when it wasn't Republican money they were taking, it was sometimes directly from the gangsters in the Kremlin or other such foreign funders. That Putin is encouraging them in the last election and this one is no shock to anyone who has looked at the actual history of the losing lefties of secular materialism.
And, as can be seen from the last week or more of posts here, the actual morality as taught by Jesus and his earliest followers as recorded in the Gospels and the Letters is not only consistent with egalitarian democracy, it is the most radical expression of what it consists of and aspires to ever recorded. To attack Christianity instead of pointing out to those who profess Christianity what the actual teachings of Jesus are and what those mean is to do the gangsters work for them. No, atheists are not only no help to those who want a decent life for all under democracy, they are one of the most damaging faction to it around. They don't belong on any real left, they belong to and of the play-left that will never govern the United States, though they have been mighty helpful to the fascists.
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