To my amazement, Roger Hutchinson is still trying to defend his inane attempt to blame skepticism for killings in China, Russia, Cambodia, etc. In his latest desperation (page 4 above), he distorted a statement I had made in an earlier article: "In a meager attempt to defend Till's position, he [Matson] wrote that nobody ever said that Christianity is the cause of atrocity. What, then, was Till trying to say?"
Before he started hacking away, Hutchinson should have at least gotten the quotation right. The final line of the middle column of my article was accidentally put as the final line of the same column in Till's article immediately below it. This may have caused some confusion, but Hutchinson must have figured out the right order of the lines, because he quoted my statement correctly except for the omission of the bold-print emphasis on the word the. With that emphasis the sentence read like this: "Nobody ever said that Christianity is the cause of atrocity." Obviously, then, I was saying only that Christianity was not the cause of all the atrocities, which is certainly true.
Hutchinson then went on to say, "Demonstrating his commitment to Till, Matson argued that Soviet and Chinese communist atrocities were not the logical fruit of skepticism. Yet, history declares unequivocally that those atrocities were not the fruit of Christianity. What else is there?" Somehow, Mr. Hutchinson still misses the point! I'll try again. Soviet and Chinese planners, not to mention the Khmer Rouge, also have a love for the color red. By his reasoning, people who love the color red are associated with brutal massacres. We have no disagreement there. What I am trying to tell Mr. Hutchinson is that preferring the color red has nothing to do with those massacres. Similarly, the fact that the leaders of these states also preferred atheism does not imply in the least that atheism has anything to do with those massacres.
Mr. Hutchinson seems to feel that if the cause was not Christianity, then that left only what he calls skepticism. What he is really saying, whether he knows it or not, is that these massacres were either done by people who believed in Christianity or people who did not believe in Christianity. He eliminated the former; thus, some people who did not believe in Christianity are guilty. Mr. Hutchinson has broad-brushed a whole group of people, most of whom are innocent. Furthermore, he has not established a causal element, let alone proven that atheism is to blame.
But, Mr. Hutchinson wasn't quite done. He has also muddied the waters by acting as if biblical morals were the exclusive property of Christians. In fact, there is a wide overlap in the moral beliefs of communists and Christians. One can scarcely attack non-Christian morales without attacking most of Christianity's own moral beliefs.
Hutchinson further said, "Not to be outdone by Till, Matson would have one believe that the Khmer Rouge were innocent naturalists who had nothing in common with Stalin or Mao" (p. 5). Huh? I never said that the Khmer Rouge were innocent naturalists! Where did he get that load of bull manure? A fanatical doctrine of a simple farming society was the root cause of the massacrenot atheism, or even communism. Of course, the Khmer Rouge shared many beliefs with communists in general, but they were also unique in their particular fanatical zeal.
After misrepresenting me on this point, he went on to ask, in the first column above, "So, what makes the Khmer Rouge any different from those guys or any different from the skeptics whose testimonies fill the pages of TSR?" I'll just answer this question with a question of my own: What made Hitler (who was a Christian) any different from people like Hutchinson? If he has trouble figuring it out, then I suggest that he see a doctor.
Mr. Hutchinson would have us believe that the long, fearful and foul record of Christianity is just an illusion, a noncausal association of unfortunate events put into motion by bad people who mistakenly thought they were Christians. I suppose that the burning of the great library at Alexandria and the murder of its famous librarian, Hypatia, were really due to a mob of people who merely pretended to be bigoted Christians. I suppose that the slaughter of innocent Jews (and even Christians) by fanatical crusaders was only done by people who pretended to be Christians on a holy mission. The dark age, darkened because of the destruction of universities and the suppression of thinking in general, couldn't possibly have been due to Christianity, could it? Christians were merely in full control and things got out of hand through no fault of their own, right? When a mother sticks her baby into the oven to "kill the devil in it," it couldn't possibly be related to what her unstable mind has read in the Bible or heard from Christian pulpits spewing out hellfire-and- brimstone rhetoric, could it? When the Bible teaches that witches should be killed, and Bible-believing people carry out the death sentence, just what are we supposed to conclude?
The church, to the extent that it promotes narrow-minded intolerance, to the extent that it has encouraged people to act on such in the past when it had more power, and to the extent that it promotes visions of hellfire and demons, is like a man who gives a loaded gun to a bunch of kids. When the worst (or most careless) of those kids finally shoots someone, whom are you going to blame? Are you going to say that those guilty were bad, abnormal kids, not your real kids? Are you going to say that the man never suggested shooting anyone and even said to be careful? Are you going to say that guns don't kill but kids do?
Like it or not, Christianity as practiced, is responsible directly or indirectly for a long list of moral ugliness. Christianity, like all systems, must be judged by its official results and not by some theoretical standard of purity. Like it or not, those who believe they are Christians and who are acknowledged as Christians by Christian churches speak for Christianity. If deeds done by Christians in good standing within the church, deeds done in the name of Christianity, are evil then we may judge the tree by its fruit. After all, it is "scriptural" to judge a tree by its fruit, isn't it?
(Dave E. Matson, editor, The Oak Hill Free Press, P. O.
Box 61274, Pasadena, CA 91116; e-mail, 103514.3640@compuserve. com)
