"Their pathos is that not even the Communist ordeal could teach them that man without God is just what Communism said he was: the most intelligent of the animals, that man without God is a beast, never more beastly than when he is most intelligent about his beastliness. 'Er nennt's Vernunft,' says the Devil in Goethe's Faust, 'und braucht's allein, nur tierischer als jedes Tier zu sein'--Man calls it reason and uses it simply to become more beastly than any beast."
--Whittaker Chambers, Witness, 1952

I'm no fan of atheism, but is the man without God necessarily a beast? It seems to me that the evils of communist regimes are the effects of more complex causes than atheism alone.

But perhaps I am thinking of individual atheists who benefit from a religious culture. Perhaps institutional atheism is a sufficient condition for totalitarianism.

*(Nit-picky comment: One can call a man an "animal" without understanding him to be a beast.)

Ralph (since you asked openly...),
My short answer is: Yes, man w/o God is a beast. True, other, e.g. economic, factors are how the beastliness played out. If you're loooking for stats and figures, start with the thousands of Russian priests murdered and churches destroyed under Communist rule. Spiritual matters are often sentimentalized into the ether in our mainstream movies, etc., but there really is a direct connection between a nation's spiritual life and its practical life, too.

Chambers's great contribution is to have crawled out from the Pit, after falling from Communism's great, lofty, stormy intellectual heights. He had been ann utterly broken man, spiritually - it's all there in Witness.

WHERE'S HEEHAW?