Weapons of Mass Destruction in Context; Investigating the Links between Militarization and Godlessness of Modern Politics

Modern brutality, which found its culmination in using weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against humanity, is the dark side of the principal teachings of the Enlightenment. The great thinkers of the Enlightenment, blaming religion as the main source of violence, removed God from the center of Western political and social thought to replace it with human. Although they were not conscious of the outcomes of their philosophy, in the course of time, it made modern societies more power-hungry and less accountable for their actions. To investigate this issue, relying on Theodor Adorno and other critics, the rudiments of the Enlightenment will first be analyzed. Then, looking at the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article investigates the way in which militarization, and its peak, the atomic bomb, became an unintended outcome of the Enlightenment. In the next step, we will discuss the reactions of American Churches to the bomb to examine how differently a God-centered perspective may act against using or proliferating WMD. This leads to the role that the belief in God may play in increasing the sense of accountability in man’s social and political behavior. The article concludes that based on historical evidence, there is no indication that a human-centered model is more immune from violence than a God-centered one.