The Atheist Obsession with Insulting Christians

[TheRocketSurgeon]

That's not a link, that is a block of text that you have copied and pasted without even saying where you got it from.

Huggy linked to that particular website, a couple pages back.

[Jenny A]

Hitler was raised Catholic and may or may not have believed in some higher power.  But he killed because he was racist and to gain power, not as a crusading atheist.  And he didn't give a damn about whether Jews believed in god, only that they had Jewish ancestry. And those who carried out his orders were almost invariably Christian.  And he appealed to Christians for why Jews should be killed.  It's a wash.  Catholics were implicit partly out of fear and partly out of racism.  Ditto Christians in general.  Both Catholics and Lutherans participated.  So victims 30 million a wash.

Ha! Many of YOU were "raised Catholics" but you're atheists now for all that, aren't you? So, that's not much of a mark against the Church, is it?

Was Hitler acting specifically as a Catholic or on behalf of the Catholic Church? Or is it more likely that having been influenced by Nietzsche, Hitler had no qualms about murdering anyone who stood in his way? Natural selection and all that.

But as you avoid addressing,  his minions were Christians and his appeal was to Christians and he was killing people not for their beliefs, but for their race.  And he sure didn't kill anyone for being Christian though he killed so Christians for sticking up for Jews or for homosexuals.  He did indeed believe in eugenics.  But that isn't atheism.

Mao may have believed in a higher power or not.  Who cares?.  He killed people because of their political beliefs, or more accurately for their failure to comply,  not over religion or lack there of.

Ditto Stalin.

Neither Stalin nor Mao would have hesitated to kill an atheist.  They both killed for power and out of paranoia.

And as atheists, they were FAR more murderous than any Christian in history.

But not to enforce atheism and only because they had access to better killing tech.
But the inquisition and the burning of heretics elsewhere and the holy wars.  Those were because of religion.  And people were killed because of their religion not because of race or politics.

Inquisition - British propaganda against Catholic Spain.
Burning of Heretics - Occurred a handful of times at most including among Protestants, so don't take this too far with regard to Catholicism.
The Crusades - Originally intended as defensive wars against the Muslims who were aggressive in the Holy Lands.

And by the way, if it were not for the Battle of Lepanto, all of Europe may well be Muslim today.

That was a Catholic victory.

A Catholic victory over Islam.  See!  War over religion.  Atheist and theist kill for power.  Only theists kill over religion.

[Catholic_Lady]

WEEEEEEEEEEEEE ARE THE CHAMPIONSSSSSSSS MY FRIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEND

[Catholic_Lady]

AND WEEEEEEEEEEEEEE'LL KEEP ON FIGHTIIIIIIIING TILL THE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEND

[Crossless2.0]

Randy wrote: "Or is it more likely that having been influenced by Nietzsche, Hitler had no qualms about murdering anyone who stood in his way? Natural selection and all that."

There just aren't enough face palms in the world for this. Hitler was "influenced" by Nietzsche precisely to the extent that Hitler didn't understand a damn thing about Nietzsche and cherry picked passages from Nietzsche's works to suit his own prejudices, as did most of the Nazi hacks who claimed kinship with Nietzsche. Whatever the problems with Nietzsche's thoughts on myriad subjects (I disagree with him often), he was certainly not an anti-Semite or a fan of the State (especially the German State as he knew it under Bismarck), he considered Herbert Spencer a joke, and the thought that Nietzsche had in mind someone like Hitler when he wrote of the Ubermensch is laughable. He would have loathed the Third Reich with every fiber of his being and would have been outraged and heartbroken at the Holocaust.

Pro-tip: In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche provides a clear example of someone he considers a model of Ubermensch: Goethe.

[Catholic_Lady]

[abaris]

Randy, read some real books on history. I can recommend quite a lot, but I highly doubt you're interested in something written by real scientists.

That's all I have to say after this stupidity fest.

[Randy Carson]

Here's a link quoting researchers in the former Soviet Union. The numbers are still very, very large.

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Before the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, researchers who attempted to count the number of people killed under Stalin's regime produced estimates ranging from 3 to 60 million.[107] After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives also became available, containing official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953),[108] around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag and some 390,000 deaths during kulak forced resettlement – with a total of about 2.9 million officially recorded victims in these categories.[109]

The official Soviet archival records do not contain comprehensive figures for some categories of victims, such as those of ethnic deportations or of German population transfers in the aftermath of World War II.[110] Eric D. Weitz wrote, "By 1948, according to Nicolas Werth, the mortality rate of the 600,000 people deported from the Caucasus between 1943 and 1944 had reached 25%."[111][112] Other notable exclusions from NKVD data on repression deaths include the Katyn massacre, other killings in the newly occupied areas, and the mass shootings of Red Army personnel (deserters and so-called deserters) in 1941. The Soviets executed 158,000 soldiers for desertion during the war,[113] and the "blocking detachments" of the NKVD shot thousands more.[114] Also, the official statistics on Gulag mortality exclude deaths of prisoners taking place shortly after their release but which resulted from the harsh treatment in the camps.[115] Some historians also believe that the official archival figures of the categories that were recorded by Soviet authorities are unreliable and incomplete.[116][117] In addition to failures regarding comprehensive recordings, as one additional example, Robert Gellately and Simon Sebag Montefiore argue that the many suspects beaten and tortured to death while in "investigative custody" were likely not to have been counted amongst the executed.[31][118]

Historians working after the Soviet Union's dissolution have estimated victim totals ranging from approximately 4 million to nearly 10 million, not including those who died in famines.[119][120][121] Russian writer Vadim Erlikman, for example, makes the following estimates: executions, 1.5 million; gulags, 5 million; deportations, 1.7 million out of 7.5 million deported; and POWs and German civilians, 1 million – a total of about 9 million victims of repression.[122]

Some have also included the deaths of 6 to 8 million people in the 1932–1933 famine among the victims of Stalin's repression. This categorization is controversial however, as historians differ as to whether the famine was a deliberate part of the campaign of repression against kulaks and others,[64][123][124][125][126] or simply an unintended consequence of the struggle over forced collectivization.[80][127][128]

Accordingly, if famine victims are included, a minimum of around 10 million deaths—6 million from famine and 4 million from other causes—are attributable to the regime,[129] with a number of recent historians suggesting a likely total of around 20 million, citing much higher victim totals from executions, Gulag camps, deportations and other causes.[130][131][132][133][134][135][136] Adding 6–8 million famine victims to Erlikman's estimates above, for example, would yield a total of between 15 and 17 million victims. Researcher Robert Conquest, meanwhile, has revised his original estimate of up to 30 million victims down to 20 million.[137] In his most recent edition of The Great Terror (2007), Conquest states that while exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, the at least 15 million people were either executed or worked to death in the camps.[138] RJ Rummel maintains that the earlier higher victim total estimates are correct, although he includes those killed by the Soviet government in other Eastern European countries as well.[139][140]

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That's not a link, that is a block of text that you have copied and pasted without even saying where you got it from.

Sorry. I thought the link imported automatically. Some do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin

[TheRocketSurgeon]

The question I would seriously like to see answered is why it's so hard for people who pull the "Stalin was an atheist mass murderer!" trope out to stop, look at the responses, and go,

"Okay, I guess that's a fair point, that he wasn't killing because of his atheism but because he was silencing anyone who stood in the way of his power or who was perceived as a threat to it, like tyrants have done throughout history."

They just go right on believing that when the Conquistadors committed mass murder, it wasn't because they were Christians but because they were power- and wealth-hungry sociopaths... yet when atheist power- and wealth-hungry sociopaths do it, IT'S BECAUSE THEY WERE ATHEISTS! Aaaaaaaaah! Evil atheists!! Aaaaaaaah!

[abaris]

They just go right on believing that when the Conquistadors committed mass murder, it wasn't because they were Christians but because they were power- and wealth-hungry sociopaths... yet when atheist power- and wealth-hungry sociopaths do it, IT'S BECAUSE THEY WERE ATHEISTS! Aaaaaaaaah! Evil atheists!! Aaaaaaaah!

Exactly. And it's even true for the Crusades, but very complicated. Way above the Randy level.

That was supposed to be an insult, but with a solid foundation in reality, by the way.