Poverty and Theism

[Ben Davis]

Hi Hopey, you're labouring under some serious misapprehensions. Since they're resulting in misrepresentations of atheism, and as a consequence, insulting me and those like me, I'd like to pick you up on them. Since I don't know you, I don't know if you're trying to be deliberately insulting so I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and addressing you civilly.

Ok ... what is your morality? What is right and wrong for you?

Mine is a morality that seeks to minimise harm and suffering and increase a global sense of community, security, prosperity, joy and hope. I base it on a secular, humanist approach.

.... states based on atheism have no morality, only that that which is passed down from past generations past. As time progresses there is no moral law under such a system, only survival of the fittest. And how do you survive by following the strongest. An a strong one with no morals is a killer, as Kim is.

Well this is simply a misrepresentation of the facts in order to paint an insulting straw-man of atheists. Firstly, nothing can be based on atheism because atheism is nothing. It has no tenets, no articles of faith, it makes no demands nor makes any impressions on value systems. It is simply a singular response to one particular question: I have no belief in any gods. Consequently, states can't be 'based' on atheism. It's utterly impossible. Instead, what DPRK is based on is a mandatory and enforced worship of the state and its heads in the Kim family. This includes a host of supernatural, 'miraculous' acts by Kim Il-sung, his wife and his brother during the Korean war and more by Kim Jong-il. In fact, N.Koreans are taught that dead members of the Kim family still watch over and protect the nation from the after-life! Kim Il-sung is still considered the 'Great Leader' and is Head of State, 'The Eternal President' is his title, despite being dead for 33 years. Kim Jong-il was, and now Kim Jong-un is, only Head of the Party. Further, DPRK's state-decreed ethical system includes many of the 'moral' teachings that you would find in christianity including punishment for adultery and divorce, opposition to homosexuality, legal slavery, sexual puritanism, blasphemy against the state, illegality of other religions... it's a theocracy in all but title and the fact that it's politically communist is almost beside the point.

Only Jesus teaches "love", i..e "love your enemies" ... Kim teaches what ... nothing ... no morality ... only serve the strongest.

You clearly have no real concept of what North Koreans believe in.

His teachings are a little more complex than that ... but I think you get my drift.

...like the utterly immoral 'spare no thought for the morrow'? Maybe table-tipping or tree cursing?

China - philosophy is not Buddhist, my wife is from China, its philosophy is atheist, she was taught atheism. Buddhism is the biggest religion yes, but it is not the philosophy that built the dictatorship ... that is atheism ... sorry.

Absolute rubbish. The Chinese are mainly Buddhist and everyone knows it. Your wife may have been brought up with no religious beliefs but that's not common at all and it's dishonest of you to try and insist that it is.

Russia - when communist (at the height of its oppression) was again atheist. Still recovering from that one.

Cuba - don't know much about it.

Germany - irrelevant - an occasional dictator appears - who for the record stated he hated Christianity. See secular sources on Hitler and religion.

Saudi Arabia and Iran - are Muslim not Christian. Their religion teaches violence, and oppression.

Western nations, particularly ones with protestant backgrounds are the freest in the world.

Now lets compare no religious states -North Korea, China, Soviet Union - wow do we see a secular revolution?

I'll ignore your error with Hitler (he was always a Christian and openly identified as such) and get to the main point: none of those were secular states. If they were, they would not enforce worship of the state. I'll let Christopher Hitchens handle this one:

Now, ok, moving to Marxism, moving to Leninism. Ok, in Russia in 1917, for hundreds of years millions of people have been told the head of the State is a supernatural power. The Czar is not just the head of the Government, not just a king, but he stands between heaven and earth. And this has been inculcated in generations of Russians for hundreds of years. If you're Joseph Stalin, himself a seminarian from Georgia, you shouldn't be in the totalitarianism business if you can't exploit a ready-made reservoir of credulity and servility that's as big as that. It's just waiting for you to capitalize on. So what do you do? Well we'll have an Inquisition, for one thing; we'll have miracles, for another, Lysenko's biology will produce four harvests a year; we'll have harvestry hunts; we'll tell everyone they must be grateful only to the leader for what they get and they must thank him and praise him all the time and that they must be aware all the time of the existence of the counter-revolutionary devil who waits to—you see where I'm going with this.

If (you) or anyone else could come up with an example of a society which had fallen into slavery and bankruptcy and beggary and terror and misery because it had adopted the teachings and the precepts of Spinoza and Einstein and Pierre Bayle and Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, then I'd be impressed and that would be a fair test on a level playing field, but you will find no such example.