(August 11, 2017 at 9:36 am)Astonished Wrote:(August 11, 2017 at 5:01 am)Brian37 Wrote: Been at on line debate for 16 years almost on a daily basis. You may not have seen the bullshit Hitler/Po Pot/Stalin crap before, but believe me, I have seen it plenty of times.
Hitler wasn't exactly a standard Christian, he was more his own brand of Deist/Catholic/Occult. He had a belief in the power of providence so no, he most certainly was not an atheist. He also ruled over a majority Christian Germany. Churches never left under the Nazis, only anyone even outside the party who challenged them would be silenced.
Stalin was an atheist by the time he took power, but studied orthodox Russian theology and the authoritarianism of the bible again, helped him convince a majority Russian Orthodox Christians to follow him. Same thing with religion under Stalin, religion never left under Stalin, only those who apposed him, even outside religion, would be silenced.
Po Pot ruled over Asian religious majorities.
On and they may not have mentioned Cuba, but Cuba is a Catholic majority nation.
North Korea also is a religious nation. Not a standard religion, but a mix of mostly Korean Shamanism and "Chondoism=Party of the young friends of the Heavenly way"..... Basically worship of the state.
So dictatorships are not religion free, they are dissent free. It isn't religion they lack, but pluralism. Dictators don't ban religion they ban challenge to their power.
Preaching to the choir, dawg. I've seen this debunked in practically every book I read by authors like Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris. It's amazing that the religious still even bring this shit up. Name one dictatorship that used secular humanism as a foundational philosophy, right? But no, they'll still try to use atheism as a blanket accusation of that kind of immorality when it's either still entirely religious, or simply irrational in every other way. The intentional misunderstanding of atheism as a dictionary definition and as a worldview is long past being tiresome. But at least someone pretended, on a forum where others could see it, to do a retraction of their dogshit rhetoric.
Decades of the cold war created that meme. It is up to atheists to debunk it.
