RE: Hello.....I have a little problem
September 8, 2011 at 6:33 pm
(This post was last modified: September 8, 2011 at 6:56 pm by Rev. Rye.)
(September 8, 2011 at 6:11 pm)Statler Waldorf Wrote: So when a religious person murders someone it is a direct result of them being religious, but when an atheist murders millions it is a direct result of their political affiliation and has nothing to do with their atheism? How convenient!!
Not quite. What I'm talking about isn't so much about politics as ideology. And when one ideology becomes all-encompassing enough (Christianity, Islam, Communism, and Naziism, have at some point fallen victim to this) and decides that certain people or even certain ethnic groups don't count as part of the human aggregate, that's where things gets dangerous.
In Short: All-encompassing ideology + Us vs. Them mentality = Complete Mother****ing Disaster.
Quote:When I make such bold claims I immediately get challenged to provide dozens of peer reviewed sources, yet everyone just lets your statements slide simply because they agree with them. It must be nice to be the beneficiary of such a lop-sided double standard.Where have you been asked to give dozens of sources? I know you've often been asked to give one source, but I don't think they specified that it had to be peer-reviewed, and that little equation, as informal and simplistic as it may be, can be applied to several cases throughout recorded history and it does hold up quite a bit. However, your idea of atheism leading to everything being permitted leading to genocide in non-religious countries just doesn't hold up. For instance, a lot of continental Europe (and I'm not even talking about the nations behind the Iron Curtain, but also nations like France, and much of Scandinavia) has been unapologetically secular for decades, and we don't see them committing genocides, do we? Conversely, when people commit genocides, we never ever see them saying that the non-existence of God is a reason to kill. In fact, it often seems that atheism isn't so much a cause as a side effect of their systems. Even in the Communist regimes, when religious people were persecuted it was because they viewed them as threats to the state (no matter how misguided those threats may seem in hindsight).
Quote:So I have one atheist telling me that everyone knows Hitler was a Christian, yet five minutes later another atheist is telling me that Hitler was most likely some form of theist (something I don’t really dispute). Sounds like you guys need to get on the same sheet of music.Yeah, there's quite a few disputes between atheists, (for instance, I reached my conclusion about Hitler's religion after studying the Third Reich, which is something I do in my spare time, in the hope of creating a film script about the Holocaust) and I think that this is a big part of why atheism isn't that big of a threat, or, regrettably or not, much of a political force, as just about the only thing atheists believe in common is that there's no real reason to believe in God.
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
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I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.