RE: North Korea - smear on atheism?
April 20, 2013 at 1:44 pm
(This post was last modified: April 20, 2013 at 1:45 pm by Tonus.)
(April 20, 2013 at 9:12 am)Dawud Wrote: I meant a dirtying of the term by a state that is obviously not atheist but uses the word 'atheist' to refer to the atrocities done by them - had North Korea really been atheist they couldn't use the term 'heavenly leader' (that's what you implied?)
I think that they use "atheist" as a stand-in for "Kim is god." Modern day tyrants seem to want to make worship of the state and its leaders the only religion. What better way to remove the competition than by making atheism a state policy? Now the citizens are free to venerate the leaders of the country with no Jesus or Mohammed or C'thulhu to compete against.
It's not as if they're up at night worrying that they might be "sullying the good name of atheism."
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
