(April 22, 2013 at 5:20 pm)Dawud Wrote: Sorry - to clarify: Stalin was an atheist who's attempt to convert people to abandon religion resulted in deaths of hundreds if not thousands.
Like the leadership of North Korea, I don't think Stalin was interested in converting people to atheism. He wanted them to convert to a political ideology that idolized the party leadership, and he didn't want Jesus or Moses or Mohammed interfering with that. He didn't kill millions because they weren't good atheists; he killed them because they weren't good "communists." Although in fairness, he probably killed most of them because he wasn't sure he could trust them, and why take chances?
Guys like Stalin are what make me think that if Osama Bin Laden hadn't been a Muslim, he'd have found some other way to satisfy his bloodthirst. Saddam Hussein was "secular," wasn't he?
"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
