(March 2, 2014 at 9:52 am)discipulus Wrote: I never have stated that these perpetrators were not really Christians. So that is really a strawman.That's a very fine line, though. You didn't say they weren't true Christians, you're just saying they didn't do truly Christian things. Which means that the rest of my comment still applies. It seems that Christian teachings don't really amount to much if they are incapable of keeping so many from committing such terrible acts and so many others from doing nothing to stop it, to the extent of helping the perpetrators continue to commit those crimes.
What I said was that these actions of a few people (few in relation to the total number of Christians existing in the world today) are not to be consider as either representative of or exemplifications of them that adhere to the central tenets of Christianity.
And while you can attribute certain actions to people who were/are atheists, you may find it much more difficult to attribute them to atheism. At best, you might claim that this is what happens when you forsake god, which brings us back to the horrible things done by people who claim to represent god's organizations on Earth. If both theist and atheist commit the same horrible crimes, then nothing differentiates them.
"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
