everyone (else) seems to be hating on atheists

[Aiza]

LOL, Aiza, are you seriously turning to communist countries to justify stereotypes about atheists in America? Y'know, what I have against theists is all those human (inluding babies) sacrifices they like to do. Sheesh!

You know who opposes state atheism as much as you do? Us.

Except I've repeatedly denounced atheist stereotypes, and just said as much in the last post.

Its atheists who seem to want to say that what Christians, Muslims, Buddhists had to go through under state atheism was not as bad as what atheists had to go through during the...um.

Maybe atheists really did need to go invisible to avoid persecution. All persecuted groups need to do this: Christians were driven underground (sometimes literally) during state atheism. And a lot of them were still caught and killed in spite of this. Maybe atheists are just way better at hiding.

Atheist isolation is a result of a society that has been completely over-run by an "ideal" victimizing those who don't buy into it and to say we have not been persecuted is a gross mistake. No violence? Are you kidding me? We get threatened with violence by religious types all the time.

I get threatened by violence too. I think the internet age makes threats of violence pretty easy.

Who actually gets victimized by real religiously motivated violence? Primarily Jews, Muslims and the occasional Christian (though Christians are still underrepresented). Not atheists.

Also, well...yes black people did experience a holocaust of sorts, well over a million-2 million people were killed during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Again, what is the death toll for these terrible and scarring atheist persecutions? Give me a rough estimate. My total for atheist persecutions is so laughably low its a crime to even begin to compare to genuine persecutions where thousands of men, women and children were killed off, driven from their homes, had their culture destroyed, etc. I have a grand whopping total of maybe 1, 1-3 if you count general hate crimes on top of state-sponsored persecutions--and thats for the entirety of human history, I'm not even limiting things to our recent history, but literally all of human recorded history and I found 1-3. Please tell me if I am missing any more.

And as for "media putting out propaganda" against you I haven't seen too much honestly. Doing a Google News search for say Muslim, gets me "Muslim soldier convicted in failed plot to bomb Fort Hood troops..." as the 4th result. Searching for "Catholic" gets me "The Catholic Church's inquisition of American nuns" (lol oh geez) as the second result. Atheist? I get "Atheists get religion all wrong" as the 6th result. Most of the results seem neutral. The media is sensationalist in general, sure, but in terms of media victimization I don't think they have it worst than anyone else, probably even better.

Also I was an atheist kid throughout jr high and highschool, I was never victimized. Many of my peers were atheist or irreligious, and maybe 1 was a devout Catholic (he is now a priest). Personally, as I mentioned earlier, I am afraid to tell my athiest friends that I converted to Catholicism and am planning to become a sister.

So, we are arguing that atheists aren't demonised, because the major faiths are all too busy murdering and persecuting each other?

No. I am pointing out that atheists haven't been persecuted half as much as any other religion--but also that the bulk of anti-religious persecutions of the last 100-200 years were committed by atheists, not "each other" as you say. (Though Muslims possibly come in second, at least in terms of anti-Christian persecutions).

The issue cannot be No True Scotsman, nobody is denying they are atheist. We are denying they committed the atrocities BECAUSE they were atheist.

No, Creed certainly said that the government itself was a "religion" and therefore it did not count. And they certainly wouldn't have committed said atrocities if they were theist. You think a theist would have set up the Militant Atheist League? Come on now. I won't say they did it "because of atheism" (nor should you say people commit atrocities "because of theism"), because there is a large mixture of issues going on, the biggest culprit being anti-theism.

When was the last time you heard of a democratically-elected government [one-person party "republics" do not apply, I mean a genuine democracy/republic of multiple competing parties] opting to murder people solely based on their religion?

The nazis. You know who supported the nazis during their campaign of genocide?

The catholic church. Yes.

Wow. So many lines of wrong right after the other, I cannot keep up!

Starting off with the obvious:
1) The Catholic Church did not support the Nazis.
2) Let ALONE "during their campaign of genocide".
3) The Nazi killing of Jewish folk was ethnicity-based, not religion-based, as it was a product and outcropping of 21st century racialism and eugenics. The Catholic Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross was killed for being a "Jew" even though by that time she was a full-fledged Carmelite Nun.
4) The Nazis weren't really democratically-elected, they didn't receive enough votes to have Hitler become chancellor, Hitler got the position through back-room dealing. You are stretching the definition of "democratic" here.

Uh, yeah, did you not read the 48% being uncomfortable with their son or daughter marrying an atheist, which is a higher number than blacks, muslims, and homosexuals?

Yes I did. And again, I hardly see how it makes it up to "loathing", because I would also be uncomfortable with such a thing. It has a pretty solid logical basis: mixed marriages being less stable.

The reason we don't hear about many atheists in the middle ages is because if you were smart you shut the hell up and didn't tell anyone about it, but one of the highest crimes to the church was unbelief.

Don't hear about MANY? Lets be 100% clear here: you don't hear about ANY, not in the modern sense of the term "atheism" anyway.

"WOULD HAVE persecuted us, IF" hundreds and hundreds of years ago is a hell of a lot different than the actual genuine persecution that Christians faced at the hands of atheists quite recently.nd you seem to have more emotion for the former than for the latter, which is sort of discomforting.

And the Catholic Church didn't burn historical records of the trials they conducted. Some were lost, but even if we take what death sentences we do get we don't get any atheists. Are you seriously trying to say that the Catholic Church went on a burning spree and got rid of all evidence that they persecuted atheists (and yet neglected to do so for any other group legitimately persecuted by the Inquisition, ie Jews and Protestants?) Can we say that Hindus were persecuted by the Inquisition too?