everyone (else) seems to be hating on atheists

[Aiza]

The question here is, did your Wiccan friend tell his Catholic teachers that he was Wiccan?

I have no idea, but a sister I know (herself an ex-agnostic Catholic convert) has had some students come up to her who claimed to be pagan or atheist. They don't get expelled or anything like that.

They are Catholic because they teach, embrace and promote Catholicism. They are for Catholics and they do not exempt non-Catholic children from observation of and learning of Catholicism in the school.

Well.....some schools do much better at promoting Catholicism than others, the majority of non-Catholic students don't convert or anything. Either way, non-Catholics can attend which was my point. Saying "Pol pot went to Catholic school" means nothing to me other than his parents had exceptional taste.

It's actually not. It's like saying Pol Pot hated religious people and atheists, which means he hated everyone.

Except he didn't persecute atheists at all, and he was an atheist himself. So....yeah, your statement makes no sense.

Or do you mean that since some intellectuals might've been atheist, therefore that counts as "persecuting atheists"? Then we can similarly say that some of the Communists Hitler killed were German and therefore Hitler "hated everyone". Logic fail.

Many Catholics, on the other hand, murdered specifically because of their faith and what their faith taught them. Answer me this, would you suffer a witch to live? If yes, you are not following your faith.

I get the feeling you don't know very much about the Catholic Faith there, Shell B. Protip: it doesn't include very many disembodied Bible verses.

Your problem is that you try to paint atheists with a single brush when they only share a single disbelief. You, and the murderous Catholics of old and new, share an entire worldview.

1) No I don't.
2) No we don't.

You actually embrace the rules that allowed them to commit their murders, yet you think atheists are somehow less moral and more likely to be horrible than Catholics?

What rules do I embrace that "allowed them to commit their murders"?

I am actually aware that the Khmer Rouge was anti-Buddhist...and anti-anything-that-argued-with-it-at-all.

Buddhists didn't have to "argue", they were explicitly anti-Buddhist. But you did try to claim that Pol Pot was a Buddhist, and of course that is wrong.

As I've stated before, communist regimes have a long, storied past with them not tolerating any kind of dissidence, and indeed want to force the individual to surrender not just their bodies but their minds to the Party as well, which again, I reiterate; exactly as all religions do.

So instead of surrendering their minds+bodies to God, they surrender them to human values and disaster ensues. Okay. Sure. The difference is that while religious people are happier, healthier, more empathetic, and longer lived; those living under totalitarian regimes are rather miserable.

Interestingly enough, while atheistic Communism has this track record you describe, religious Communism does not. As I mentioned earlier, by the simplest definitions of "Communism", religious communities also fit. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_communism) A monastery has you share all of your property in common. But you are the one who decides to join, and you can also decide to leave.

So yes, totalitarianism is very different from "religions in general" and I don't see the similarities you describe.

And I don't really care whether or not anyone can get into a catholic school, again you either are missing the point or, I suspect, are simply not wanting to get it because of the implications.

I honestly don't know what the "implications" are supposed to be. But to answer the main thrust of what I think your argument is, no, Pol Pot's regime is not okay under "Catholic doctrine". Its quite opposed to Catholic doctrine. Compare Pol Pot with say, a priest. You think they are both "shepherds" some how, but yet Catholic priests aren't running around murdering people somehow (well...they aren't supposed to be killing anyone anyway!). Fancy that.

Catholics "living off illiteracy" is a Protestant myth, and in fact people were always encouraged to read Scripture. But it was, and still is, gravely misguided to interpret this Scripture on your own. Scripture is a product of the Church. The Catholic Church has and continues to encourage education on all levels, with the world's largest non-governmental school system and some of the finest schools.

The catholic church states that if you deny god, you are damned to eternal torture.

No it does not.

And you're going to be a sister? Really? I'm going to turn something around on you that the christians love asking me for some reason: "What if you're wrong?" If you're wrong and I'm right then you're wasting your life in blind service to something that doesn't exist.

You did not know? Yes, I want nothing more than to be a Sister, there is nothing that my heart longs for more than the religious life.

I am going to serve God no matter what. Serving God and others is what we (should) do as Christians, in the single, married or religious vocations. I am nothing but happy to do so. Sisters are also some of the happiest (and longest lived!) people around. I'd much sooner serve God, who is all goodness + love, than myself, or money, or anything else that society tells me to "serve". The Dominican charism in particular, which is the charism which I very recently discovered was absolutely me, is based around study, prayer and teaching. If you have ever been to a convent, you will know it is absolutely a tiny piece of Heaven. I want to post you like a million pictures and talk about all the wonderful orders but geez it would take forever, I am afraid.

Honestly, I wanted to be a Sister before I was even a Catholic.

The atheist state that was determined to wipe out theism (except for overlooking several hundred churches they could have destroyed) was happy to promote it when it served the state's purposes? It's almost like they were motivated by expediency. You think maybe the churches that were spared before the late forties supported the state?

They were not "happy" to promote it, since the Nazis re-opened the churches under their occupied areas, the USSR had to ease up on religious persecution in order to stem any support for the Nazis. Starting in 1944-1945 they started re-issuing anti-religious propaganda (including within textbooks) and when they realized that the "war of words" wasn't working and churches continued to grow they ended up clamping back down with massive closing of churches, closing of all monasteries/convents, banning of any pilgrimages, banning the presence of children at any religious service, forced retirement and/or imprisonment of any clergy who criticized atheism, forced recording of anyone baptized, married, or who had a funeral in the church. Any Christians were shamed as backward at public meetings, and if that did not work, then they were blocked from promotion or expelled from their university if they were in college.

Yep.

In fact, it sounds like writing a legitimate source of information wasn't what they were trying to do at all.

Probably, I can't imagine that website honestly caring about legitimate information.

As I said, it's not much, but people with no religous training at all is a group in which atheists are likely to be highly represented, as opposed to the group of people who don't go to church much.

Maybe? You said that the societal default was theism though, and atheism is that which you need to "think yourself into". (This would be even more the case in 1928). I'd doubt that atheists were highly represented among the "no religious training" group, and I'd also doubt that "no religious training" represented a high amount of atheists. I'd say far more atheists have recieved some religious training than practice religion but yet your qualm is with the latter.

Ah, the insufferable smugness returns. You'll make a great nun.

It was a joke! Thus the winky face. But yes, as a former atheist myself I've heard probably every weird way that atheists try to explain this (and I love how the only explanations you can think of is that religious are lying or mistaken). You don't need to be threatened by it, and trust me, you get no "religious cred" for having once been atheist anymore than atheists get "atheist cred" for having once been religious.

I had to correct quite a few "ex-Christians" on actual Christian beliefs (even in this very thread) but I don't call them liars for it.

Also a nun is a religious woman who lives in a cloister. (Basically never leaving her convent, only seeing her family behind a grate, etc). I want to be a Sister.