everyone (else) seems to be hating on atheists

[Aiza]

Semi-dead? Look at the dates on the posts.

Nice dodging.

What exactly do you think I am "dodging" here? At the absolute worst, you caught me in...not knowing about Łyszczyński? Um?

And yeah, I think no new posts for a couple of days counts as semi-dead. Revivable to be sure, but no one is actively posting in it.

Well of COURSE he denied it; admission to guilt never brought about any mercy from the church.

Well, actually people admitted to guilt and were not killed all the time.

I get the impression he was lying. A circumstantial claim, mind you, but the man WAS writing a book about atheism.

Maybe, and I honestly agree with you that at least his beliefs might resemble modern day atheism (unlike the 2 others who were pantheist and non-Trinitarian), and that his story is rather sketchy.

By state sponsored I meant by some sort of established authority in general, as opposed to an illegal killing as in the Hooper case, say. Not sure what the correct term would be there.

I don't deny there was probably people who were atheists they just never suffered on the level that Christians were. I am not even sure how much Łyszczyński counts as that "precedence" which kept atheists in fear since he wasn't killed til the 17th century (toward the end of the Renaissance period), so for the bulk of Christian history, no atheist had ever been killed for being atheist. But yes, your own analysis of the situation seems to be pretty sensible, especially with respect to why atheism really wasn't much of an issue in the day--being unmentioned in the Roman Catechism and only mentioned very offhand in the Douay Catechism of 1649 for example.

That being said (because I always have to nitpick it is in my nature ), um, most Islamic terrorists are actually relatively well educated: engineers being one of the most overrepresented professions: http://nationalinterest.org/blog/bruce-h...rists-4080 . They are basically young male intellectuals angry at the West. Though that might be another issue for another thread.

Also the Renaissance is different from the Enlightenment, the Renaissance was a cultural blossoming from 14th-17th centuries starting in Florence, Italy with devout Catholics Dante and Petrarch; and the Enlightenment was an 18th century philosophical movement which started with Locke and Voltaire and all those other famous 18th century philosophers. (followed by the Romantic movement in backlash to that)