The Lies of Sam Harris

[ITR champion]

Another Doper has asked me for a thread exposing the malicious lies that Sam Harris tells about Christians. Well, seek and ye shall find. Unfortunately the lies that Mr. Harris tells are too numerous to list and debunk all of them, so I'll focus on chapter 3 of his book The End of Faith. Unfortunately the lies that Mr. Harris tells in that chapter are also too numerous to list and and debunk, so I can only pick a few.

He begins the chapter with a second person narrative of a torture victim at the Spanish Inquisition. In a relatively short space, he runs through almost every common myth and misconception about the Inquisition. For example, he maintains the myth that the most common form of torture was "foot roasting". (page 81) Real historians have rejected this nonsense for a long time. A 1994 BBC Production called The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition puts a lot of this nonsense to rest, including the foot roasting myth. Harris, like his pal Richard Dawkins, can't be bothered to provide cites for most of his claims, so we'll never know exactly where he got his misinformation. Nevertheless, he's either using history that's way out of date, or else recycling legends that never had any basis to begin with.

Harris also says that everyone involved in the running of the Inquisition was a member of the Roman Catholic Clergy. (page 83) Wrong again. Many were not members of the clergy. (In fact they were mostly lawyers--not that that implies anything.)

Later Harris accuses the Catholic Church of "torturing scholars to the point of madness for merely speculating about the nature of the stars". (page 105) Once again, a citation is sorely missing. Having recently debunked the myth that Galileo was tortured or murdered by the Church, I see no need to repeat that here. I will point out that the Catholic Church has never tortured or executed any scientist. The first scientist to be murdered for political reasons was French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who was a practicing Catholic. He was killed during the Reign of Terror by the proudly secular Jacobin Regime.

Apparently wanting to go out with a bang, Harris decided to repeat the mythical claim of Papal infallibility. "No Pope can criticize the actions of his predecessor", says Harris. (page 106) Since this comes after repeating the usual lies about Pope Pius XII and his actions during the Holocaust, he clearly wants us to believe that this was something related to Pius XII. In reality, the Church holds that Papal Infallibility holds only when the Pope invokes it with regards to certain doctrines. Most Popes never invoke it. I don't think Pius XII ever did, though I could be wrong.

In short, Sam Harris: big, fat liar and hatemonger.

[cosmosdan]

I like some clarification. Without agreeing with the details you mention I'd like to know if you make any distinction between a mistake, an incorrect fact, believing a popular myth, and lie?

[Lobohan]

I like some clarification. Without agreeing with the details you mention I'd like to know if you make any distinction between a mistake, an incorrect fact, believing a popular myth, and lie?I might add, that all Christians are liars if believing a popular myth is grounds to be a liar.

[gonzomax]

Question the teachings or opinions of the ITR and you must be a big fat liar. There can be no other explanation.

[sunacres]

Having read The End of Faith, I'd have to say that the "lies" you're trumpeting don't deflect the thrust of his argument by much.

For you to say "the Catholic Church has never tortured or executed any scientist" speaks volumes to that point.

[cosmosdan]

I might add, that all Christians are liars if believing a popular myth is grounds to be a liar.

Um, yeah that was kinda my point.

[razncain]

I will point out that the Catholic Church has never tortured or executed any scientist.

Why doesn’t Bruno ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno) qualify when he was burned at the stake as a heretic by the Roman Inquisition even if he may not have been executed for his Copernican views?

[mhendo]

I had never even heard of Sam Harris until i opened this thread, and certainly had no brief for or against him. But your post got me intrigued, and i did a bit of digging. For example, he maintains the myth that the most common form of torture was "foot roasting". (page 81) Firstly, while he does talk about foot roasting, nowhere on page 81 does he claim that it was "the most common form of torture." Here's what he says:If you are unlucky enough to be in Spain, where judicial torture has reached a transcendent level of cruelty, you may be placed in the "Spanish Chair": a throne of iron, complete with iron stocks to secure your neck and limbs. In the interest of saving your soul, a coal brazier will be placed beneath your bare feet, slowly roasting them. Because the stain of heresy runs deep, your flesh will be continually larded with fat to keep it from burning too quickly. Or you may be bound to a bench, with a cauldron filled with mice placed upside-down on your bare abdomen. With the requisite application of heat to the iron, the mice will begin to burrow into your belly in search of an exit.

Page 81 (http://books.google.com/books?id=Lr8ytqlY9NgC&dq=sam+harris+end+of+faith&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=GqnmEXjeO3&sig=x2Vc6ZX7LinkuVkoxBmVJ1jkjW4&hl=en&ei=JKmoSbfvHIjTnQfa5eT4Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=7&ct=result#PPA81,M1)Basically what he's saying here is that, if you were in Spain, two of the possibilities were the foot roasting, or the belly-burrowing mice. I make no claim to any knowledge about the prevalence of foot roasting, but that passage, which is all he has to say about foot roasting on page 81, does not claim that it was "the most common form of torture."Harris also says that everyone involved in the running of the Inquisition was a member of the Roman Catholic Clergy. (page 83) Wrong again. Many were not members of the clergy. (In fact they were mostly lawyers--not that that implies anything.)The link i give above goes to the Google Books scan of End of Faith. If you scroll down, you'll see that page 83 is the last page available from this section of the book.

As far as i can tell, nowhere on that page does Harris claim that "everyone involved in the running of the Inquisition was a member of the Roman Catholic Clergy." If you can point out the relevant passage to me, i'd be most appreciative.

[gonzomax]

Are you exposing the lies of ITR?

[Lobohan]

Um, yeah that was kinda my point.Well then, as you were. :D

[Bryan Ekers]

Having recently debunked the myth that Galileo was tortured or murdered by the Church
Was that before or after I cured cancer?

[Captain Carrot]

Champ, your attention please (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=508564).

[The Second Stone]

So if I understand Mr. Harris' arguments correctly, the crimes of some people of a group are translatable to all members of the group, and I as a 21st century Christian am responsible for the actions of bad Christians several centuries previously, not to mention all other crimes attributable to Christians? Do I have that right?

Does that mean that atheists are responsible for all the crimes committed by atheists throughout history? They do share a common lack of belief.

The logic seems to be lacking. While some crimes are connected to later crimes by normal causation, most are bad acts committed by people unconnected to others in history. This logic is contrary to what Christians claim. Matthew Chapter 25, verses 31-40 says:

31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. 34 Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? 38 And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? 39 And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ 40 And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, [6] you did it to me.’

Good things that are done in the name of God are attributable to God. Bad things are attributable to the bad people that do them, the devil and his agents.

41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ 44 Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ 45 Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ 46 And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Those who do evil and claim it for God are rejected by God in those works.

[dinoboy]

Unfortunately the lies that Mr. Harris tells in that chapter are also too numerous to list and and debunk, so I can only pick a few.

Pick a few more...

These aren't lies, these are you not reading what is there (or perhaps, reading what isn't there?)

[dinoboy]

So if I understand Mr. Harris' arguments correctly, the crimes of some people of a group are translatable to all members of the group, ... Do I have that right?

I don't believe he ever says anything close to this or any other blanket statements for that matter (could be mistaken; no cite; been a while since I read any of his work). He merely argues how the Christian belief system can lead to serious consequences and presents specific, historic examples to back up his claims.

[Half Man Half Wit]

Why doesn’t Bruno ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno) qualify when he was burned at the stake as a heretic by the Roman Inquisition even if he may not have been executed for his Copernican views?
Actually, according to a document found in the Vatican's archives in 1940, his conviction and execution was at least in part due to his unwillingness to recant his belief in the plurality of worlds (http://asv.vatican.va/en/doc/1597.htm), i.e. that there are many inhabited worlds in the universe.

Personally, I don't hold such things against Christianity, and I don't subscribe to popular 'root of all evil'-views -- but revisionism isn't going to make them go away. There have been horrible, dreadful mistakes made in the name of Christianity, and today's Christians need to learn from them, not try to contort history into some convenient fantasy of universal benevolence -- this just serves as a foundation for making those mistakes all over again. As I said, I don't believe Christianity -- or even religion in general -- to be the 'root of all evil', but it can be, like every dogmatic, authoritative system, a ready conduit for it, and originally well-meaning ideas and undertakings can too easily become corrupted and perverted from their original intentions. All it takes is someone at the top to go flaky.

[Weston]

Shouldn't this thread be called "The things Sam Harris has said that contradict what I've previously heard and which must therefore be wrong my post is my cite fuck you!"?

The Second Stone


So if I understand Mr. Harris' arguments correctly, the crimes of some people of a group are translatable to all members of the group, and I as a 21st century Christian am responsible for the actions of bad Christians several centuries previously, not to mention all other crimes attributable to Christians? Do I have that right?


You have that 100% wrong. Sam harris doesnt say anythng like that in any of his books.

[cosmosdan]

So if I understand Mr. Harris' arguments correctly, the crimes of some people of a group are translatable to all members of the group, and I as a 21st century Christian am responsible for the actions of bad Christians several centuries previously, not to mention all other crimes attributable to Christians? Do I have that right?

No you don't have that right.

Sam's point as I understand it is that because of how religious belief systems have a very real effect on the lives of others they should lose any protected status and unwarranted respect that holds them above detailed examination and challenging. I wholeheartedly agree.

People are free to believe whatever they want but when their religious beliefs spill out into real world actions that affect the lives of those who don't share their beliefs then they deserve to be directly challenged. When religious leaders launch campaigns to deny gays equal rights then those of us who disagree have a right and even duty to challenge them to explain themselves and show a valid reason for their actions. If all they point to is their personal interpretation of a 2000 year old book they ain't got much.

This , according to Sam, applies to all religion not just Christianity. People must be held responsible for how their actions affect others and they cannot claim protected status under the banner of religion.

[cosmosdan]

I had never even heard of Sam Harris until i opened this thread, and certainly had no brief for or against him. But your post got me intrigued, and i did a bit of digging.Firstly, while he does talk about foot roasting, nowhere on page 81 does he claim that it was "the most common form of torture." Here's what he says:Basically what he's saying here is that, if you were in Spain, two of the possibilities were the foot roasting, or the belly-burrowing mice. I make no claim to any knowledge about the prevalence of foot roasting, but that passage, which is all he has to say about foot roasting on page 81, does not claim that it was "the most common form of torture."The link i give above goes to the Google Books scan of End of Faith. If you scroll down, you'll see that page 83 is the last page available from this section of the book.

As far as i can tell, nowhere on that page does Harris claim that "everyone involved in the running of the Inquisition was a member of the Roman Catholic Clergy." If you can point out the relevant passage to me, i'd be most appreciative.

Does that mean Champ is a big fat liar {by his definition} or is he merely bearing false witness?

[An Arky]

Stupid rhetorical question of the day:

Why do christians always have to be laying their trip on everybody else? Why can they not accept that there is going to be a segment of the population that aren't buying what they're selling and just move on? I realize there's probably some cryptic blurb in the bible that they took to mean they should do this, but I should think that TPTB at God, Inc. would not be so keen on having their salesmen spending so much time on cold calling (and I mean really, really cold calling). I think most of them are just doing something like unemployment surfers who call companies to apply for jobs they know don't exist just so they can say they did.

ETA: Oh, it seems that the OP is doing one of those fart-and-leave-the-room type deals. How christian.

[The Second Stone]

I don't believe he ever says anything close to this or any other blanket statements for that matter (could be mistaken; no cite; been a while since I read any of his work). He merely argues how the Christian belief system can lead to serious consequences and presents specific, historic examples to back up his claims.

I have only the OP's characterization to go on, and there seems to be some consensus that the OP has misrepresented the argument. It is correct that the perpetrators of these acts attempted to "justify" them in the name of Christ. Christ would deny these actors. While it is certainly possible that absent a belief in Christ and others that these actors would have never done anything to injure others, that is rather unlikely. When people use a religion of charity, kindness and non-violence to justify cruelty and violence and avarice I think that the cause is not religion, but rather cruel, violent and greedy people who are being hypocrites about their religion, that being a simpler explanation than a complex misunderstanding of the religion.

[Kalhoun]

It appears the Champ is questioning his own faith. What other reason would he have to burrow into these books and misrepresent nearly every example he holds up in defense of his beliefs?

There's probably no god. If there is, we have no reason to believe it's the christian version. He's beginning to understand this, and it scares him. Have a little compassion.

[dinoboy]

...It is correct that the perpetrators of these acts attempted to "justify" them in the name of Christ. ... While it is certainly possible that absent a belief in Christ and others that these actors would have never done anything to injure others, that is rather unlikely.

Possibly.

Certainly you are correct, it is the individual that does "bad" things. But individuals are motivated by a multitude of stimuli. Further, authority (of any kind) seems to hold great sway over people and religion is well established as an authority in most cultures. Part of my interpretation of Mr. Harris' argument was that religion gave these particular people the motivation to do these vile things (or follow authority blindly) whereas their other motivations (ones also shared by the non-religious) were insufficient.

My (remedial) take:
1) Not everyone religious who does "evil" does so for religions reasons but there are some (just as all the non-religious who do "evil").
2) Most religious who do "good" might (probably more likely) or might not claim/believe it so in the name of their religion.*
3) All religious could do "good" for non-religious reasons (as shown by non-religious "do gooders")

So, it would seem that religion simply adds one more possible reason to a shared list of motivators: As such it is unnecessary for doing "good" but can be sufficient for doing "evil".

* Even so, I don't know if we can simply cancel out this "evil" by the apparent "good" done in the name of a religion.

(This argument seemed too easy for me... So it must be full of holes. Critique away!) :)


...When people use a religion of charity, kindness and non-violence...

Most religions publicly purport peace in some way ("Hey, I'm a great guy! Just ask me!") - though much written in their texts might contradict such a claim.

[Robot Arm]

I will point out that the Catholic Church has never tortured or executed any scientist.Does Hypatia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia) count?

[The Second Stone]

My (remedial) take:
1) Not everyone religious who does "evil" does so for religions reasons but there are some (just as all the non-religious who do "evil").
2) Most religious who do "good" might (probably more likely) or might not claim/believe it so in the name of their religion.*
3) All religious could do "good" for non-religious reasons (as shown by non-religious "do gooders")


1) Yes, there certainly are people who commit bad acts in "good faith" for religious reasons. That doesn't mean that they are correct in their good faith belief that religion justifies it.
2) Yes, many religious people do good only for religion. But doing "good" with or without religion is still doing good.
3) Yes, religious people can and many times do good things for the same reasons non-religious people do those same kinds of things. In fact, all acts of charity can be done for non-religious reasons, and the same for all good acts.

There are, of course, matters not yet considered. Faith can provide feelings of well being for those who might otherwise be fully cognizant of conditions that would require the non-religious to despair. This is most everyone in the world. Would you deprive those who only have faith of that faith to satisfy your own sense of proper reality?

[Der Trihs]

Would you deprive those who only have faith of that faith to satisfy your own sense of proper reality?Yes. First, because it's better to be right. And second, because they are far more likely to progress to a better situation if they pin their hopes on something real. And third, because they are less likely to harm others without faith distorting their judgement. And fourth, because it's quite possible that faith is why they are so badly off to begin with.

[ITR champion]

As far as i can tell, nowhere on that page does Harris claim that "everyone involved in the running of the Inquisition was a member of the Roman Catholic Clergy." If you can point out the relevant passage to me, i'd be most appreciative.
It was on page 84, not 83. That was a mistake on my part, for which I apologize. Nevertheless it does not change the validity of the argument. Mr. Harris says:

"It is important to remember ... that the perpetrators of the Inquisition--the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions--were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God--popes, bishops, friars, and priests."

Now according (http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/history/world/wh0008.html) to The Myth of the Inquisition:

"The Inquisition had a secular character, although the crime was heresy. Inquisitors did not have to be clerics, but they did have to be lawyers."

So according to Mr. Harris, it is "very important to remember" things that he's making up off the top of his head. (Or possibly copying from someone else who did so; since he won't provide sources, we can't know.)

[FriarTed]

Does Hypatia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia) count?

Not according to your cite. She was killed by a Christian mob, probably led by monks, particular one Peter. However, she was not killed by "the Church" nor "the State", and the reason for her murder was in no way related to her scientific or philosophical work, but to the perception that she was responsible for maintaining the rift between Bishop Cyril and the Prefect Orestes.

Incidentally, I first heard of her in a book put out by Garner Ted Armstrong's Internat'l Church of God, in which she was upheld as a victim of Catholic misogyny and Bishop Cyril blamed for instigating her murder.

[mhendo]

It was on page 84, not 83. That was a mistake on my part, for which I apologize.What about your claim regarding Harris's discussion of foot roasting. You said that he calls it "the most common form of torture," but my quote from page 81 shows that he never says any such thing. Did you ignore that part of my post because you were embarrassed at being caught in a misrepresentation of Harris's argument?

Also, Norman Roth, in his book Conversos, Inquisition and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), has this to say about torture:Generally, prisoners were kept in dark and filthy cells, hot in summer and freezing in winter, infested with rats, snakes, and worms. Water and fire were routinely used as methods of torture, as well as the rack and pulley. Some prisoners were so weakened, and their feet so burned, that they could not walk to their own death at the stake and had to be carried.

p. 251Roth's own footnotes refers to another scholarly work, Luis Coronas Tejada, Conversos and Inquisition in Jaen (Jerusalem, 1988).

None of this suggests that foot roasting was "the most common form of torture"—as far as i can tell, no-one has actually made that claim—but the fact that professional scholars of the period continue to include such descriptions does suggest that the practice did occur. Nevertheless it does not change the validity of the argument. Mr. Harris says:

"It is important to remember ... that the perpetrators of the Inquisition--the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions--were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God--popes, bishops, friars, and priests."

Now according (http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/history/world/wh0008.html) to The Myth of the Inquisition:

"The Inquisition had a secular character, although the crime was heresy. Inquisitors did not have to be clerics, but they did have to be lawyers."The issue, here, i guess, is how much the historian should be willing to separate the religious and the secular in a society that maintained such close ties between the religious and secular authority. Spain during the Inquisition maintained almost none of the church-state separation that we so take for granted today, and even secular law was heavily embedded in, and based upon, edicts and rulings issued by the Catholic church.

Now, it could well be that Harris overstates the institutional affiliation of those who participated in the Inquisition, but you seem to be trying to take the argument far beyond its logical bounds. Even if the people doing the actual interrogation and the torturing did not have to be clerics, the notion that you can therefore separate the interrogations and torture from the Church is completely ridiculous.

Here's another quote from Roth:Since, according to canon law, the Church could not actually shed blood, the condemned "heretic" was turned over to the "secular arm," i.e., the government, for a sentence to be carried out. Nevertheless, the actual form of execution, death by burning, was not known in secular law and was one totally contrived by Church authorities (as noted above, the Fuero real based itself on a forged text, surely of ecclesiastical origin). Furthermore, the Inquisitors themselves were present and joyfully participating at the autos da fe (acts of faiths), as these public celebrations were known.

<snip>

The theological excuse for the horrible death by burning was that the corrupted soul of the unrepentant "heretic" would be better served, and possible saved, by punishment in this world than by eternal damnation in the next.

p. 221Also, having done some reading of scholarly reviews over the last day or so, it seems to me that the scholarly understanding of the Inquisition is not quite as benign as you would have us believe.

It certainly seems true that there has been a considerable amount of scholarly literature correcting the view of the Inquisition of a centralized, totalitarian horror chamber overseen by the Catholic Church. Quite a few scholars have pointed to the secular and governmental influences on the Inquisition, and others have also argued that there was, in fact, no single Inquisition to speak of; rather, the nature and tone of the different inquisitions tended to reflect particular local and regional issues. Perhaps the standard-bearer for this revisionist view is Henry Kamen, who has been writing about the Inquisition for decades, and whose third edition of his monumental work on the subject came out in 1998, appropriately titled The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

But Kamen's work, while widely respected, has not been without its critics in the scholarly community. And one of the more frequent criticisms in the scholarly reviews is that, in his zeal for offering an alternative view of the Inquisition, and his tendency to discount certain sources, he sometimes errs of the side of a whitewash, understating the importance of terror and torture.

For example, in a review for the Journal of Modern History (vol. 72, no. 2, June 2000: pp. 549-550), John Edwards says:Yet [Kamen] is also more inclined, in contrast to an in sometimes apparent contradiction of his new determination on the falsehood of its evidence, at least partially to exonerate the Inquisition of the traditional "Black Legend" charges, which date back to the sixteenth century. It is not quite a matter of Monty Python's now notorious "soft cushion," "comfy chair," and "cup of coffee at eleven o'clock," but it almost strays into that area at times."Thomas Glick, reviewing Kamen's work for the American Historical Review (vol 104, no. 5, December 1999: pp. 1773-1774), says:All that is well, but Kamen takes great pains both to establish his own moral distance from the Inquisition and its zeitgeist and to exonerate and exculpate. He is one of a number of authors who argue that neither Ferdinand nor Isabella were anti-Jewish, nor-for that matter-anti-Muslim (p. 26); nor did they subscribe to any "deliberate policy" to impose religious uniformity (p. 61). But Kamen supplies no other plausible explanation for the expulsion of the Jews or the war against Granada or the persecution of Muslim minorities. After describing the ruthless extirpation of Protestantism, he concludes the Spanish reaction was "almost humane" compared to religious persecution in other countries. With regard to the impact of censorship, the Inquisition was not unique in Europe in imposing thought control, nor can it be blamed for fossilizing academic culture for 300 years (p. 133). Kamen denies that Spain was cut off from contact with the outside world, then admits the "unquestionable isolated state of peninsular culture" (p. 135). After relating horrible details of imprisonment, he concludes that prison conditions were not all that bad (p. 192), then goes on to state that the proportionately small number of executions among all cases is an effective argument against the "legend of a bloodthirsty tribunal" (p. 203). The facts ought to speak for themselves, rather than requiring adornment with constant exculpatory pleas. Glick, in concluding his review, notes: In attempting to demonstrate that the Inquisition's institutional reach was limited, revisionist historians have been reluctant to admit that its psychological reach might not have been so limited.In a review for The Sixteenth Century Journal (vol 30, no. 3, Autumn 1999: pp. 919-921), John Tedeschi summarizes Kamen's revisionist argument, and then notes:But what I find troublesome is the frequent offhand attitude towards the evidence and the failure to anchor these new facts on solid documentation.Thus, the alleged low impact of the censorship machinery is contradicted by the careful discussion, "Le contrble des livres," in Bethencourt's L'lnquisition a l'epoque moderne which examines irrefutable evidence "about the efficacy of the system of the control of books (225).The bold statement that "over long periods of time and substantial areas of the country, it [the Inquisition] quite simply did nothing" (82) does not find the
documentary support it requires in the accompanying note: "In the 140 years between 1536 and 1675 the Inquisition of Mallorca, for example, did virtually nothing" (331). No figures of any kind are offered.

<snip>

Throughout, one reads statements that call for some further explanation or that should be founded on a document or a citation.Interestingly, Johns Edwards, who wrote one of the reviews quoted above, is also among the scholars who have tried to present a more nuanced view of the Spanish Inquisition, and his own book, The Spanish Inquisition (Stroud: Tempus, 1999) was reviewed for the English Historical Review (vol 115, no. 463, September 2000: pp. 960-961) by Colin Thompson. Thompson praises Edwards' book as "fair and balanced," and notes that, despite the fact that "some writers remain attached to fantasy rather than historical enquiry," many questions remain unanswered: was the Spanish Inquisition any more brutal than other systems of repression in Western Europe? How many conversos actually left Spain? What was the true religious affiliation of those who remained, so often the subject of its investigations? Edwards explains the problems, and is refreshingly
honest where no definitive answers can be given.

<snip>

Edwards rightly emphasizes the significance of the political alongside the religious aspects of its workings...

<snip>

His assessment of the inquisitors as 'faceless bureaucrats' rather than 'spectacular tyrants' is not intended to deny the appalling cruelties they inflicted.The question in all this, i guess, is whether pointing out the institutional and bureaucratic aspects of the Inquisition automatically exonerates the religious authorities and institutions of the period. That is certainly the position that you seem to be taking, but it's not one that the professional scholarship seems comfortable with, on the whole.

Furthermore, your OP claims to expose the "malicious lies that Sam Harris tells about Christians." But even if we accept that the Inquisition was, in many respects, a product of nominally secular institutions and bureaucracies, and even if some of their atrocities were the result of mundane politics or power-grabs rather than theological questions of spiritual import, the fact is that the Inquisition was, in all its important aspects, run by Christians (because even the lawyers who weren't clerics were still Catholics) and based on notions of heresy and apostasy promulgated by the Catholic faith.

You might be right that Sam Harris misrepresents the Inquisition in his book, but i think you are far to cavalier with your own assertions. Arguing that the Inquisition had a "secular character" not only ignores the massive influence the Church had on the Inquisition itself, but it ignores the essential overlapping and intertwining of religious and secular authority in Spain during the period. To say that something has a "secular character" in sixteenth century Spain is not the same as saying that issues of religion and religious authority were absent or unimportant.

[Calculon]

I guess here there are two questions about Sam Harris' work. Firstly, is his characterisation of the inquisition accurate? Then, secondly, does the inquisition actually prove much about the nature of religion.

With the first question it is difficult to assess what Sam Harris actually believes happened during the inquisition, because his writing is full of inuendo and heresay, with very few cites or objective statements. He goes through a list of things that may have happened to you, with the obvious but unstated implication that this is representative of the norm of what happened. Given that little to no effort is made to create a balanced account, I think his description is overblown.

Secondly though, even if we accept that his account of the inquisition is representative, it proves nothing. Two other important points need to be made:

1) The inquisition, as bad as it was, was often more just than the justice systems (or lack thereof) of the secular government at the time. Given that nothing like the inquisition happens today, it is unfair to judge history by the standards of today. All people, religious or not, are a product of their times. And too the inquisiton changed in focus and in standards of justice over time. I think that given the prevailing standards, the inquisition is much more a product of it's times rather than an intrinsic product of religion.

2) Atheist belief systems have lead to similar, if not worse attrocities than the inquisition. For instance one need only look to attempt to de-christianise France during the reign of terror as an example of atheists using much worse standards of justice on those they felt to be enemies of the state than those used in the inquisition.

What this shows I think is that people are jerks, and will hurt each other regardless of their belief systems. Trying to show the dangers of religion by example is foolish, since the same sorts of examples can be brought up about atheism.

Calculon.

[dinoboy]

2) Atheist belief systems have lead to similar, if not worse attrocities than the inquisition. For instance one need only look to attempt to de-christianise France during the reign of terror as an example of atheists using much worse standards of justice on those they felt to be enemies of the state than those used in the inquisition.

What this shows I think is that people are jerks, and will hurt each other regardless of their belief systems. Trying to show the dangers of religion by example is foolish, since the same sorts of examples can be brought up about atheism.

Calculon.

I agree that anyone can be cruel but...

Now, I'm not saying either was exactly a party (well, besides the Cult of Reason orgies and such, I'll bet those were a hoot!) but did you just try to equate a 10 month Reign of Terror (Sept. 1793 – July 1794) implemented by a recently liberated lower class out for vengeance (yes, I know not all of them were - but many felt repressed by the monarchy) to the nearly 350 year Inquisition (1478 - 1834) implemented by the authoritarian establishment already in charge?

[Calculon]

I agree that anyone can be cruel but...

Now, I'm not saying either was exactly a party (well, besides the Cult of Reason orgies and such, I'll bet those were a hoot!) but did you just try to equate a 10 month Reign of Terror (Sept. 1793 – July 1794) implemented by a recently liberated lower class out for vengeance (yes, I know not all of them were - but many felt repressed by the monarchy) to the nearly 350 year Inquisition (1478 - 1834) implemented by the authoritarian establishment already in charge?

Two points:

1) The inquisition was established in Spain after a long period of Muslim rule. One of the main initial functions was dealing with people who had converted from the old national faith of Islam, or the permitted faith of Judaism, to the new national faith of Catholicism. This is not all that dissimilar to the regime change in France, which undertook a change from a Catholic monarchy to a secular republic.

2) The short timeframe of the Reign of Terror compared to the inquisition can be interpreted in a number of ways. One way is to suggest that since the inquisition lasted so long, and even had a measure of popular support, it could not have been all that bad. The Reign of Terror, on the other hand, disintegrated so quickly because the persecution was so bad that it was inherently unstable and simply could not have lasted that long. Hardly a view that shows the superiority or compassion of anti-religious atheist regimes.

Calculon.

[cosmosdan]

It was on page 84, not 83. That was a mistake on my part, for which I apologize. Nevertheless it does not change the validity of the argument. Mr. Harris says:

"It is important to remember ... that the perpetrators of the Inquisition--the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions--were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God--popes, bishops, friars, and priests."

Now according (http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/history/world/wh0008.html) to The Myth of the Inquisition:

"The Inquisition had a secular character, although the crime was heresy. Inquisitors did not have to be clerics, but they did have to be lawyers."

So according to Mr. Harris, it is "very important to remember" things that he's making up off the top of his head. (Or possibly copying from someone else who did so; since he won't provide sources, we can't know.)

I find it ludicrous that you would take that sentence and turn it into "Sam Harris is a big fat liar and hate monger"
Yeah, how dare he do something as unscholarly as repeating a popular myth as it it was true? Just imagine.

Even with his details less than completely accurate they are accurate enough for his point to stand. Yours however seems to be flagging.

[cosmosdan]

I guess here there are two questions about Sam Harris' work. Firstly, is his characterisation of the inquisition accurate? Then, secondly, does the inquisition actually prove much about the nature of religion. Harris is not using the inquisition to prove anything about the nature of religion.

[Calculon]

Harris is not using the inquisition to prove anything about the nature of religion.

What then do you think is the reason that Sam Harris has chosen to discuss the inquisition?

His point in bringing up the inquisition, unless I am mistaken, is that religous people have lost touch with reality and therefore likely to do anything. The inquisition then is one example of the horrible things that religious people do that demonstrate their irrationality.

My point is that the argument is flawed because people of all professed beliefs or lack of beliefs commit attrocities. The problem is not that religion is bad, but that people themselves are to blame.

Calculon.

[Snarky_Kong]

2) The short timeframe of the Reign of Terror compared to the inquisition can be interpreted in a number of ways. One way is to suggest that since the inquisition lasted so long, and even had a measure of popular support, it could not have been all that bad. The Reign of Terror, on the other hand, disintegrated so quickly because the persecution was so bad that it was inherently unstable and simply could not have lasted that long. Hardly a view that shows the superiority or compassion of anti-religious atheist regimes.


It couldn't have been that bad, so it wasn't? Excellent logic.

[cosmosdan]

What then do you think is the reason that Sam Harris has chosen to discuss the inquisition?

His point in bringing up the inquisition, unless I am mistaken, is that religous people have lost touch with reality and therefore likely to do anything. The inquisition then is one example of the horrible things that religious people do that demonstrate their irrationality.

My point is that the argument is flawed because people of all professed beliefs or lack of beliefs commit attrocities. The problem is not that religion is bad, but that people themselves are to blame.

Calculon.

I explained it in post #18. You are mistaken. That's not his point.

[Fantome]

My point is that the argument is flawed because people of all professed beliefs or lack of beliefs commit attrocities. The problem is not that religion is bad, but that people themselves are to blame.
That point has had to been debunked a hundred times on this board. No one commits atrocities because of rational thought that questions dogma and leads to a lack of belief. Atheists don't commit atrocities because of rational thought and no one blames Christianity because Christians have robbed banks, drank and drove, etc. Abortion bombings, crusades, lies being spread in Africa about the effectiveness of condoms, etc., however, are committed because of the irrationality of religion and the spread of the dogma can be blamed. Attempting to pin bad things done by atheists on atheism is just more religious irrationality.

[Calculon]

It couldn't have been that bad, so it wasn't? Excellent logic.

This was in response to the basic argument that the inquisition was much worse because it went on for longer. Obviously this is a bad argument, as the longevity of something is not proportional to its severity. In fact, the suggestion is that the length of a movement is probably inversely proportional to how bad it is. Longevity implies that both it is stable (ie: not running the country into ruin, as say, Stalinism did to Russia) and that it is not bad enough to inspire the people to overthrow it. Of course this second part is a bit tricky, since it varies depending on the will of those in power as well, and therefore there are exceptions to the general rule.

Calculon.

[Calculon]

I explained it in post #18. You are mistaken. That's not his point.

OK, so then since no-one that I know of is now advocating re-instating the inquisition, why then bring it up? More to the point, what does the inquisition have to do with myself, who is decidedly not Catholic?

Calculon.

[Calculon]

That point has had to been debunked a hundred times on this board. No one commits atrocities because of rational thought that questions dogma and leads to a lack of belief. Atheists don't commit atrocities because of rational thought and no one blames Christianity because Christians have robbed banks, drank and drove, etc. Abortion bombings, crusades, lies being spread in Africa about the effectiveness of condoms, etc., however, are committed because of the irrationality of religion and the spread of the dogma can be blamed. Attempting to pin bad things done by atheists on atheism is just more religious irrationality.

Firstly, I think the characterization of atheism as nothing more than the lack of belief in a God absurdly reductionistic. Atheism, like theism, is most properly understood as a class of many different belief systems (communism, nihilism, existentialism, ect) that are all held together the common thread that they all deny the existence of God. Atheists DO make positive statements about the world around them (for instance, that science describes reality) and these positive statements do lead them to act in particular ways.

Otherwise the argument becomes one of special pleading. Why is "there is no god" the be all and end all of atheism, but religion is so much more than "there is a god". You can't be reductionist about one and then try and say that the other involves a host of other elements.

Secondly there were fundamentally atheist campaigns of violence (among other motivations admittedly) during the Reign of Terror.

One of the beliefs of these groups was precisely that religion was irrational. This lead them to the conclusion that religious people were dangerous, and the state would be better rid of them. When these people, especially rural people refused to voluntarily renounce their Catholicism, these groups took it upon themselves to force them to change their minds, to the point of executing them.

What is really troubling of course is that from this chapter it looks like Sam Harris agrees with most of this logic, that religious people are dangerous, ect. The only thing missing is the final step, that the end of riding ourselves of religion justifies the means of atrocities against individuals. Of course he does agree on this as well to an extent, as his publicized support of the torture of terrorism suspects shows.

I think the reason that point is debunked so often is that it is true. Atheists don't limit themselves to just the statement "there is no evidence for God". Atheists believe so much more than that, and these extra beliefs lead them to do different things. Often good things, but also sometimes bad things.

Calculon.

[The Second Stone]

Yes. First, because it's better to be right. And second, because they are far more likely to progress to a better situation if they pin their hopes on something real. And third, because they are less likely to harm others without faith distorting their judgement. And fourth, because it's quite possible that faith is why they are so badly off to begin with.

Your post ignores reality in favor of your own fantasy. 90 percent of the people in the world are religious. It is a fantasy, an utter break with reality, to actually believe that you can sweep it away with wishing. Great that it works for you personally, I have nothing against that. But denying comfort to the almost 6 billion people who have faith isn't going to happen unless you dissociate from reality, which you seem to claim to reject. It's one thing to anonymously point out on a message board how cruel you would be to an old dying religious person with a few minutes left to live, or to parents who cannot save their child who has only hours to live and nothing can be done. But it really is hard to picture a gung ho atheist who would insert himself into such a situation to proselytize a whole new set of uncomforting facts in real life. It would in fact require someone incapable of empathizing. The rest of us have to live with all the other people who are already in the world and we have to get along with them and make the best of the short time we have.

The fact that you believe that the world would be a better place if it were changed the way you suggest indicates that you are not lacking empathy. You've come up with a utopia that you have rationally justified would benefit mankind to even my satisfaction. But like The Republic, The Law, More's Utopia, Star Trek, etc. you cannot get there from here. You overlook that human nature being what it is, you are spitting into the ocean, the character of the ocean will not change. And you miss out on meeting and genuinely engaging most of the world's population. Yes, many behave badly, but so many people are so wonderful too. Accept reality the way it is. With human culture and beliefs.

[Sage Rat]

Atheism, like theism, is most properly understood as a class of many different belief systems (communism, nihilism, existentialism, ect) that are all held together the common thread that they all deny the existence of God.
Neither of these assertions is correct.

1) Atheism isn't a unifying force of the items you described. It isn't a unifying force at all. Religion is, on the other hand, a unifying force and hence it was seen as an opponent to the power of fascist states. And of course it's a philosophy besides being a religion, so any philosophy is going to trash it just as much as they'll trash Buddhism and Sikhism and Confucianism. Those are competitors.

2) Atheists don't deny the existence of God. They notice the lack of any reason to believe in him, just like they notice the lack of any reason to believe in UFOs or Santa Claus. I don't deny that there could be a teapot floating in outerspace, hidden behind Mars. I just see no reason to believe such a thing.

[Sophistry and Illusion]

I would just like to give mhendo mad props for an extremely well-written and well-researched post.

[Calculon]

Neither of these assertions is correct.

1) Atheism isn't a unifying force of the items you described. It isn't a unifying force at all. Religion is, on the other hand, a unifying force and hence it was seen as an opponent to the power of fascist states. And of course it's a philosophy besides being a religion, so any philosophy is going to trash it just as much as they'll trash Buddhism and Sikhism and Confucianism. Those are competitors.


I am not saying that atheism brings people together. What I am saying is that there are many different philosophies that can be rightly labeled atheistic. Therefore when you talk about all atheists you have to include all of these philosophies, whether or not they actually get along with each other.

This is especially true if you are going to talk of "religion" as one monolithic block. The scientific positivism of Richard Dawkins and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Satre have more in common than the Christianity of the Pope and Hinduism of Swami Vivekananda. If it is meaningful to talk of one as a monolithic block, then it should be for the other.

Secondly, to insist that there is a real belief system out there called "atheism" that is limited to just the statement "there is no reason to believe in God" is simply absurd. I know of no-one who would limit their knowledge in such a fashion. Sam Harris certainly believes more than this, as his writings demonstrate. Atheism is more than just "there is no reason to believe in God" just as Christianity is more than just "Jesus is God".

Calculon.

[Half Man Half Wit]

This was in response to the basic argument that the inquisition was much worse because it went on for longer. Obviously this is a bad argument, as the longevity of something is not proportional to its severity. In fact, the suggestion is that the length of a movement is probably inversely proportional to how bad it is.
Well, it could also be so oppressive as to quell any sign of dissent from the outset, of course. Feudalism lasted longer than Athenian democracy -- does that make it the 'better' system?

Firstly, I think the characterization of atheism as nothing more than the lack of belief in a God absurdly reductionistic.
It's however the definition of 'atheism'.

Atheism, like theism, is most properly understood as a class of many different belief systems (communism, nihilism, existentialism, ect) that are all held together the common thread that they all deny the existence of God.
Atheism may be a feature of a certain dogmatic system, yes, but it does not give rise to them the way faith does to religions -- disbelief in the existence of a higher power requires no further qualification, whereas the belief in god immediately opens up further questions, at the very least regarding the properties of this god; once you try to answer them, you have formed yourself a nice little religion. It's basically just an evolutionary process from there on.

The same doesn't hold for atheism, owing to its uniqueness, as opposed to faith's interchangeability -- with faith, you have a multiplicity of essentially equivalent stances you can pit against each other, however, atheism is the singular rejection of all these stances. You don't have different flavours of lacking belief.

Atheists DO make positive statements about the world around them (for instance, that science describes reality) and these positive statements do lead them to act in particular ways.
Atheism is perfectly compatible with making no statements about the world around us at all -- in fact, the solipsist is automatically atheist. That most of us make other assumptions about the nature of reality isn't a consequence of atheism, but rather a consequence of solipsism being decidedly silly.

Also, science just requires two positive statements about the world around us, which are that it in fact exists and that our perception of it isn't totally misleading; it's not, like religion, a baseless series of assertions to pick and choose. That is more parsimonious than any religion or other faith-based system.

Atheism is the result of an attempt at minimizing the amount of 'positive statements', 'assumptions' or 'axioms' that are necessary to make descriptive statements that have some hope to apply to the real world, and so is science -- that's the reason the two of them often go together, not that atheism somehow leads to science. Correlation and causation, that kinda thing.

Otherwise the argument becomes one of special pleading. Why is "there is no god" the be all and end all of atheism, but religion is so much more than "there is a god".
Well, 'there is no god' is not actually the assertion of atheism. Lack of belief in the existence of something is very much not the same as the belief in the non-existence of something.

I would just like to give mhendo mad props for an extremely well-written and well-researched post.
Yeah, from me, too. I'm hoping to see a continuation of debate on this level, though I'll be unable to participate, so I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing it answered.

[Calculon]

Neither of these assertions is correct.

1) Atheism isn't a unifying force of the items you described. It isn't a unifying force at all. Religion is, on the other hand, a unifying force and hence it was seen as an opponent to the power of fascist states. And of course it's a philosophy besides being a religion, so any philosophy is going to trash it just as much as they'll trash Buddhism and Sikhism and Confucianism. Those are competitors.


I am not saying that atheism brings people together. What I am saying is that there are many different philosophies that can be rightly labeled atheistic. Therefore when you talk about all atheists you have to include all of these philosophies, whether or not they actually get along with each other.

This is especially true if you are going to talk of "religion" as one monolithic block. The scientific positivism of Richard Dawkins and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Satre have more in common than the Christianity of the Pope and Hinduism of Swami Vivekananda. If it is meaningful to talk of one as a monolithic block, then it should be for the other.

Secondly, to insist that there is a real belief system out there called "atheism" that is limited to just the statement "there is no reason to believe in God" is simply absurd. I know of no-one who would limit their knowledge in such a fashion. Sam Harris certainly believes more than this, as his writings demonstrate. Atheism is more than just "there is no reason to believe in God" just as Christianity is more than just "Jesus is God".

Calculon.

[Der Trihs]

Firstly, I think the characterization of atheism as nothing more than the lack of belief in a God absurdly reductionistic. Atheism, like theism, is most properly understood as a class of many different belief systems (communism, nihilism, existentialism, ect) that are all held together the common thread that they all deny the existence of God. Well, you are wrong. Atheism is simply disbelief in gods, and nothing else. It's the lack of a single belief, not a belief system.

Why is "there is no god" the be all and end all of atheism, but religion is so much more than "there is a god". Because the vast majority of religious people don't follow the generic belief that there is some totally undefined god, but religions. And because religion is a belief system, but atheism is simply the lack of belief.

Your post ignores reality in favor of your own fantasy. 90 percent of the people in the world are religious. It is a fantasy, an utter break with reality, to actually believe that you can sweep it away with wishing. And where have I said I could do that ? Rather the opposite; I believe that humanity will clutch the insanity and evil of religion to itself with absolute determination, even to the point of the death of the species. Or worse than death.

The fact that you believe that the world would be a better place if it were changed the way you suggest indicates that you are not lacking empathy. You've come up with a utopia that you have rationally justified would benefit mankind to even my satisfaction. But like The Republic, The Law, More's Utopia, Star Trek, etc. you cannot get there from here. You overlook that human nature being what it is, you are spitting into the ocean, the character of the ocean will not change. Which is why in the long run we have the collective choice of changing human nature, or our civilization or species will die, or worse.

[tagos]

What then do you think is the reason that Sam Harris has chosen to discuss the inquisition?
Calculon.

Because the Inquisition was all about heresy, which it appears to escape the OP's notice, is a religious concept and the inquisition an instrument of the various Churches throughout Medieval times and represent one of the many enormous crimes of Christianity.

That he apparently has never heard of Bruno shows a battle still in need of fighting.

[tagos]

It appears the Champ is questioning his own faith.

Maybe his time would be better put questioning his ability to read for understanding.

[cosmosdan]

OK, so then since no-one that I know of is now advocating re-instating the inquisition, why then bring it up? More to the point, what does the inquisition have to do with myself, who is decidedly not Catholic?

Calculon.

The point is about all religious belief systems in general, not any one. The inquisition is one extreme example, there are others including current ones. Radical Islam comes to mind. Currently Christians campaign to keep gays from having equal rights. They try to restrict the freedom of choice for women. One religious leader who's support was sought by John McCain called his followers to a Holy War against Islam.

Your point about the deeds of atheists isn't relevant. Atheists don't have any protected status around their belief system. There has been an unwritten social rule a person's religious beliefs should not be questioned. Harris points out that religious belief systems have a very real world effect on those who are not believers. For that reason he advocates that religious belief systems should be examined and challenged by the same standards as anything else. Facts and hard evidence.

[The Second Stone]

And where have I said I could do that ? Rather the opposite; I believe that humanity will clutch the insanity and evil of religion to itself with absolute determination, even to the point of the death of the species. Or worse than death.

Which is why in the long run we have the collective choice of changing human nature, or our civilization or species will die, or worse.
I wrote:
There are, of course, matters not yet considered. Faith can provide feelings of well being for those who might otherwise be fully cognizant of conditions that would require the non-religious to despair. This is most everyone in the world. Would you deprive those who only have faith of that faith to satisfy your own sense of proper reality?
And here is where I interpreted what you said as wishful thinking. You would deprive these people of solace.
Yes. First, because it's better to be right. And second, because they are far more likely to progress to a better situation if they pin their hopes on something real. And third, because they are less likely to harm others without faith distorting their judgement. And fourth, because it's quite possible that faith is why they are so badly off to begin with.

Of course one day the species will die, as all species have since the big bang. Death is a certainty of life. As individuals we will all die, and as a species we will also die. The universe itself will die a heat death in a few trillion years.

The concept of "evil" is itself a fantasy created by humans for human purposes. Animals taking advantage of others is part of the natural condition. Your assertion that religion is "evil" because it is a fantasy merely suggests that only the bigger fantasies should be considered to have value: religion being a subset of evil in your view. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people he did not exist. And like that "poof" he was gone.

[Der Trihs]

The concept of "evil" is itself a fantasy created by humans for human purposes.It's not a "fantasy", it's an assertion. A human defined concept. It only becomes a fantasy if you claim it's some objective force, like rocks or electromagnetism.

Animals taking advantage of others is part of the natural condition. Your assertion that religion is "evil" because it is a fantasy merely suggests that only the bigger fantasies should be considered to have value: religion being a subset of evil in your view. What the "natural condition" is, is irrelevant; the distinction of good versus evil is about what's desirable, not what is natural. And religion isn't evil because it's a fantasy; that's what makes it stupid. What makes it evil is it's malice, bigotry, cruelty, and callousness.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people he did not exist. And like that "poof" he was gone.He never existed in the first place.

[The Second Stone]

It's not a "fantasy", it's an assertion. A human defined concept. It only becomes a fantasy if you claim it's some objective force, like rocks or electromagnetism.

What the "natural condition" is, is irrelevant; the distinction of good versus evil is about what's desirable, not what is natural. And religion isn't evil because it's a fantasy; that's what makes it stupid. What makes it evil is it's malice, bigotry, cruelty, and callousness.



And religion is an assertion too, a human defined concept. It only becomes a fantasy if you insist it behave like an objective force, like rocks or electromagnetism.

The distinction between religion and a "natural condition" is irrelevant under your reasoning about what is desirable, rather than what is natural. Evil does not objectively exist, the only thing that makes evil, evil are the human values that reject malice, bigotry, cruelty and callousness and coincident with the nature of evil, not the nature of religion.

Any concept can be used for evil, including religion, or atheism as hoping that religion won't exist. What Stalin and Mao did against religion and in the name of atheism were greater evils, as subjectively measured by humans, than any other acts in history with possible exceptions of genocides like the Holocaust, also arguably carried out by atheists for atheist motives. Any human activity can be interpreted as evil by those adversely affected. The subject of eating a nice steak dinner is seriously regarded as an evil act of murder by some vegetarians.

The fact that evil encompasses come of the field of religion, and religion encompasses some of the field of evil does not make them of the same overall character. That's a flaw in logic. Some people judge religion, on balance, not to be for them. Most people in the world (around 90 percent) believe that religion, on balance, is for them and a good thing. Even under the ethical logic that has concluded that there is no God, people are still left to decide to decide for themselves what is good and what is evil. Even Trekkers must decide whether to dress up as bloodthirsty Klingons or quasi fascist military Starfleet.

[Sage Rat]

I am not saying that atheism brings people together. What I am saying is that there are many different philosophies that can be rightly labeled atheistic. Therefore when you talk about all atheists you have to include all of these philosophies, whether or not they actually get along with each other.
Yeah but that's like saying that Buddhists are atheists because Christianity is correct and hence what they believe in isn't real, and hence they believe in nothing--ergo they are atheists. Woot.

Pointing out that people believe alternate philosophies and religions than Christianity, some of which don't include a deity or deities of any sort is rather a pointless thing to point out. Yep, there are philosophies that don't endorse a deity of any sort. In fact most of these can perfectly co-exist with religion. Confucianists were often Buddhists. Social Darwinists were most often Christians.

[Der Trihs]

And religion is an assertion too, a human defined concept. It only becomes a fantasy if you insist it behave like an objective force, like rocks or electromagnetism.In other words, if it's a religion.

Religion isn't a simple assertion; it's a lie or delusion. It makes claims about objective reality that are baseless or outright false.

The distinction between religion and a "natural condition" is irrelevant under your reasoning about what is desirable, rather than what is natural. Evil does not objectively exist, the only thing that makes evil, evil are the human values that reject malice, bigotry, cruelty and callousness and coincident with the nature of evil, not the nature of religion.No. All of those are part of the nature of religion; they are things that religion tends strongly towards.

Any concept can be used for evil, including religion, or atheism as hoping that religion won't exist. Some are far more inclined towards evil than others; and religion is one of the worst.

What Stalin and Mao did against religion and in the name of atheism were greater evils, as subjectively measured by humans, than any other acts in history with possible exceptions of genocides like the Holocaust, also arguably carried out by atheists for atheist motives. Only in the minds of Christian apologists. The Nazis were overwhelmingly Christian, with a great deal of support from Christian organizations, and acting according to common Christian values.

As for Mao and Stalin, they were killing people for Communism and personal power, not atheism. Atheism doesn't call for the deaths of others, or for anything else for that matter.

[The Second Stone]

Well, that's quite an defense of Stalin and Mao. They did what they did to religion with state imposed atheism following. It seems no different to me than other evil people accused of doing things in the name of religions, for the reasons I've stated. And they did them on the stated assertions that religions were "lies" or "delusions". As horrible as the evils of this world are, the evils done to advance atheism claim a place second to none, not even Naziism.

As for religion being a lie, undoubtedly there are clergy who do not at all believe, but I see no reason to dismiss all of religion as a lie, or even enough of it to make it a serious argument. Most believers are not "lying", but under your logic that makes them all of the rest, every last one, "delusional". Freud, of course, agreed with you, describing religion as a "shared delusion". And he was serious. Religion, is not, of course, a delusion. It is a shared set of beliefs and faith, concepts entirely in the human mind, but communicated and operated upon that have meaning and benefits (and downsides) for the individuals and communities operating under them. Infinity is a concept that is similar. It exists nowhere except in concept. Yet it makes a number of human activities, such as space flight, possible. It is neither a lie, nor a delusion. It exists. And religion also exists and people use it socially every day and for many other reasons. You have rejected shared belief systems because in your analysis the costs far outweigh the benefits. But you cannot make that decision for other people, only for yourself. Have you converted anyone to atheism and seen that their life is better? If people get a sense of community and personal meaning out of it, should they really be confronted in their times of joy (or extremis) with an atheist preacher's nilhilism?

I would disagree that Naziism was Christian in its nature. It was not. It was ultra-capitalistic in its nature and dictatorial and totalitarian. The socialism in its title was an outright cynical lie to make it sound popular. The German resistance was lead by a Lutheran minister, Deitrich Bonhoeffer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer As evil as the crimes of the Nazis were, they were not done in the name of Christianity. Despite all the accusations against the Vatican, they sheltered hundreds of Jews in Vatican City during the war, I've met some of them. It is far more appropriate, and less fanatical, to lay other crimes at the feet of the Church: the persecution of scientists and philosophers, crusades, inquisitions and molestation cover-ups. But eternal damnation for these crimes, these deviations from a clear charitable purpose set by the Founder, is not a reality concept, but again a religious concept. The molestation cover-up continues and is criminal, but again, it is not a tenet of the faith to cover up molestation, but rather a deviation from set principles that will, in all likelihood be punished as a crime. A legal system is not made invalid by the fact that judges are sometimes on the take, or adopt a judicial philosophy that imposes a long period of injustice (Dred Scot or Plessey v. Ferguson), but that is rather an injustice and against the very concept of justice. It doesn't mean that all human beings should give up on justice, nor will they.

As for religion being one of the worst evils, I think that perhaps you mistake that lust for power and money and domination and vengeance often try to cloak themselves in with good motives espoused by religions and frequently have nothing to do with religion beyond a public excuse. The sack of Constantinople by one of the Crusades being just such an example.

[Der Trihs]

Well, that's quite an defense of Stalin and Mao. They did what they did to religion with state imposed atheism following.State imposed Communism, not atheism. It was all about Communism, not atheism, not matter what the believers like to claim. Of course, that's because if the admit that Communism is a belief system all it's own, they lose what's pretty much their only tool to bash atheism and pretend it's as bad as religion.

It seems no different to me than other evil people accused of doing things in the name of religions, for the reasons I've stated.And it's not; as I've stated in the past, Communism is a non-theistic religion that refuses to call itself a religion. It's a false and intolerant worldview that's taken on faith; not so different than Christianity, except for being generally less fond of the end of the world. And it has acted as religions tend to do when they get power; imposed itself by force and slaughtered and oppressed unbelievers.

And they did them on the stated assertions that religions were "lies" or "delusions". As horrible as the evils of this world are, the evils done to advance atheism claim a place second to none, not even Naziism. Once again, garbage. Communism did what it did to advance Communism, not atheism. That's why it stands out, and why the believers love to lie and equate Communism and atheism all the time. That way they can use Communism to bash atheism, as long as they carefully ignore the question of why it's only the Communists who act like that. Not atheists in general. Where's the gulags in the European nations where atheism is common ?

As for religion being a lie, undoubtedly there are clergy who do not at all believe, but I see no reason to dismiss all of religion as a lie, or even enough of it to make it a serious argument. Most believers are not "lying", but under your logic that makes them all of the rest, every last one, "delusional". More or less. Some are either stupid or extremely ignorant, rather than being either liars or deluded.

If people get a sense of community and personal meaning out of it, should they really be confronted in their times of joy (or extremis) with an atheist preacher's nilhilism? And what makes you equate atheism with nihilism ? That's more religion's style; that the world doesn't matter, that people don't matter; that suffering and death don't matter.

I would disagree that Naziism was Christian in its nature. It was not. It was ultra-capitalistic in its nature and dictatorial and totalitarian.Common Christian values, all of them. As was the hatred of Jews and homosexuals and so on.

The socialism in its title was an outright cynical lie to make it sound popular. The German resistance was lead by a Lutheran minister, Deitrich Bonhoeffer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer And the Catholic Church, and believers in general were big fans of fascism. As far as they were concerned, all their evils could be ignored because they opposed the ultimate evil of "godless Communism".

As for Deitrich Bonhoeffer, your own link admits that the sect we was a part of was a small one. The majority of Christians did the Christian thing and supported the slaughter of the Jews. Christianity is evil; the fact that occasional Christians overcome the fundamental vileness of the religion they have attached themselves to in no way redeems it. It just means that they are good people, but bad Christians. As opposed to those who were good Christians but bad people, and put Jews in gas chambers.

But eternal damnation for these crimes, these deviations from a clear charitable purpose set by the Founder, is not a reality concept, but again a religious concept. The molestation cover-up continues and is criminal, but again, it is not a tenet of the faith to cover up molestation, but rather a deviation from set principles that will, in all likelihood be punished as a crime. Yes, as a crime by the secular legal system. The Church puts the welfare of the faith above all else, and happily sacrificed children for decades to protect the reputation of the faith.

As for religion being one of the worst evils, I think that perhaps you mistake that lust for power and money and domination and vengeance often try to cloak themselves in with good motives espoused by religions and frequently have nothing to do with religion beyond a public excuse. Ah, yes, the standard excuse. Religion is good and pure, and any evil done in it's name doesn't count.

[The Second Stone]

Asserting that communism did not try to wipe out religion and impose atheism is a failure to deal with fact by reinterpreting history. Was communism a religion as you assert? Only if one removes the distinction between religion and political theory or economic theory and call them the same thing. Politics and religion are not the same thing. If they were, presumably people who hated religion as evil would spend a similar amount of time tearing down all political efforts, and vice versa.

I've never said that communism is similar to religion, merely that it advanced atheism for its own goals. Communism is not a religion, theistic or otherwise, it was an economic and political theory. Those are both substantially different human endeavors than religion.

It seems that the apology of communism (which I don't adhere to but don't have anything particular against other than the brutality of its failures), namely that communism advances communism, not atheism, is the exact same relation to the argument that Christianity does not advocate war, greed, oppression, etc., except that Christianity in its tenets is actually against those things and requires treating each human being with dignity, where communism actually advocates atheism as a way of making the world a better place. Marx made the same arguments about religion that many of its modern critics make. Now I don't want to weigh down Marx with the crimes that practitioners of his philosophy committed, Marx would have been horrified at what Lenin, Stalin and Mao did, and even moreso with attaching his name to it. But to suggest that Marx and his criminal practitioners did not advocate atheism and enforce it is to deny reality.

Common Christian values have never included capitalism, which is contrary to Christian principle and always has been. The dictatorial element of Christianity went out with the Reformation and has been on a slide ever since. Christianity has in fact had anti-Jewish elements: these have been taking a drubbing and dropped out of the teaching for the last 60 years, and the views on homosexuality that still exist in many Christian theologies have started on the same road. None of these events and trends can have escaped the careful Christian critic (in the academic sense).

I am not a Catholic, so I do not speak for Catholicism, but to state that it was ever Catholic doctrine to support fascism is mistaken.

I mention Bonhoeffer because he is the most admired non-Catholic Christian of the twentieth century. His influence continues to grow, particularly among Protestants. The suggestion that Christians supported the Holocaust is wrong. Murdering Jews has always been murder in Christian tradition. No group can claim not to have murderers among it, that does not mean that the whole group are murderers or should be tainted with it. If it does, then official atheists, Mao and Stalin, give the evil prize to atheists and atheism.

Ah, yes, the standard excuse. Religion is good and pure, and any evil done in it's name doesn't count.

That is a straw man argument. I never said that religion is pure and that evil done in the name of religion has no consequence. I think I acknowledged and even argued that religion isn't pure and that there have been bad consequences. But most bad acts, even those that are done in the name of religion, only use religion in the same way a bank robber takes a hostage: to scare people away from shooting at the greed and cruelty hiding behind religion.

I will agree that the Catholic Church appears to have put the welfare of their hierarchy and priests above that of the children hurt by the molesters. It is not excusable and must be stopped (I believe it now is) and must be punished, and recompense made. But nobody disagrees except the extent of the recompense and the actual institution being punished. The suggestion that every institution that has a series of criminal acts committed by its higher-ups is cause for the disbanding of that institution, rather than punishment and recompense, would leave us without institutions.

The world and the lives of people in it are far, far more complex than simple declarative sentences of disdain can effectively deal with. It's why radio political entertainment personalities usually work alone or with only token opposition: there is a lot more going on than one point of view can encompass.

[Half Man Half Wit]

Well, that's quite an defense of Stalin and Mao. They did what they did to religion with state imposed atheism following. It seems no different to me than other evil people accused of doing things in the name of religions, for the reasons I've stated.
I'm not a great fan of the whole 'religion is evil because evil things are done in its name' line of thinking, but this sort of tu quoque seems an even worse argument to me. I mean, do you honestly not see a difference between a religion, a belief system directly caused by the faith in the existence of god and subsequent needs to examine his properties, and ideologies (like communism etc.) that have no foundation in atheism at all? I'm not saying they don't promote it, and in some cases even require it, but atheism doesn't lead to communism (or anything, really) the way faith in some higher being leads to religion. Correlation is not causation -- for instance, there are people, including myself, arrive at atheism out of a sort of desire for frugality in one's belief system, i.e. rejecting baseless and incomparable hypotheses about ephemeral realities, in accordance with some sort of baseline Occam's razor, and those people will often tend to gravitate towards a scientific viewpoint in general, because that caters to the same need; this doesn't mean that atheism is a reason for scientific thinking, though. On the other hand, religions are a direct consequence of faith -- faith in something is effectively already a religion in so far as that 'something' is defined by faith. From there, the establishing of that religion is a straight-forward (and necessary, or else the religion will die out) process of 'fleshing out' the object of faith -- detailing god's attributes, writing some mystical narratives, coming up with some rituals etc.
Faith cannot be faith alone, but absence of faith stands on its own.

Infinity is a concept that is similar. It exists nowhere except in concept.
Well, there's an infinity of moments between now and later, and an infinity of points between here and there (provided no spacetime quantization).

Yet it makes a number of human activities, such as space flight, possible. It is neither a lie, nor a delusion. It exists. And religion also exists and people use it socially every day and for many other reasons.
Nobody's denying that religion exists, but that's at best questionable regarding the objects of their faiths (something you'll agree with for the majority of religions if you follow one of them). Infinity has a clear-cut sense in which it has mathematical existence; I have yet to see an equation ending in '= god'. And faith doesn't carry the same weight in making existential statements owing to its absolutely subjective nature: everybody can, basically, rediscover the mathematics of infinity, but not the tenets of (some given) faith; those are absolutely limited to the individual or those he can convince of them.

[Der Trihs]

Asserting that communism did not try to wipe out religion and impose atheism is a failure to deal with fact by reinterpreting history. No, it's pointing out that you are falsely conflating atheism and Communism.

Was communism a religion as you assert? Only if one removes the distinction between religion and political theory or economic theory and call them the same thing. Politics and religion are not the same thing. If they were, presumably people who hated religion as evil would spend a similar amount of time tearing down all political efforts, and vice versa. What makes Communism a religion, or a close cousin is that it's a false worldview based on faith. Being a worldview, being based on faith, and being false ( which effectively goes with being based on faith ) are pretty much what defines something as a religion.

And I never said that all of politics or economics is a religion, that's a strawman argument.

It seems that the apology of communism (which I don't adhere to but don't have anything particular against other than the brutality of its failures), namely that communism advances communism, not atheism, is the exact same relation to the argument that Christianity does not advocate war, greed, oppression, etc., except that Christianity in its tenets is actually against those things and requires treating each human being with dignity, where communism actually advocates atheism as a way of making the world a better place. Communism supports atheism for the same reason it opposes all labor unions not controlled by the Communist party; it doesn't like competition. And Christianity is most certainly NOT opposed to "war, greed, oppression, etc".

Common Christian values have never included capitalism, which is contrary to Christian principle and always has been. The dictatorial element of Christianity went out with the Reformation and has been on a slide ever since. Nonsense. Christianity has a long tradition of supporting and excusing greed & capitalism ( once capitalism showed up to be supported ). And Christianity's "Dictatorial element" is still going strong; it's just that Christianity has become too weak and divided to impose the kind of tyranny it used to.

Christianity has in fact had anti-Jewish elements: these have been taking a drubbing and dropped out of the teaching for the last 60 years, and the views on homosexuality that still exist in many Christian theologies have started on the same road.Yes, anti-Semitism has taken a beating for the last 60 years - AFTER the fall of the Nazis who you are trying to claim weren't acting like Christians. And the fight against homophobia, much like the fight against anti-semitism is largely a fight against Christianity and other religions.

I am not a Catholic, so I do not speak for Catholicism, but to state that it was ever Catholic doctrine to support fascism is mistaken. :rolleyes: Oh, please. The Pope supported fascism leading up until WWII, and the Catholic Church helped Nazi war criminals escape to safety.

The suggestion that Christians supported the Holocaust is wrong. Murdering Jews has always been murder in Christian tradition.They supported the holocaust, they supported and in fact created the beliefs that led to it. And Christians have been killing Jews for centuries in pogroms; pretending that it's some Nazi aberration is ridiculous.

No group can claim not to have murderers among it, that does not mean that the whole group are murderers or should be tainted with it. If it does, then official atheists, Mao and Stalin, give the evil prize to atheists and atheism. Except that Communism is in no way representative of atheism. But then that's why you need to slander atheism by trying to smear it with the crimes of Communism; you don't HAVE non-Communist mass murders and tyranny committed in the name of atheism to point at. So you will continue to pretend the two are the same.

As opposed to religion, where mass murder and tyranny in it's name are not at all restricted to one group.

But most bad acts, even those that are done in the name of religion, only use religion in the same way a bank robber takes a hostage: to scare people away from shooting at the greed and cruelty hiding behind religion.Nonsense. Christianity, for example is in the position it is today because of it's propensity towards mass murder and tyranny. People commit acts of evil and stupidity all the time because their religion demands it, not just using it as an excuse.

I will agree that the Catholic Church appears to have put the welfare of their hierarchy and priests above that of the children hurt by the molesters. It is not excusable and must be stopped (I believe it now is) and must be punished, and recompense made. But nobody disagrees except the extent of the recompense and the actual institution being punished. Again, nonsense. The Catholic Church, and many of it's followers was forced into doing something about it. Plenty of people disagreed that something should be done.

The world and the lives of people in it are far, far more complex than simple declarative sentences of disdain can effectively deal with.But religion is not. It's just garbage, plain and simple.

[jakesteele]

http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Wars-Library-World-History/dp/0816028516

A recent comprehensive compilation of the history of human warfare, Encyclopedia of Wars by Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod documents 1763 wars, of which 123 have been classified to involve a religious conflict.3 So, what atheists have considered to be "most" really amounts to less than 7% of all wars.

[Der Trihs]

http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Wars-Library-World-History/dp/0816028516

A recent comprehensive compilation of the history of human warfare, Encyclopedia of Wars by Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod documents 1763 wars, of which 123 have been classified to involve a religious conflict.3 So, what atheists have considered to be "most" really amounts to less than 7% of all wars.Which atheists say that ? And for that matter, a religious conflict doesn't need to be involved for religion to either be responsible or contribute to war.

Also, given that it's a textbook it likely isn't reliable. A textbook too critical of religion would be unpublishable in America.

[Mapache]

[QUOTE=The Second Stone;

I would disagree that Naziism was Christian in its nature. It was not. [snip] As evil as the crimes of the Nazis were, they were not done in the name of Christianity.

How many times do we have to debunk this assertion?


[QUOTE= A Hitler] . We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity... in fact our movement is Christian. We are filled with a desire for Catholics and Protestants to discover one another in the deep distress of our own people.

-Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Passau, 27 October 1928, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]

My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.

-Adolf Hitler, in his speech in Munich on 12 April 1922

In the life of nations, what in the last resort decides questions is a kind of Judgment Court of God.... Always before god and the world the stronger has the right to carry through what he wills.

-Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich, 13 April 1923


It will at any rate be my supreme task to see to it that in the newly awakened NSDAP, the adherents of both Confessions can live peacefully together side by side in order that they may take their stand in the common fight against the power which is the mortal foe of any true Christianity.

-Adolf Hitler, in an article headed "A New Beginning," 26 Feb. 1925

The Government, being resolved to undertake the political and moral purification of our public life, are creating and securing the conditions necessary for a really profound revival of religious life.... The National Government regard the two Christian Confessions as the weightiest factors for the maintenance of our nationality.

-Adolf Hitler, in his speech to the Reichstag on 23 March 1933



And so on, almost ad infinitum.....

[cosmosdan]

State imposed Communism, not atheism. It was all about Communism, not atheism, not matter what the believers like to claim. Of course, that's because if the admit that Communism is a belief system all it's own, they lose what's pretty much their only tool to bash atheism and pretend it's as bad as religion.

And it's not; as I've stated in the past, Communism is a non-theistic religion that refuses to call itself a religion. It's a false and intolerant worldview that's taken on faith; not so different than Christianity, except for being generally less fond of the end of the world. And it has acted as religions tend to do when they get power; imposed itself by force and slaughtered and oppressed unbelievers.

Once again, garbage. Communism did what it did to advance Communism, not atheism. That's why it stands out, and why the believers love to lie and equate Communism and atheism all the time. That way they can use Communism to bash atheism, as long as they carefully ignore the question of why it's only the Communists who act like that. Not atheists in general. Where's the gulags in the European nations where atheism is common ?



The point about Communism isn't to bash atheism or label it as evil. It's to show that belief systems that promote no God belief are just as capable of atrocities as those that do. IMO it suggests that it isn't God belief or religion per say that is the source of any evil acts any more than non belief was for Communism. It strikes me as saying that governments are evil and should be done away with because we can clearly see that it's governments that have committed more atrocities than any other human construction. It's so over simplified it's ridiculous and substance free.

[cosmosdan]

I'm not a great fan of the whole 'religion is evil because evil things are done in its name' line of thinking, but this sort of tu quoque seems an even worse argument to me. I mean, do you honestly not see a difference between a religion, a belief system directly caused by the faith in the existence of god and subsequent needs to examine his properties, and ideologies (like communism etc.) that have no foundation in atheism at all? I'm not saying they don't promote it, and in some cases even require it, but atheism doesn't lead to communism (or anything, really) the way faith in some higher being leads to religion. Correlation is not causation -- for instance, there are people, including myself, arrive at atheism out of a sort of desire for frugality in one's belief system, i.e. rejecting baseless and incomparable hypotheses about ephemeral realities, in accordance with some sort of baseline Occam's razor, and those people will often tend to gravitate towards a scientific viewpoint in general, because that caters to the same need; this doesn't mean that atheism is a reason for scientific thinking, though. On the other hand, religions are a direct consequence of faith -- faith in something is effectively already a religion in so far as that 'something' is defined by faith. From there, the establishing of that religion is a straight-forward (and necessary, or else the religion will die out) process of 'fleshing out' the object of faith -- detailing god's attributes, writing some mystical narratives, coming up with some rituals etc.
Faith cannot be faith alone, but absence of faith stands on its own.

That's an interesting point but keep in mind that lot's of people believe and don't practice any particular religion. Others may enjoy going to a service but have no need to embrace any particular doctrine. Now let's add that some religions teach a rigid doctrine and some don't.

It's true that out faith in basic ideas and teachings organized religion can and has been born. It's also true that attempts to hold those ideas into a box of specific dogma and doctrine has continuously failed.

[Der Trihs]

The point about Communism isn't to bash atheism or label it as evil.That's EXACTLY the point. To pretend the two are identical so that believers can pretend that all atheists are monsters, without having to show any wrongdoings being committed by non-Communist atheists. That's why it's ALWAYS Communism in these discussions, with occasional lies about the Nazis being atheist.

IMO it suggests that it isn't God belief or religion per say that is the source of any evil acts any more than non belief was for Communism. In other words, let's pretend that religion is responsible only for good. Or are you going to apply the same logic for good deeds, and refuse to give religion any credit for good as you refuse to give it any blame for evil ?

And the comparison simply doesn't work, anyway. First, because atheism isn't a belief system, while both Communism and religion are. Second, because all the facts support atheism, and oppose both Communism and religion; both Communism and religion require a delusional mind set. Third, because atheism, being simply disbelief in gods, doesn't call for any action, make any judgements, demand any action; unlike both Communism and religion which do all of those. And fourth, why is it just the Communists, and not other atheist groups ? Answer : Because their actions are all about Communism, and not about atheism.

[cosmosdan]

That's EXACTLY the point. To pretend the two are identical so that believers can pretend that all atheists are monsters, without having to show any wrongdoings being committed by non-Communist atheists. That's why it's ALWAYS Communism in these discussions, with occasional lies about the Nazis being atheist.
I won't even bother with this since we both know you have nothing to back it up with except your ability to type "Is So" over and over again.
In other words, let's pretend that religion is responsible only for good. Or are you going to apply the same logic for good deeds, and refuse to give religion any credit for good as you refuse to give it any blame for evil ?
Yawn! Never said anything even remotely like this. My point is that good deeds or evil ones have more nuanced motives that aren't understood by your gross oversimplification and glaringly obvious prejudice against religion.

And the comparison simply doesn't work, anyway. First, because atheism isn't a belief system, while both Communism and religion are. Second, because all the facts support atheism, and oppose both Communism and religion; both Communism and religion require a delusional mind set. Third, because atheism, being simply disbelief in gods, doesn't call for any action, make any judgements, demand any action; unlike both Communism and religion which do all of those. And fourth, why is it just the Communists, and not other atheist groups ? Answer : Because their actions are all about Communism, and not about atheism.
Irrelevant. I made no such comparison. The point is that neither belief in God or non belief is the determining factor for good or evil deeds. Atheists do good and bad things. Believers do good and bad things.

[mhendo]

I'd like to know if ITR champion is ever going to come back to his own debate.

You started this thread, my friend, and i took the time to read your argument, address some of your claims, and make some arguments of my own. Other people have done the same. Were you ever planning on actually debating the issues you laid out in the OP, or was this really intended as an IMHO-style thread, where you would just dispense your opinion and move on?

[Der Trihs]

I won't even bother with this since we both know you have nothing to back it up with except your ability to type "Is So" over and over again. In other words, "let's ignore the elephant in the living room". Let's ignore the fact that it's always Communism that gets brought up and used to bash atheism, and equated to atheism. If Communism had never existed, what argument would you use to pretend that atheism is just as bad as theism ?

Yawn! Never said anything even remotely like this. My point is that good deeds or evil ones have more nuanced motives that aren't understood by your gross oversimplification and glaringly obvious prejudice against religion. Yes, that's exactly what you were saying. You were making the standard argument for religion that tries to pretend that religion isn't responsible for evil committed in it's name.

Irrelevant. I made no such comparison. The point is that neither belief in God or non belief is the determining factor for good or evil deeds. Atheists do good and bad things. Believers do good and bad things.But believers do more bad things.

[Fantome]

Irrelevant. I made no such comparison. The point is that neither belief in God or non belief is the determining factor for good or evil deeds. Atheists do good and bad things. Believers do good and bad things.
Right. So we don't blame atheism for bad things that atheists have done and we don't blame theism on bad things that theists have done...but it is fair to blame bad things done in the name of religion due to religious hate filled dogma on religion. Atheism has no religion, period. Bad things done in the name of Allah can be blamed on Islam. Bad things done because of dogma in the Bible can be blamed on Christianity. Bad things done because of Communist beliefs can be blamed on the spread of Communism.

[jakesteele]

Which atheists say that ? And for that matter, a religious conflict doesn't need to be involved for religion to either be responsible or contribute to war.

Also, given that it's a textbook it likely isn't reliable. A textbook too critical of religion would be unpublishable in America.


I’m not sure what you mean by, which atheists say that? Atheist conflict doesn’t need to be involved for atheism to be responsible or contribute to war. So saying religion doesn’t need to be involve to be responsible or contribute is the equivalent of saying the same thing about atheism.
Part and parcel to all wars is expansionism and greed. Most wars, whatever the reason, take what they conquer. “To the victor goes the spoils.”

How do you figure it being a textbook makes it reliable? Are you saying the stats are reversed and that they are lying about religion being responsible for only a small portion of the wars? That logic doesn’t follow, that’s just your biased opinion. From what I gather about neoatheists is their premise for attacking religion is that
1. it hinders scientific progress as in stem cell, cloning, etc.
2. religion starts the majority of wars and that if everybody switched to atheism the number of wars would plummet.

If I haven’t got that right please let me know. But do you really think that a totally atheist world would significantly reduce wars?

[Der Trihs]

I’m not sure what you mean by, which atheists say that? You seemed to be saying that atehsits claimed that most wars were religious conflicts.

Atheist conflict doesn’t need to be involved for atheism to be responsible or contribute to war. So saying religion doesn’t need to be involve to be responsible or contribute is the equivalent of saying the same thing about atheism.No, it's not. There's no such thing as "atheist conflict" because by definition there's only one atheist position; that there are no gods. There's no competing dogmas to have conflict over. Atheists can and do disagree of course, but that's not "atheist conflict", that's just an argument between people who happen to be atheist, on subjects other than atheism.

You simply can't realistically treat religion and atheism as equivalent; they are very different. One is a belief system based on faith; the other is the lack of a single belief, no faith required. Trying to blame atheism for people's bad behavior the way religion is responsible for it's followers bad behavior is like talking about about legs on a snake. They have none, just as atheism has no dogma for people to be bad about.

How do you figure it being a textbook makes it reliable? Are you saying the stats are reversed and that they are lying about religion being responsible for only a small portion of the wars? I'm saying that I don't trust them; that textbooks that touch on political or religious subjects tend to be highly censored and distorted. And that even if ALL wars were caused by religion no American textbook would dare admit it.

From what I gather about neoatheists is their premise for attacking religion is that
1. it hinders scientific progress as in stem cell, cloning, etc.
2. religion starts the majority of wars and that if everybody switched to atheism the number of wars would plummet.

If I haven’t got that right please let me know. There's no such thing as "neoatheism". I don't know any atheists who claim that most wars are caused by religion. And yes, religion hinders science, along with any number of other useful things

Speaking as a plain old atheist, no "neo" involved, I consider religion to be baseless, extremely stupid, morally corrosive, and destructive on a wide variety of fronts.

But do you really think that a totally atheist world would significantly reduce wars?Probably. It would remove one cause of war, a major excuse for it, and produce fewer people willing to die. Worldwide atheism would in my opinion increase the general ethical tone of humanity; not because atheism is good, but because religion is evil and crazy.

[The Second Stone]

I'm not a great fan of the whole 'religion is evil because evil things are done in its name' line of thinking, but this sort of tu quoque seems an even worse argument to me. I mean, do you honestly not see a difference between a religion, a belief system directly caused by the faith in the existence of god and subsequent needs to examine his properties, and ideologies (like communism etc.) that have no foundation in atheism at all? I'm not saying they don't promote it, and in some cases even require it, but atheism doesn't lead to communism (or anything, really) the way faith in some higher being leads to religion. Correlation is not causation -- for instance, there are people, including myself, arrive at atheism out of a sort of desire for frugality in one's belief system, i.e. rejecting baseless and incomparable hypotheses about ephemeral realities, in accordance with some sort of baseline Occam's razor, and those people will often tend to gravitate towards a scientific viewpoint in general, because that caters to the same need; this doesn't mean that atheism is a reason for scientific thinking, though. On the other hand, religions are a direct consequence of faith -- faith in something is effectively already a religion in so far as that 'something' is defined by faith. From there, the establishing of that religion is a straight-forward (and necessary, or else the religion will die out) process of 'fleshing out' the object of faith -- detailing god's attributes, writing some mystical narratives, coming up with some rituals etc.
Faith cannot be faith alone, but absence of faith stands on its own.


Well, there's an infinity of moments between now and later, and an infinity of points between here and there (provided no spacetime quantization).


Nobody's denying that religion exists, but that's at best questionable regarding the objects of their faiths (something you'll agree with for the majority of religions if you follow one of them). Infinity has a clear-cut sense in which it has mathematical existence; I have yet to see an equation ending in '= god'. And faith doesn't carry the same weight in making existential statements owing to its absolutely subjective nature: everybody can, basically, rediscover the mathematics of infinity, but not the tenets of (some given) faith; those are absolutely limited to the individual or those he can convince of them.

I'm not suggesting atheism causes communism, but communism is atheistic and uses atheism to justify the oppression of people and their beliefs. It is the exact argument used against religion in this thread. I respect that you disagree.

No, there are not an infinity of moments between now and later. It is finite, limited by the Planck time. Infinity is just a concept.

You don't accept that God is as valid a concept as infinity. I get that. Religious people who don't do math would reverse your order, they find many useful things in their lives to do with religion, but none to do with infinity. Do you deny the validity of their enjoyment of their religion? I gather so.

[The Second Stone]

No, it's pointing out that you are falsely conflating atheism and Communism.

No, I am not, you are not reading carefully enough. You are the one calling Communism a religion, and it is not.

What makes Communism a religion, or a close cousin is that it's a false worldview based on faith. Being a worldview, being based on faith, and being false ( which effectively goes with being based on faith ) are pretty much what defines something as a religion.

Communism is normally classed by scholars as a political and economic philosophy. You have avoided this argument by asserting that it is a religion. It is not. Nor is Communism false in the sense that bigots call other religions false religions. Communism is a political and economic theory and exists as such. It is a failure when put into practice, but that is something that Marx recognized in his own lifetime.

And I never said that all of politics or economics is a religion, that's a strawman argument.

That is the logical conclusion of your previous statement that ignores that you have erroneously characterized Communism as a religion, which you repeat. You cannot make Communism into a religion and take away its political and economic character by a waive of your hand. It isn't a religion.

Communism supports atheism for the same reason it opposes all labor unions not controlled by the Communist party; it doesn't like competition. ...

No, you obviously have not read Marx.
Austin Cline (an atheist) writes: http://atheism.about.com/b/2006/03/13/karl-marx-religion-2.htm
According to Marx, religion is an expression of material realities and economic injustice. Thus, problems in religion are ultimately problems in society. Religion is not the disease, but merely a symptom. It is used by oppressors to make people feel better about the distress they experience due to being poor and exploited. This is the origin of his comment that religion is the “opium of the masses” - but as shall see, his thoughts are much more complex than commonly portrayed.

To the extent that communism in actual practice benefited from removing competition, you are correct, but only to that extent.

...And Christianity is most certainly NOT opposed to "war, greed, oppression, etc".

Where did Jesus or Paul say they were not opposed to war, greed or oppression? Your statement misrepresents by 180 degrees the theology you oppose. This statement suggests that you have no idea what Christian doctrine actually is, and your failure to look it up after so many months of railing against it suggests that you don't care what it really is, and are not arguing against it in good faith.



Nonsense. Christianity has a long tradition of supporting and excusing greed & capitalism ( once capitalism showed up to be supported ). And Christianity's "Dictatorial element" is still going strong; it's just that Christianity has become too weak and divided to impose the kind of tyranny it used to.

There are no parts of the New Testament to support this. The New Testament is in fact contrary. Your issue seems to be with so-called Christians who have misused a clear message of pacifism, charity and sharing for the opposite ends. This is like saying that all atheists are like Stalin and Mao and wrong for the same reasons.

Yes, anti-Semitism has taken a beating for the last 60 years - AFTER the fall of the Nazis who you are trying to claim weren't acting like Christians. And the fight against homophobia, much like the fight against anti-semitism is largely a fight against Christianity and other religions.

If you can't tell the difference between Adolph Eichmann and Deitrich Bonhoeffer you need to look harder. Christians are not equal to Nazis anymore than atheists are equal to Communists. I would suggest not just an open library, but the opening of a closed mind.

:rolleyes: Oh, please. The Pope supported fascism leading up until WWII, and the Catholic Church helped Nazi war criminals escape to safety.

Beg all you want, but this is a misinterpretation of history. The Catholic Church never had a policy of helping war criminals escape. To the extent that individuals who were Catholic may have done so, I am unaware of any named person who did such a thing, nor of any charges brought against anyone of obstruction of justice for doing so. You state that the whole institution did so and did so based in doctrine without any evidence of any of it.

They supported the holocaust, they supported and in fact created the beliefs that led to it. And Christians have been killing Jews for centuries in pogroms; pretending that it's some Nazi aberration is ridiculous.

Again you assert and libel all Christians for supporting the Holocaust. This is the same as saying all atheists supported the purges and gulags. It is not based in reality, but in hateful fantasy.

Except that Communism is in no way representative of atheism. But then that's why you need to slander atheism by trying to smear it with the crimes of Communism; you don't HAVE non-Communist mass murders and tyranny committed in the name of atheism to point at. So you will continue to pretend the two are the same.

As opposed to religion, where mass murder and tyranny in it's name are not at all restricted to one group.

Nonsense. Christianity, for example is in the position it is today because of it's propensity towards mass murder and tyranny. People commit acts of evil and stupidity all the time because their religion demands it, not just using it as an excuse.

You misunderstand me. I have no desire to slander atheism. I respect atheism. I am merely pointing out that your arguments against Christians have the same flaws as one could use against atheists if you do not distinguish that the things done to advance the philosophy of each from the people that don't do those things and from the underlying principles. You wish to weigh me down with having supported the Holocaust (I wasn't born yet) and pogroms, yet excuse yourself from the gulag. Both are nonsensical. Religions, or lack of them, commit no acts.

People commit acts. Writing is committing an act. Casting blame for the Holocaust on Christianity and all Christians is an act done by a real person. An act done by a real person who does not accept that the large and vast majority of Christians in the last century despised Naziism and the Holocaust, that churches and doctrines did not approve of, call for or participate such acts. You, in this argument, have committed a great injustice on Christians. And I imagine that you are proud of it.

[The Second Stone]

Bullshit. Just because Hitler was deceptive and hiding behind Christianity does not make Christians Nazis, nor any Nazis Christians. Nothing in Christian doctrine called for the Holocaust or Naziism in any way.

[cosmosdan]

In other words, "let's ignore the elephant in the living room". Let's ignore the fact that it's always Communism that gets brought up and used to bash atheism, and equated to atheism. If Communism had never existed, what argument would you use to pretend that atheism is just as bad as theism ? I'm not pretending anything. I'm shooting for accurate language and means of comparision. You're playing word games to make your bias seem factual, It ain't workin'
If atheism is unfairly judged by looking at Communism then theism must be unfairly judged by looking at religion. As you said yourself., atheism is not a belief system. Neither is theism in and of itself. A particular religion with a specific doctrine is a belief system with theism as an integral part. Communism is a belief system with atheism as an integral part. Let's use the same scales to weigh things shall we? I know that doesn't help support your prejudice but give it a shot anyway.
Yes, that's exactly what you were saying. You were making the standard argument for religion that tries to pretend that religion isn't responsible for evil committed in it's name.
Not even close. I'm sorry that either your lack of reading comprehension your own prejudice, or keep you from seeing the point I'm making. I believe individuals and the groups that shelter or encourage them should take responsibility for their choices. I really don't give a crap whether they are religious or not. I also happen to think your argument is a load, so I'm saying so.
But believers do more bad things. Well since believers make up , what, 90% of the worlds population, that's an obvious and not to startling statistic. If we're talking a per capita type argument I'm fairly sure you have no idea and are just making things up as usual.

I won't bother asking you to back that up because I know from experience that you won't. I'll just assume you typed "Do so" 40 or 50 times to save the bandwidth.

[Fantome]

If atheism is unfairly judged by looking at Communism then theism must be unfairly judged by looking at religion.
That's right. But it's not unfair to judge a religion based on the tenets of that religion. Atheism has no tenets or dogma to judge it on.


Communism is a belief system with atheism as an integral part.
No, Communism works just fine without atheism:
Communism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general.[1][2][3] Karl Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human society, which would be achieved through a proletarian revolution. "Pure communism" in the Marxian sense refers to a classless, stateless and oppression-free society where decisions on what to produce and what policies to pursue are made democratically, allowing every member of society to participate in the decision-making process in both the political and economic spheres of life.

As a political ideology, communism is usually considered to be a branch of socialism; a broad group of economic and political philosophies that draw on the various political and intellectual movements with origins in the work of theorists of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution.[4] Communism attempts to offer an alternative to the problems with the capitalist market economy and the legacy of imperialism and nationalism. Marx states that the only way to solve these problems is for the working class (proletariat), who according to Marx are the main producers of wealth in society and are exploited by the Capitalist-class (bourgeoisie), to replace the bourgeoisie as the ruling class in order to establish a free society, without class or racial divisions.[2] The dominant forms of communism, such as Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism and Trotskyism are based on Marxism, but non-Marxist versions of communism (such as Christian communism and anarcho-communism) also exist.

Karl Marx never provided a detailed description as to how communism would function as an economic system, but it is understood that a communist economy would consist of common ownership of the means of production, culminating in the negation of the concept of private ownership. Unlike socialism, which is compatible with a market economy, a communist economy consists of local or communal democratic planning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism

Christianity working without theism? Nope.
Christianity (from the word Xριστός "Christ") is a monotheistic religion[1] centered on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in the New Testament.[2]

Adherents of Christianity, known as Christians,[3] believe that Jesus is the only begotten[4][5] Son of God and the Messiah (Christ) prophesied in the Hebrew Bible (the part of scripture common to Christianity and Judaism). Christian theology claims that Jesus Christ is a teacher, the model of a virtuous life, the revealer of God, as well as an incarnation of God, and most importantly the savior of humanity who suffered, died, and was resurrected to bring about salvation from sin.[6] Christians maintain that Jesus ascended into heaven, and most denominations teach that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead, granting everlasting life to his followers. Christians call the message of Jesus Christ the Gospel ("good news") and hence label the earliest written accounts of his ministry as gospels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity

[cosmosdan]

Right. So we don't blame atheism for bad things that atheists have done and we don't blame theism on bad things that theists have done...but it is fair to blame bad things done in the name of religion due to religious hate filled dogma on religion. Atheism has no religion, period. Bad things done in the name of Allah can be blamed on Islam. Bad things done because of dogma in the Bible can be blamed on Christianity. Bad things done because of Communist beliefs can be blamed on the spread of Communism.

As I said in my response to DT, let's keep the comparisons reasonably fair. If someone who doesn't even believe in God uses religious language to justify his deeds or to manipulate others, is religion to blame? That's akin to blaming the gun for the killing rather than the person who pulled the trigger.
I'd agree that a strict dogma whether religious or not can bring negative results. Whenever people start thinking and teaching, people who are good and right think this way and people who are evil and wrong think differently, and then use that difference to persecute others, we have a problem. That principle certainly applies to religion but it also applies to Communism or over zealous nationalism. IMHO that means it's not religion or theism that's the . It's any dogmatic narrow way of thinking. It's a form of prejudice and bigotry not dissimilar from racial prejudice. In racial prejudice we draw lines of skin color and culture, on what is good bad, superior or inferior. With a dogmatic mind set it's a belief system, whether religious or political or economic, that generates separation and animosity. That's not even considering other factors like the desire for power.

ftr, Allah is the Arabic word for God and no, people using that to justify their hatred or for their political agenda don't get to blame that on Islam. Also, there is no dogma in the Bible.

[cosmosdan]

That's right. But it's not unfair to judge a religion based on the tenets of that religion. Atheism has no tenets or dogma to judge it on.
I agree. I think belief systems should be examined and openly criticized when they impact the lives of others. I also expect that to require some effort on the part of those that want to criticize, to keep their criticism accurate and reasonable. Seem fair?

[QUOTE]
No, Communism works just fine without atheism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
Since I strive for accuracy of language and detail I appreciate the correction. We are , however, talking about historical communism not the ideal. If communism works fine even with theism then we're left with the problem of explaining the atheistic view and persecution of religion under historical communism. Again we're back to dogma. If a religion justifies persecuting those that believe differently with a "better world" mindset it doesn't seem better of much different to me than those who would persecute religion because they think atheism makes a better world.

Christianity working without theism? Nope.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity Granted, and ?

[cosmosdan]

I'd like to know if ITR champion is ever going to come back to his own debate.

You started this thread, my friend, and i took the time to read your argument, address some of your claims, and make some arguments of my own. Other people have done the same. Were you ever planning on actually debating the issues you laid out in the OP, or was this really intended as an IMHO-style thread, where you would just dispense your opinion and move on?

I think he realized early on that his argument was crap and decided avoiding it was better than trying to defend it. Not much better,......is it?

[Mapache]

Bullshit. Just because Hitler was deceptive and hiding behind Christianity does not make Christians Nazis, nor any Nazis Christians. Nothing in Christian doctrine called for the Holocaust or Naziism in any way.

Bullshit yourself. Xians are fond of a sort of reverse No True Scotsman fallacy, which goes something like this:

No true Xian could possibly be a Nazi.
There are a lot of photos (http://www.nobeliefs.com/nazis.htm) that seem to show Xian Nazis. They wear priest suits, have big crosses around their necks, and are described as being Archbishops, Cardinals, priests and so forth, so they must be real Xians.

Therefore, just because they give Nazi salutes, march in Nazi parades, are photographed grinning at Uncle Adolph in what seems to be enthusiasm, celebrate Nazi weddings, give Nazi speeches, order every church in Germany to celebrate masses of thanksgiving for UA's miraculous escape from asssasination, and so on, they aren't really Nazis. We know this because no Xian could be a Nazi.

And Xian doctrine, I think, is mostly based on the Bible, which describes acts very similar to the Holocaust, only directly ordered by YHWH and presented as the acts of an omnibenevolent, loving god. And Jesus claimed to have been around watching it all ("Before Abraham was, I am.") ("I and the father are one") so apparently he thought that all that "leave nothing alive that breathes" stuff was just fine.

Just how is slaughtering some twenty one million (at least- the Exodus myth claims that 600,000 "men who carried the sword" left Egypt, which would imply at least three million Hebrews, and Deuteronomy 7:1 commands them to murder all of the men, women and children in "seven nations greater and mightier than thou") to steal their land and posess their resources, any different than Hitler´s war for Lebensraum?

[Fantome]

As I said in my response to DT, let's keep the comparisons reasonably fair. If someone who doesn't even believe in God uses religious language to justify his deeds or to manipulate others, is religion to blame?
If the person is the follower of a non-theistic religion, then yes.


That's akin to blaming the gun for the killing rather than the person who pulled the trigger.
If there was a religion where killing innocents with guns was a main tenet, then we can easily agree that less people spreading that religion to their children is a good hing. Whether we can blame ideologies in the same way that we can blame people is irrelevant.


I'd agree that a strict dogma whether religious or not can bring negative results. Whenever people start thinking and teaching, people who are good and right think this way and people who are evil and wrong think differently, and then use that difference to persecute others, we have a problem. That principle certainly applies to religion but it also applies to Communism or over zealous nationalism. IMHO that means it's not religion or theism that's the .
Of course it is. If people are spreading a harmful religion to children as being good then that religion is a problem.


ftr, Allah is the Arabic word for God
I'm aware.

and no, people using that to justify their hatred or for their political agenda don't get to blame that on Islam.Again, it doesn't matter if "blame" is the appropriate word. If hatred is being espoused by the Quran and Hadith, then yes, we can logically claim that Islam is not a good thing.

Also, there is no dogma in the Bible.
Huh?
1. a system of principles or tenets, as of a church.
2. a specific tenet or doctrine authoritatively laid down, as by a church: the dogma of the Assumption.
3. prescribed doctrine: political dogma.
4. a settled or established opinion, belief, or principle.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dogma
You going by a definition of dogma I'm not familiar with?

[Fantome]

I agree. I think belief systems should be examined and openly criticized when they impact the lives of others. I also expect that to require some effort on the part of those that want to criticize, to keep their criticism accurate and reasonable. Seem fair?
Of course; I believe I've been fair.


Since I strive for accuracy of language and detail I appreciate the correction. We are , however, talking about historical communism not the ideal. If communism works fine even with theism then we're left with the problem of explaining the atheistic view and persecution of religion under historical communism.
There is no atheistic view, especially regarding persecution. Remember what seemed fair to you above? Practice what you preach.


Again we're back to dogma. If a religion justifies persecuting those that believe differently with a "better world" mindset it doesn't seem better of much different to me than those who would persecute religion because they think atheism makes a better world.
Religion frequently persecutes those not because a reason has been concluded, but because "God says so." Atheism spreads no tenets of persecution and atheism did not beget Communism. What's your definition of dogma, anyway?


Granted, and ?
What didn't you get? You said that atheism as an integral part of Communism and "If atheism is unfairly judged by looking at Communism then theism must be unfairly judged by looking at religion."
Communism requires zero atheism and there have been plenty of theistic Communists. Religion by definition does require theism so your "shooting for accurate language and means of comparision" missed the mark.

[mhendo]

I think he realized early on that his argument was crap and decided avoiding it was better than trying to defend it. Not much better,......is it?I'm sure you're right. It this were MPSIMS, or IMHO, or even the Pit, i wouldn't care very much. I don't have a problem if people want to use those forums to just give an opinion and be done with it, or blow off a little stream.

But i've always felt that Great Debates required a higher standard, and that if you're invested enough in a topic to start a thread here, you have some responsibility to join in the ensuing debate, or at very least to offer some responses when people make direct rebuttals of your central argument.

I'm not talking about making it a rule or anything; it just seems to me to be a matter of decent etiquette.

[jakesteele]

You seemed to be saying that atehsits claimed that most wars were religious conflicts.

No, it's not. There's no such thing as "atheist conflict" because by definition there's only one atheist position; that there are no gods. There's no competing dogmas to have conflict over. Atheists can and do disagree of course, but that's not "atheist conflict", that's just an argument between people who happen to be atheist, on subjects other than atheism.

You simply can't realistically treat religion and atheism as equivalent; they are very different. One is a belief system based on faith; the other is the lack of a single belief, no faith required. Trying to blame atheism for people's bad behavior the way religion is responsible for it's followers bad behavior is like talking about about legs on a snake. They have none, just as atheism has no dogma for people to be bad about.

I'm saying that I don't trust them; that textbooks that touch on political or religious subjects tend to be highly censored and distorted. And that even if ALL wars were caused by religion no American textbook would dare admit it.

There's no such thing as "neoatheism". I don't know any atheists who claim that most wars are caused by religion. And yes, religion hinders science, along with any number of other useful things

Speaking as a plain old atheist, no "neo" involved, I consider religion to be baseless, extremely stupid, morally corrosive, and destructive on a wide variety of fronts.

Probably. It would remove one cause of war, a major excuse for it, and produce fewer people willing to die. Worldwide atheism would in my opinion increase the general ethical tone of humanity; not because atheism is good, but because religion is evil and crazy.


Neoatheist is the equivalent of Neoconservative or Neoliberal as opposed to paleoatheists, paleoconservatives, paleoliberals. It’s the same thing as a person that modifies a car. It’s still the same car, but with a different look.

A classical example of neoatheism, which is strident, vocal and polemic towards religion is this, your statement:

“Worldwide atheism would in my opinion increase the general ethical tone of humanity; not because atheism is good, but because religion is evil and crazy.”

That is scary, irrational shit. Me thinks I’m getting a sulfurous whiff of fundamentalism.

Look out! Helter Skelter!!!!

Just out of curiosity, if religion is so bad and atheism is so good, could you give me your vision of a world of nothing but atheism. Would crime rates plummet? Would war end? Would all the Wall Street bullshit that’s going on never happen? Would almost all people never lie, cheat or steal? Would nobody ever commit adultery again? Would all interpersonal conflicts be resolved by civil discourse and then go out for beers?

Seriously, I want to know what’s inside the head of the average neoatheist.

[Half Man Half Wit]

I'm not suggesting atheism causes communism, but communism is atheistic and uses atheism to justify the oppression of people and their beliefs.
No; the argument is that faith leads to religions, and that those haven't always played nice with each other. If atheism doesn't similarly lead to communism or whatever have you, the analogy simply fails.

No, there are not an infinity of moments between now and later. It is finite, limited by the Planck time. Infinity is just a concept.
Well, prove that and you've got a Nobel waiting for you. Right now, all our calculations (using differential equations) assume continually changing variables, which means non-quantized spacetime, which means the distance between two moments may be arbitrarily small, which means infinitely many of them in a given interval.

You don't accept that God is as valid a concept as infinity. I get that. Religious people who don't do math would reverse your order, they find many useful things in their lives to do with religion, but none to do with infinity. Do you deny the validity of their enjoyment of their religion? I gather so.
I'm not denying the validity of their enjoyment, I'm merely pointing out that just such enjoyment doesn't imply anything about god. Similarly, a person on drugs may find great enjoyment in conversing with two metres tall pink bunny rabbits, but that doesn't imply anything about the existence of two metres tall pink bunny rabbits (I don't want to draw up a parallel between religion and drug usage, btw, my argument is simply about the subjectivity of the experience). Infinity is not similarly subjective as a concept, whether or not you do math; indeed, mathematical expressions involving infinity would be just as valid if noone ever wrote them down, but if nobody had ever written down the stories about Jesus, his works would be unrecoverably lost today. That's the difference between infinity and god; it's not merely one of opinion. Again, the comparison is not apt.

If someone who doesn't even believe in God uses religious language to justify his deeds or to manipulate others, is religion to blame?
Well, could he appeal to god if there was no religion? That's pretty much the problem I've pointed out earlier: if everyone involved in this religion thing is all about love, peace, and harmony, there's no problem; but one rotten apple can spoil the whole crop, making use of the mechanisms religion imbues him with. Do you think Jim Jones could have gotten more than 900 people to kill themselves if he hadn't bound them to himself using at least a pseudoreligious structure? You only need the public to believe in god, and somebody the public believes to relay to them god's will, and that somebody has an incredibly powerful tool for mass control on his hands; who's gonna stand up against the will of an all-powerful being, after all? Such a thing simply doesn't follow from atheism.

[Der Trihs]

Neoatheist is the equivalent of Neoconservative or Neoliberal as opposed to paleoatheists, paleoconservatives, paleoliberals. It’s the same thing as a person that modifies a car. It’s still the same car, but with a different look.

A classical example of neoatheism, which is strident, vocal and polemic towards religion is this, your statement:

“Worldwide atheism would in my opinion increase the general ethical tone of humanity; not because atheism is good, but because religion is evil and crazy.”So basically, your "neoatheism" is nothing more than a conversational tone. You are trying to make me, personally into some sort of movement.

That is scary, irrational shit. Me thinks I’m getting a sulfurous whiff of fundamentalism.

Look out! Helter Skelter!!!! Ah yes; first I get compared to mass murdering tyrants, and now a murderous cult. Perhaps you will accuse me of being a child molestor to round things out.

Just out of curiosity, if religion is so bad and atheism is so good, could you give me your vision of a world of nothing but atheism. Would crime rates plummet? Would war end? Would all the Wall Street bullshit that’s going on never happen? Would almost all people never lie, cheat or steal? Would nobody ever commit adultery again? Would all interpersonal conflicts be resolved by civil discourse and then go out for beers?

Seriously, I want to know what’s inside the head of the average neoatheist.First, again, there's no such thing as a "neoatheist". Second, I'm not representing anyone but myself, much less the average of a nonexistent group. And third, I specifically said that atheism isn't good, in the very passage you quoted.

It's not a matter of atheism making anything better; it's a matter of removing something that is inflicting immense harm. Religion.

[cosmosdan]

If the person is the follower of a non-theistic religion, then yes.
Then we disagree on that.


If there was a religion where killing innocents with guns was a main tenet, then we can easily agree that less people spreading that religion to their children is a good hing. Whether we can blame ideologies in the same way that we can blame people is irrelevant. Since it seems a ideology is being blamed I think it is relevant. People use many things to justify their actions Religion is one of several vehicles people use for both good and bad.



Of course it is. If people are spreading a harmful religion to children as being good then that religion is a problem. Who gets to declare it harmful? Which version of the religion? Christianity is a religion but it comes in a lot of versions. Some are very dogmatic some are not. Some parents teach their kids to think for themselves while some lay down very rigid rules for right and wrong.





Again, it doesn't matter if "blame" is the appropriate word. If hatred is being espoused by the Quran and Hadith, then yes, we can logically claim that Islam is not a good thing. Any so called Holy book is subject to interpretation. To some Muslims jihad is the inner war of spiritual growth. To some it is the war against the great devil America and the Zionists. So no, you can't logically claim Islam is not a good thing.


Huh?

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dogma
You going by a definition of dogma I'm not familiar with?
Nope same one. Since the Bible and other Holy books are subject to interpretations and those interpretations can vary widely, the dogma is not in them. It's in those who do the interpreting.

[cosmosdan]

Of course; I believe I've been fair.
But as we tell our religious friends. Belief does not make it true ;)

There is no atheistic view, especially regarding persecution. Remember what seemed fair to you above? Practice what you preach.
Stop shifting the goalposts. You posted a technical definition of Communism which may not apply to the actual historical event that was being discussed. Within that historical context there clearly was an atheistic view that led to persecution regardless of the technical definitions of atheism and communism.

Religion frequently persecutes those not because a reason has been concluded, but because "God says so." Atheism spreads no tenets of persecution and atheism did not beget Communism. What's your definition of dogma, anyway? Again, comparing religion and atheism is an unfair comparison.
My definition of dogma is just as you posted. I don't think I'm the one who doesn't understand it. I'm pointing out that the rigid dogmatic mind set that seems to be the problem can exist equally well with either theism or atheism as a tenet.



What didn't you get? You said that atheism as an integral part of Communism and "If atheism is unfairly judged by looking at Communism then theism must be unfairly judged by looking at religion."
Communism requires zero atheism and there have been plenty of theistic Communists. Religion by definition does require theism so your "shooting for accurate language and means of comparision" missed the mark.
Great, except we're talking about a particular historical event rather than technical definitions so what I don't get is how this is relevant to the discussion and what point you're trying to make with this information.
Okay, atheism isn't an integral art of Communism in all scenario's. That's interesting. Thanks for pointing that out. Was it in the historical context that we are talking about?

By the way, religion does not require theism. Just to be accurate. ;)

Buddhism (http://website.lineone.net/~ashvajit/Buddhism%20a%20non-theistic%20religion.htm)

[cosmosdan]

Well, could he appeal to god if there was no religion? That's pretty much the problem I've pointed out earlier: if everyone involved in this religion thing is all about love, peace, and harmony, there's no problem; but one rotten apple can spoil the whole crop, making use of the mechanisms religion imbues him with. Do you think Jim Jones could have gotten more than 900 people to kill themselves if he hadn't bound them to himself using at least a pseudoreligious structure? You only need the public to believe in god, and somebody the public believes to relay to them god's will, and that somebody has an incredibly powerful tool for mass control on his hands; who's gonna stand up against the will of an all-powerful being, after all? Such a thing simply doesn't follow from atheism.

So we couldn't have a charismatic leader who believed atheism was good and religion was bad and persecuted religion and actually killed people and leveled churches? That kind of thing couldn't happen. Right?

[cosmosdan]

No; the argument is that faith leads to religions, and that those haven't always played nice with each other. If atheism doesn't similarly lead to communism or whatever have you, the analogy simply fails.



Yes but faith clearly doesn't have to lead to dogmatic religion and persecution of others. The analogy doesn't have to match in every respect to be valid. The point is that theism or atheism by themselves do not lead to good or bad choices and actions.

[Half Man Half Wit]

Great, except we're talking about a particular historical event rather than technical definitions so what I don't get is how this is relevant to the discussion and what point you're trying to make with this information.
Okay, atheism isn't an integral art of Communism in all scenario's. That's interesting. Thanks for pointing that out. Was it in the historical context that we are talking about?
It seems harder to grok than I thought. I'll try once more: theism, faith, what have you, leads to religion. It's the cause of religion. Atheism, disbelief, however you want to call it, doesn't lead to communism. It doesn't cause communism. It doesn't cause, in fact, anything. If you agree with this, how is it fair to label atrocities committed in the name of communism atheistic? Even though the two are correlated, there is no causative link. There is between atrocities done in the name of religion and faith, because without faith, religion wouldn't exist, quite plainly.
And if you disagree, then you'd have to show how you arrive at communism from disbelief in the existence of god.

[tagos]

So we couldn't have a charismatic leader who believed atheism was good and religion was bad and persecuted religion and actually killed people and leveled churches? That kind of thing couldn't happen. Right?

I doubt you can point to any political leader of any significance whose followers were motivated by their atheism and were atheists who carried out such a thing. Ruling out Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao and Hitler. Although no doubt you think you have some sort of gotcha here to weigh against the two millenia of Christian and Islam crimes. Which include Hitler and his good Catholic and Protestant Germans bringing the Christian demonisation of Jews to a head.

[Half Man Half Wit]

So we couldn't have a charismatic leader who believed atheism was good and religion was bad and persecuted religion and actually killed people and leveled churches? That kind of thing couldn't happen. Right?
Yes, of course! That person could then simply take the reigns of the established atheistic power structures... oh wait. Atheism doesn't have people that proclaim themselves the infallible arbiters of atheistic truth! Funny that.

Yes but faith clearly doesn't have to lead to dogmatic religion and persecution of others. The analogy doesn't have to match in every respect to be valid.
It does, however, have to match in the one crucial point it is trying to establish: that there is a similar causative link between atheism and atrocities committed in the name of communism, and theism and atrocities committed in the name of religion. Which it doesn't. Atheism is incidental to communism. Faith is required for religion.

Faith leads to religion. Atheism leads to nothing. Faith is therefore responsible for actions committed in the name of religion, because without it, there would be no religion. Atheism isn't the reason for communist atrocities because it isn't the reason for communism.

[Half Man Half Wit]

In fact, consider the following scenario: the population of Country A is devoutly religious, and their head of state is also their religious Head Honcho. What he says is not merely mortal, but divine law. Transgressions against the Head Honcho's words are transgressions against the almighty himself. Naturally, this can be used to keep the public in line and have them do as they're told very easily, seeing how there's an eternity of hellfire waiting for everybody showing the slightest signs of rebellion. If Head Honcho says somebody is the enemy, he is The Enemy because god said so! And if Head Honcho says the enemy should be killed, then by god, the enemy will be killed.

Now, let's have a look at Country B. They don't do religion, simply, and their head of state is just that, a political leader. What atheistic measures does he have to keep the public in line? Do what you're told or else, nothing's gonna happen to you? Sure, he could resort to military or political means, and he probably has other oppressive means at his disposal, but those aren't in any way atheistic in nature. His power doesn't derive from atheism the way Country A's Head Honcho's power derives from religion. It can't, in fact. That's the difference. And it's a big one.

[cosmosdan]

It seems harder to grok than I thought. I'll try once more: theism, faith, what have you, leads to religion. It's the cause of religion. Atheism, disbelief, however you want to call it, doesn't lead to communism. It doesn't cause communism. It doesn't cause, in fact, anything. If you agree with this, how is it fair to label atrocities committed in the name of communism atheistic? Even though the two are correlated, there is no causative link. There is between atrocities done in the name of religion and faith, because without faith, religion wouldn't exist, quite plainly.
And if you disagree, then you'd have to show how you arrive at communism from disbelief in the existence of god.

I grok fine. You're missing my point. I am not labeling those atrocities atheistic. I'm pointing out that both atheists and theists are capable of such atrocities so it seems that belief of non belief is not the culprit for atrocities.

Theism is not the cause of religion. Even if I thought it was I'd find your leap from theism to religious atrocities unreasonable.

[Half Man Half Wit]

I grok fine. You're missing my point. I am not labeling those atrocities atheistic. I'm pointing out that both atheists and theists are capable of such atrocities so it seems that belief of non belief is not the culprit for atrocities.
That's rather trivial, and I don't think anybody would oppose that point. Of course, both atheists and theists can be dicks. It's also not what's being discussed here, or why I consider the communism comparison to be a bad one. The point as it was raised originally in this thread was:
Atheism, like theism, is most properly understood as a class of many different belief systems (communism, nihilism, existentialism, ect) that are all held together the common thread that they all deny the existence of God.
or perhaps there was an earlier variant of this. This is what I opposed, not that both atheists and theists are capable of fucking shit up; if the latter was your only point all along, I apologize for attacking you.

Theism is not the cause of religion. Even if I thought it was I'd find your leap from theism to religious atrocities unreasonable.
Faith, however, is the cause of religion; theism then is merely the cause of theistic religions, though how theistic and non-theistic religions actually differ, epistemologically, isn't all that clear to me -- you could well call a belief in and worship of fairies non-theistic, but you could also equate them with the gods of that particular religion; same for all similar metaphysical entities.

But, leaving causes aside for a minute, once there is an established system of religious power, it is possible to abuse it, as I tried to show with my example above. Similar doesn't work for atheism.

That's all I've been saying all along -- that while religion isn't necessarily 'the root of all evil', its structures form a ready (and often also willing, owing to human nature) conduit for it. It's like your example with the gun: no, the gun isn't responsible for killing a person; it's the person pulling the trigger. Nevertheless, you can't shoot people if there are no guns. Atheism has no comparable structures, and at least I can't see how one would form them.

[Half Man Half Wit]

Got locked out of the edit window:

That's all I've been saying all along -- that while religion isn't necessarily 'the root of all evil', its structures form a ready (and often also willing, owing to human nature) conduit for it. It's like your example with the gun: no, the gun isn't responsible for killing a person; it's the person pulling the trigger. Nevertheless, you can't shoot people if there are no guns.
The analogy would be that just because you still can strangle persons if you don't have a gun, non-existing guns are to blame for stranglings the same way guns are to blame for shootings. But there isn't anything there that can share some of the blame besides the murderer himself; in the case of a shooting, it's the gun that made it possible in the first place. Non-guns don't make stranglings possible.

[Fantome]

Since it seems a ideology is being blamed I think it is relevant. People use many things to justify their actions Religion is one of several vehicles people use for both good and bad.
Are you saying when people justify their evil actions on religion, it's always just a scapegoat and they would have carried out their actions if they weren't indoctrinated into their religion that preaches these actions as good things?

Who gets to declare it harmful?
I do. You do. We all do. Are we not to judge?


Which version of the religion?
The ones spreading hate and those that have a a holy book describing a hateful, vindictive, evil god.


Christianity is a religion but it comes in a lot of versions. Some are very dogmatic some are not.
I don't know any that aren't dogmatic.


Some parents teach their kids to think for themselves while some lay down very rigid rules for right and wrong.
What's your point?


Any so called Holy book is subject to interpretation. To some Muslims jihad is the inner war of spiritual growth. To some it is the war against the great devil America and the Zionists. So no, you can't logically claim Islam is not a good thing.
Yes, I can. It's holy books are evil and a few interpretations softening a few of the messages don't change all of the evil it contains. I've yet to find a Muslim that has interpreted any of the passages that unbelievers are fools and their reward will be in Hell any other way but the obvious.



Nope same one. Since the Bible and other Holy books are subject to interpretations and those interpretations can vary widely, the dogma is not in them. It's in those who do the interpreting.
That's some rationalization you've accomplished there. If a book can be interpreted differently by different people then it contains no dogma? By that rationale, there's no such thing as dogma.



But as we tell our religious friends. Belief does not make it true ;)
Then show me where my criticism haven't been accurate and reasonable.

Stop shifting the goalposts. You posted a technical definition of Communism which may not apply to the actual historical event that was being discussed. Within that historical context there clearly was an atheistic view that led to persecution regardless of the technical definitions of atheism and communism.
Shifting the goalposts? I'm confused as to what goal you're talking about. Atheism does not lead to Communism. Theism and irrational thought that goes with it almost always leads to evil religions.

Again, comparing religion and atheism is an unfair comparison.
That's what I and others have been saying all along. Atheism is just being without belief in God/gods and it's usually because of critical thinking and not accepting fantastic claims without evidence.


My definition of dogma is just as you posted. I don't think I'm the one who doesn't understand it. I'm pointing out that the rigid dogmatic mind set that seems to be the problem can exist equally well with either theism or atheism as a tenet.
No. Atheism has no tenets. Religions do, and many of them are evil and harmful to the rest of us. Whether or not an evil group can adopt atheism as a "tenet" is not relevant unless atheism is the cause of an evil ideology coming into existence. Communism did not come into existence because of atheism and atheism does not cause other evil ideologies to come into existence. Theism does as does the irrationality that goes along with it.



Great, except we're talking about a particular historical event rather than technical definitions so what I don't get is how this is relevant to the discussion and what point you're trying to make with this information.
I told you already. My point was that you said that atheism as an integral part of Communism and "If atheism is unfairly judged by looking at Communism then theism must be unfairly judged by looking at religion."
Communism requires zero atheism and there have been plenty of theistic Communists. Religion by definition does require theism so your "shooting for accurate language and means of comparision" missed the mark.



Okay, atheism isn't an integral art of Communism in all scenario's. That's interesting. Thanks for pointing that out. Was it in the historical context that we are talking about?
No. The historical context that's important is that Communism doesn't naturally follow atheism and atheism does not and has not caused people to become Communists.

By the way, religion does not require theism. Just to be accurate. ;)

Buddhism (http://website.lineone.net/~ashvajit/Buddhism%20a%20non-theistic%20religion.htm)
Semantics. Most of us define religion the way that the first hit on dictionary.com does. It would make sense that some Buddhists would like to label it as a religion though because of the special protection and government perks (in most Western countries) that go with it. It would be nice if I could get the government to buy into my weekly poker game being sacred.

[cosmosdan]

I doubt you can point to any political leader of any significance whose followers were motivated by their atheism and were atheists who carried out such a thing. Ruling out Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao and Hitler. Although no doubt you think you have some sort of gotcha here to weigh against the two millenia of Christian and Islam crimes. Which include Hitler and his good Catholic and Protestant Germans bringing the Christian demonisation of Jews to a head.

I was thinking of Stalin's persecution of the church. from Wikki

"Stalin's role in the fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church is complex. Continuous persecution in the 1930s resulted in its near-extinction: by 1939, active parishes numbered in the low hundreds (down from 54,000 in 1917), many churches had been leveled, and tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns were persecuted and killed. Over 100,000 were shot during the purges of 1937–1938"

I think that qualifies per my response about a charismatic leader.

[cosmosdan]

That's rather trivial, and I don't think anybody would oppose that point. Of course, both atheists and theists can be dicks. It's also not what's being discussed here, or why I consider the communism comparison to be a bad one. The point as it was raised originally in this thread was:

or perhaps there was an earlier variant of this. This is what I opposed, not that both atheists and theists are capable of fucking shit up; if the latter was your only point all along, I apologize for attacking you. I get it. I think we were talking past each other on different tangents. NP
My point is this, I believe whatever mechanism it is inside people that allows them to committ such moral crimes is seperate from belief or non belief. It seems IMO to be linked to the dogmatic, "My way is the only correct way" kind of thinking. certainly that exists within religion but we also see a lot of religion that isn't that way. We also see examples of that mind set in groups outside of religon such historical communism, extreme nationalism, and politics. That leads me to conclude that the argument that religion is evil to be incorrect in the way it inaccurately oversimplifies the position. It seems to me that religon, politics. natioalism, whatever, where we see examples of the rigid mindset, are merely the vehicles of whatever drives those atrocities and not the culprit. Labeleing the vehicle as the problem rather rather than the driver is inaccurate IMHO.

[cosmosdan]

Are you saying when people justify their evil actions on religion, it's always just a scapegoat and they would have carried out their actions if they weren't indoctrinated into their religion that preaches these actions as good things? No


I do. You do. We all do. Are we not to judge? Sure, we must make judgment calls, but people do not always agree on what is good, bad, or in between. This is a non answer.



The ones spreading hate and those that have a a holy book describing a hateful, vindictive, evil god. uh huh Things are rarely that black and white.



I don't know any that aren't dogmatic. Then maybe you need a better source than dictionary.com. Dogma tends to be more rigid than tenets of belief
Dogma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma)
Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, ideology or any kind of organization: it is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted or diverged from.



What's your point? Churches can have doctrine and tenets of belief without being considered dogmatic.



Yes, I can. It's holy books are evil and a few interpretations softening a few of the messages don't change all of the evil it contains. I've yet to find a Muslim that has interpreted any of the passages that unbelievers are fools and their reward will be in Hell any other way but the obvious. Maybe you need to get out more. In most religions there are conservatives and liberals, practicing and non practicing. A book is an inanimate object and cannot be evil . Period.




That's some rationalization you've accomplished there. If a book can be interpreted differently by different people then it contains no dogma? By that rationale, there's no such thing as dogma. I'm not rationalizing anything and this statement from you contains no logic. I clearly said that dogma exists within those interpreting the book, not the book itself.



Then show me where my criticism haven't been accurate and reasonable.
Well the statement just above this one is a doosy.

Shifting the goalposts? I'm confused as to what goal you're talking about. Atheism does not lead to Communism. Theism and irrational thought that goes with it almost always leads to evil religions. The problem is you can't provide any real evidence that there's a casual link between theism and evil acts committed by religious people. I'm saying the issue is not theism but something else that can and does exist in believers and non believers.


That's what I and others have been saying all along. Atheism is just being without belief in God/gods and it's usually because of critical thinking and not accepting fantastic claims without evidence. Then stop making the comparison. A religion is a belief system, often held by theists. Atheists also have belief systems , just currently more individualistic.

No. Atheism has no tenets. Not what I said. Try again.

Religions do, and many of them are evil and harmful to the rest of us. Whether or not an evil group can adopt atheism as a "tenet" is not relevant unless atheism is the cause of an evil ideology coming into existence. Communism did not come into existence because of atheism and atheism does not cause other evil ideologies to come into existence. Theism does as does the irrationality that goes along with it. I'm making no claim that atheism caused Communism or anything else. I'm saying atheism doesn't protect one from the dogmatic mind set that can lead to moral crimes. You have yet to show a casual link between theism, organized religion, and moral crimes with religious justification.





I told you already. My point was that you said that atheism as an integral part of Communism and "If atheism is unfairly judged by looking at Communism then theism must be unfairly judged by looking at religion."
Communism requires zero atheism and there have been plenty of theistic Communists. Religion by definition does require theism so your "shooting for accurate language and means of comparision" missed the mark.
Which, as I already said, is interesting, and I'm glad to be corrected on that detail but not all that relevant to my point.




No. The historical context that's important is that Communism doesn't naturally follow atheism and atheism does not and has not caused people to become Communists. Irrelevant! Not all communists commit or support the historical crimes I'm referring to. The fact that many did indicates to me that the casual link to moral crimes like those is neither atheism or theism. I understand the point you making. I just don't think it means what you think it means. It doesn't change of affect the point I'm making.


Semantics. Most of us define religion the way that the first hit on dictionary.com does. It would make sense that some Buddhists would like to label it as a religion though because of the special protection and government perks (in most Western countries) that go with it. It would be nice if I could get the government to buy into my weekly poker game being sacred.
By us, you mean people that don't know any better? You corrected me and I appreciate it. Do you need to play games now rather than admit you were incorrect on a minor detail? A dictionary is not a convincing cite to declare Buddhism is not a religion.

[tagos]

I was thinking of Stalin's persecution of the church. from Wikki

"Stalin's role in the fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church is complex. Continuous persecution in the 1930s resulted in its near-extinction: by 1939, active parishes numbered in the low hundreds (down from 54,000 in 1917), many churches had been leveled, and tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns were persecuted and killed. Over 100,000 were shot during the purges of 1937–1938"

I think that qualifies per my response about a charismatic leader.

But he and his followers were not motivated by atheism, as has been explained at length repeatedly, over and over again on these boards. :rolleyes:

And no - he wasn't 'charismatic' either.

[cosmosdan]

But he and his followers were not motivated by atheism, as has been explained at length repeatedly, over and over again on these boards. :rolleyes:

And no - he wasn't 'charismatic' either.

Save your roll eyes and try reading for comprehension. I never claimed they were motivated by atheism. I merely stated a leader who was an atheist could commit such acts. You created the motivated by atheism bit, not me.

If you don't think Stalin qualifies as charismatic you might want to check out the "Cult of Personality" section in Wikki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin)

Stalin created a cult of personality in the Soviet Union around both himself and Lenin. Many personality cults in history have been frequently measured and compared to his. Numerous towns, villages and cities were renamed after the Soviet leader (see List of places named after Stalin) and the Stalin Prize and Stalin Peace Prize were named in his honor.

[cosmosdan]

Faith, however, is the cause of religion; theism then is merely the cause of theistic religions, though how theistic and non-theistic religions actually differ, epistemologically, isn't all that clear to me -- you could well call a belief in and worship of fairies non-theistic, but you could also equate them with the gods of that particular religion; same for all similar metaphysical entities.

But, leaving causes aside for a minute, once there is an established system of religious power, it is possible to abuse it, as I tried to show with my example above. Similar doesn't work for atheism.

That's all I've been saying all along -- that while religion isn't necessarily 'the root of all evil', its structures form a ready (and often also willing, owing to human nature) conduit for it. It's like your example with the gun: no, the gun isn't responsible for killing a person; it's the person pulling the trigger. Nevertheless, you can't shoot people if there are no guns. Atheism has no comparable structures, and at least I can't see how one would form them.
Didn't mean to skip this. It deserves a response.
Even faith isn't really the cause of religion. Lot's of people have faith without belonging to an organization. I think perhaps it is merely the desire to be a part of a like minded group for some common purpose that causes organized religion. The sense of purpose and belonging that it invokes. We see similar things in other groups don't we? "I'm an American and we're the greatest country in the world"
"I'm a Democrat and those dam Republicans are idiots and ruining this country"
"I'm a Hutu and you dam Tutsis have got to die." {note=these examples are because of subject matter. It could easily be I'm a Buddhist and I'm one with everything"}
Atheists can certainly belong to organizations even if the basis isn't atheism. Then again, it might be. http://www.atheists.org/ (http://www.atheists.org/) and http://www.atheistalliance.org/

Your no gun thing. Don't you see where that leads? If there were no cars or planes nobody would die in a car accident or plane accident but we'd also lose all the benefits of that kind of transportation. Guns are used for personal defense and in defending others. If there were no guns people would use knives swords and bows and arrows like they used to. That's not a solution.

The analogy would be that just because you still can strangle persons if you don't have a gun, non-existing guns are to blame for stranglings the same way guns are to blame for shootings. But there isn't anything there that can share some of the blame besides the murderer himself; in the case of a shooting, it's the gun that made it possible in the first place. Non-guns don't make stranglings possible. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. It doesn't matter what the vehicle is, guns, knives, clubs, bare hands, or religion, politics, nationalism, greed, lust for power, whatever. The vehicle is not to blame for the decision to commit a moral crime.

[Half Man Half Wit]

Even faith isn't really the cause of religion. Lot's of people have faith without belonging to an organization.
That just means that faith alone isn't generally sufficient for religion, i.e. that you can conceivably have faith without that leading to establishing a religion/following an established one. But, there are no religions that don't exist because of faith (even money-making schemes like Scientology and certain televangelist churches can only exist because of the faith of their followers, even though in this case it was probably more the faith in money that got them going. Generally, however, faith is necessary for religion.)

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. It doesn't matter what the vehicle is, guns, knives, clubs, bare hands, or religion, politics, nationalism, greed, lust for power, whatever. The vehicle is not to blame for the decision to commit a moral crime.
No. But for the ease with which it is committed. Religion, brought about by faith, gives you the tools with which to control great masses of people with relatively great ease; abusing these tools is still you moral responsibility, of course, but nevertheless, if they weren't there, they couldn't be abused. Atheism doesn't give you any such tools to abuse. Furthermore, it's just not a black and white 'either you do or you don't' -- regardless of the means necessary -- decision to commit any moral crime, the ease with which it can be done plays a great role in determining whether or not it will be committed at all. So the means, perhaps, aren't totally blameless, even though the decision is yours alone.

[cosmosdan]

That just means that faith alone isn't generally sufficient for religion, i.e. that you can conceivably have faith without that leading to establishing a religion/following an established one. But, there are no religions that don't exist because of faith (even money-making schemes like Scientology and certain televangelist churches can only exist because of the faith of their followers, even though in this case it was probably more the faith in money that got them going. Generally, however, faith is necessary for religion.) Yes, and...... ?


No. But for the ease with which it is committed. Religion, brought about by faith, gives you the tools with which to control great masses of people with relatively great ease; abusing these tools is still you moral responsibility, of course, but nevertheless, if they weren't there, they couldn't be abused. Atheism doesn't give you any such tools to abuse. Furthermore, it's just not a black and white 'either you do or you don't' -- regardless of the means necessary -- decision to commit any moral crime, the ease with which it can be done plays a great role in determining whether or not it will be committed at all. So the means, perhaps, aren't totally blameless, even though the decision is yours alone.

One more time, equating a system of beliefs such as a religion, and atheism, is an unfair comparison. The proper comparison is atheism to theism. Although theism is usually a component of religion there's no way to link simple belief to a moral crime with religious justification.

Furthermore, on organizations religious or otherwise, regardless of how you phrase it, you're blaming the car for the accident. It doesn't makes sense and it's not a realistic solution.

[Half Man Half Wit]

Yes, and...... ?
...and thus, faith leads to religion.

One more time, equating a system of beliefs such as a religion, and atheism, is an unfair comparison.The proper comparison is atheism to theism.
Which, of course, leads to religion -- at least to the theistic ones. I'd also say that atheism is actually opposed to all forms of faith, be they theistic or not, but since the religions we're mainly dealing with are all theistic in nature, I won't belabour that point.

Although theism is usually a component of religion there's no way to link simple belief to a moral crime with religious justification.
The link lies in the existence of religion -- there'd be none without that 'simple belief'.

Furthermore, on organizations religious or otherwise, regardless of how you phrase it, you're blaming the car for the accident.
I'm very explicitly not. The car example isn't apt, by the way, let's keep it to weapons, since one generally doesn't use cars the same way; crimes perpetuated with religious justification aren't accidental, but intentional. I'm not saying that because the knife stabbed somebody, the knife is at fault, and your attempt to knock down that strawman accomplishes nothing. But without the knife, there wouldn't have been a stabbing. True, the killing might have then just been a strangling, but it's considerably harder to strangle somebody than it is to stab them. That's where the weapon becomes important, and similarly, that's where religion becomes important.

It doesn't makes sense and it's not a realistic solution.
I'm not trying to solve anything, just stating how I see things.

[cosmosdan]

...and thus, faith leads to religion.
I wouldn't put it that way. Eggs are a part of a cake recipe but it wouldn't be accurate to say eggs lead to cake.

Which, of course, leads to religion -- at least to the theistic ones. I'd also say that atheism is actually opposed to all forms of faith, be they theistic or not, but since the religions we're mainly dealing with are all theistic in nature, I won't belabour that point. Disregarding my objection to the term "leads" I don't see that theism can be held as a casual of some moral crime justified by religion.


The link lies in the existence of religion -- there'd be none without that 'simple belief'. Starting from theism, adding faith, and the desire to be part of some organized religion we still have a big question mark. Many religious folks express their theism and faith by helping others. IMO that means there's some other casual ingredient{s} that lead to moral crimes. Not theism and faith. I'm also suggesting those other issues that may lead to violence in religions can exist and do exist in other organizations and whether the person is a theist or an atheist doesn't matter.


I'm very explicitly not. The car example isn't apt, by the way, let's keep it to weapons, since one generally doesn't use cars the same way; crimes perpetuated with religious justification aren't accidental, but intentional. I'm not saying that because the knife stabbed somebody, the knife is at fault, and your attempt to knock down that strawman accomplishes nothing. But without the knife, there wouldn't have been a stabbing. True, the killing might have then just been a strangling, but it's considerably harder to strangle somebody than it is to stab them. That's where the weapon becomes important, and similarly, that's where religion becomes important. I understand that but the analogy is woefully incomplete. If all theism and faith led to moral crimes you'd have a pretty valid point. Knives also serve many useful purposes. If you decide to get rid of knives to prevent stabbings your not dealing with the real issue and you're likely causing as much harm as you're preventing by removing a tool that also does much good. Get rid of guns and shootings disappear and stabbings go up. Get rid of knives and stabbings disappear and clubbing goes up etc. etc. Unless you deal with the proper issue removing religion to stop religiously motivated crimes would only mean the same violence would occur and take on a different name.
Hey, since science helps creates more advanced weaponry let's get rid of science. Doesn't sound to practical does it?


I'm not trying to solve anything, just stating how I see things.
Fair enough

[Half Man Half Wit]

I wouldn't put it that way. Eggs are a part of a cake recipe but it wouldn't be accurate to say eggs lead to cake.
Well, religion certainly isn't assembled from a list of ingredients, but it grows from an initial proposition -- from faith. The comparison would only be apt if eggs naturally grew into cakes occasionally, and in that case, I'd certainly say that eggs lead to cakes. Religion from faith is an evolutionary process, basically -- the starting point (faith) does not exclusively determine the end point, but the end point is certainly predicated on the starting point.

Disregarding my objection to the term "leads" I don't see that theism can be held as a casual of some moral crime justified by religion.
How not? If, when there's no faith, there's no religion, then it's not possible to give a religious justification for some moral crime.

IMO that means there's some other casual ingredient{s} that lead to moral crimes. Not theism and faith.
I've never claimed that there aren't -- in fact, I've been careful to point out that I don't buy into the whole 'root of all evil'-thing when it comes to religion.

I understand that but the analogy is woefully incomplete. If all theism and faith led to moral crimes you'd have a pretty valid point. Knives also serve many useful purposes. If you decide to get rid of knives to prevent stabbings your not dealing with the real issue and you're likely causing as much harm as you're preventing by removing a tool that also does much good.
I've also never claimed that no good can come from religion -- as I said before, if all the followers of some religion are all about love, peace & harmony that's a great thing, the problem is just that so few really are, and also that the network established by religion can be equally well used to spread moral corruption.

Look, the original assertion as raised in this thread was that since communism is to atheism what religion is to faith, it's as possible to commit atrocities in the name of atheism as it is in the name of faith. I've argued that that's not the case, not because atheists can't be every bit as fucked up as the worst religious fundamentalists, but because atheism doesn't give rise to communism (or any other ideology) the way faith gives rise to religions. I actually thought we were more or less on the same page there.

Unless you deal with the proper issue removing religion to stop religiously motivated crimes would only mean the same violence would occur and take on a different name.
I've never once argued for religion to be removed. In fact, I believe you're right, we'd find other means and reasons to kill each other. But they won't be atheistic in nature the way killing someone because they have the wrong altar in their house is religiously motivated, and hence, ultimately, follows from faith.

A little hypothetical: Say we've got a situation where one person is violently angry at another, perhaps because the other slept with their spouse, or stole them some money, or whatever. They're both confined into the same space for some period of time. Do you think the situation would lead to the same consequences if one of them has a knife as it does when there's no knife? Don't you think, on average, the consequences will end up being worse in the case with the knife? Surely, one of 'em might end up dead in both cases, but thanks to the ease of killing the knife provides, I'd wager that that's more often the case if the knife is present.

Religion is like the knife: not in itself bad, but easy to abuse to perpetuate bad actions. Atheism is like the lack of knife: not in itself able to prohibit committing bad actions, but at least it doesn't make them any easier.

[Lemur866]

Well, religion certainly isn't assembled from a list of ingredients, but it grows from an initial proposition -- from faith. The comparison would only be apt if eggs naturally grew into cakes occasionally, and in that case, I'd certainly say that eggs lead to cakes. Religion from faith is an evolutionary process, basically -- the starting point (faith) does not exclusively determine the end point, but the end point is certainly predicated on the starting point.

See, I don't think this is accurate. Why are people religious? The obvious answer is that their parents and community are religious, and they teach kids to be religious. The kid doesn't acquire faith and then from there become religious. It's more the other way around. He's dragged to religious rituals, sits around bored while people talk, is dressed in uncomfortable costumes, and so on. He becomes a member of the religious community without understanding any of it. Faith isn't the genesis of his religion.

And when we go back and ask ourselves where did these religions come from that these kids are being brought up in, the answer isn't faith either. All these religions evolved from older ideas about religion or the supernatural, and those ideas from older ideas, and so on, back to the religious ideas of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. And these guys didn't believe in spirits and monsters and magic out of faith either. When a kid asked his hunter-gatherer dad about what we call religious ideas, the kid wasn't told to have faith in the existence of the river spirit.

It was more like, the river exists, it's constantly moving, therefore there must be some sort of something animating that river, therefore the river must be alive in some way, therefore the river has feelings and emotions akin to human emotions, therefore you have to be polite to the river just like you have to follow rules of politeness in human interactions, and grandpa always said that the river likes to be given a gift of feathers, and that's why we always drop a bundle of feathers into the river every time we cross the river, and because he didn't do it right that's probably why Timmy angered the river and drowned when he tried to cross the river last spring.

It's not faith that drives this sort of idea, it's mistaken but plausible understandings about the nature of the world. The idea of faith is a late addition to the history of religion, and peculiar to certain religions. The idea that you should have faith in God and God's teachings because God told you to have faith in God and God's teachings is obviously a circular one. This sort of notion isn't the historic origin of religion, or the cause of religious belief in a human child, it is a post-hoc rationalization applied after one already believes in the religion. The memetic value of the idea that you aren't allowed to leave or question a religion is obvious, but those memes only work once you're already a member of the religion.

[Half Man Half Wit]

It was more like, the river exists, it's constantly moving, therefore there must be some sort of something animating that river, therefore the river must be alive in some way, therefore the river has feelings and emotions akin to human emotions, therefore you have to be polite to the river just like you have to follow rules of politeness in human interactions, and grandpa always said that the river likes to be given a gift of feathers, and that's why we always drop a bundle of feathers into the river every time we cross the river, and because he didn't do it right that's probably why Timmy angered the river and drowned when he tried to cross the river last spring.
Well, I think fundamentally, faith comes from superstition, and superstition is a form of behaviour -- think of Skinner's pigeons: they were randomly given some food at some time, and after a while started to associate behaviours they'd been randomly engaging in when they got fed with getting fed, thus repeated these behaviours in an effort to make the food appear again. Mistaken causal attribution, same thing you're arguing for, basically. But is this (essentially unsubstantiated) belief that a certain kind of behaviour leads to certain results, even though it actually doesn't, really that different from faith?

It's not faith that drives this sort of idea, it's mistaken but plausible understandings about the nature of the world.
You're arguing that religion directly springs from these misattributions -- fine. But I'd say that the belief in these misattributions is pretty much just that what we normally call 'faith'. 'God did it' is a mistaken (if there's not actually a god) but plausible explanation for natural phenomena; the belief that 'god did it' is the right explanation is faith.

The idea of faith is a late addition to the history of religion, and peculiar to certain religions.
Are there any religions that are not founded on faith, though? That's a honest question -- I couldn't think of any.

[Lemur866]

Well, maybe we're using the word "faith" differently, because I don't think any religion is founded on faith, as I argued earlier. Individual humans don't become members of a religion because they first had faith in that religion and then joined it. Religions weren't invented because one guy had faith in a new religion and founded it, and then other people got faith in the religion and joined it.

If we decide that belief in certain behaviors leads to certain results is faith, then everything is faith.

I'd rather say that faith is something that people talk about AFTER they already believe something, it's a memetic characteristic of certain religions that acts to prevent people from leaving the religion. It's a sustaining characteristic of religion, not the origin of religion. You are taught to believe in Jesus as a child, and so you do. Then you start asking questions about Jesus, and they tell you that even though they can't answer your questions you should just have faith in Jesus anyway. And so you stop questioning and just believe. But you didn't start believing in Jesus because you had faith in Jesus, you started believing in Jesus because your parents taught you to believe in Jesus, or you met some other people who convinced you to start believing in Jesus.

So "faith" is a characteristic of certain types of religions, and one of the reasons that religions of this type are very common around the globe. If you're a polytheist there's no problem when some stranger comes into your village to talk about this new god named Jesus. But if you're a Christian and a stranger comes into your village to talk about Freya, then there's a problem.

[Half Man Half Wit]

I'm not sure I know any other definition of faith other than 'unsubstantiated belief' -- unsubstantiated in the sense that it isn't sufficiently indicated by evidence or simply can't be shown to be true, either because it just isn't, or because its object is supposedly intangible to a degree that makes it inaccessible to the common methods of ascertaining truth. Perhaps you should give your definition, if it is in conflict with mine?

[Lemur866]

But how do you substantiate any belief? Every belief we have about the universe is contingent, because we are fallible finite beings who constantly make mistakes. The guy who believes a river god drowned Timmy last spring doesn't believe it on faith, be thinks he has pretty good reasons for his belief.

Now, we can say that we know that his belief is incorrect, that there is no such thing as a river spirit, and the river spirit didn't get angry at Timmy. But his belief isn't unsubstantiated, rather it is incorrect.

If we define "faith" as any unsubstantiated belief then we're going to find very few people who have any sort of faith, unless we define "unsubstantiated" as "something I personally judge to be weakly substantiated".

I agree that many religious ideas are examples of superstitious behavior as Skinner defined it. I just don't think calling superstitious or incorrect beliefs "faith" is helpful. Did you drive through that red light because you had faith that it was green? No, you just didn't notice it was red. Did you drive through the green light because you had faith that green lights are safe? No, you just didn't notice the truck running the red light and the last 10,000 times you drove through a green light it was safe so you didn't pay any attention to whether this particular one was safe. Do you knock on the dashboard three times before you drive through a green light because you have faith that knocking will keep you safe? No you don't have faith that knocking keeps you safe, you have a mistaken belief that knocking keeps you safe, which you arrived at because the last 10,000 times when you knocked nothing bad happened so therefore the knocking must keep you safe. Whether you knock three times or ask Jesus to keep you safe, they are examples of the same type of behavior.

[Blalron]

Semantics. Most of us define religion the way that the first hit on dictionary.com does. It would make sense that some Buddhists would like to label it as a religion though because of the special protection and government perks (in most Western countries) that go with it. It would be nice if I could get the government to buy into my weekly poker game being sacred.

You are wrong... in fact, you are wrong according to the very source (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/religion?qsrc=2888) you are citing as authoritative! Shame on you! :p

Ok, maybe the first listing doesn't apply to buddhism. But so what? Just because it's listed under definition #2 doesn't make it any less valid. The word "set" has a 119 different listings, and I dare you to argue that only listing #1 is valid!


re⋅li⋅gion
   /rɪˈlɪdʒən/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [ri-lij-uhn] Show IPA
–noun
1. a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, esp. when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.
2. a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects: the Christian religion; the Buddhist religion.
3. the body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices: a world council of religions.
4. the life or state of a monk, nun, etc.: to enter religion.
5. the practice of religious beliefs; ritual observance of faith.
6. something one believes in and follows devotedly; a point or matter of ethics or conscience: to make a religion of fighting prejudice.

[Half Man Half Wit]

But how do you substantiate any belief?
I'm going to stand by what I wrote in my last post -- by supporting it with evidence, or showing it to be true, at least as far as such a thing is possible (which it is, at least in some cases -- some mathematical statements at least can be shown to be true within a given framework). I can substantiate my belief in the existence of black sheep by discovering one, for instance.

Do you knock on the dashboard three times before you drive through a green light because you have faith that knocking will keep you safe? No you don't have faith that knocking keeps you safe, you have a mistaken belief that knocking keeps you safe, which you arrived at because the last 10,000 times when you knocked nothing bad happened so therefore the knocking must keep you safe. Whether you knock three times or ask Jesus to keep you safe, they are examples of the same type of behavior.
How is believing either the knocking thing or Jesus will keep you safe not faith? What, to you, would be faith, if not this?

[cosmosdan]

Well, religion certainly isn't assembled from a list of ingredients, but it grows from an initial proposition -- from faith. The comparison would only be apt if eggs naturally grew into cakes occasionally, and in that case, I'd certainly say that eggs lead to cakes. Religion from faith is an evolutionary process, basically -- the starting point (faith) does not exclusively determine the end point, but the end point is certainly predicated on the starting point. I notice that another poster just just pointed out to you that some people are exposed to the organization and told it's "right" before they have faith. I think religion and the nature of a what particular religion a person joins is based on a mix of factors that could be compared to a list of ingredients pretty easily. Regardless, I think we've exhausted the subject.


How not? If, when there's no faith, there's no religion, then it's not possible to give a religious justification for some moral crime.
It depends on whether the goal is to prevent violence or just change the description of the violence. Let's keep this no faith, no religion comment in mind for later in the post.

I've never claimed that there aren't -- in fact, I've been careful to point out that I don't buy into the whole 'root of all evil'-thing when it comes to religion.
Great, but when you advocate, no gun, and make a statement like, no faith, no religion, what do you mean? Your argument seems pretty inconsistent.

I've also never claimed that no good can come from religion -- as I said before, if all the followers of some religion are all about love, peace & harmony that's a great thing, the problem is just that so few really are, and also that the network established by religion can be equally well used to spread moral corruption. So few are? Any data to support that statement? Almost any organization can be corrupted. I fail to see your point.

Look, the original assertion as raised in this thread was that since communism is to atheism what religion is to faith, it's as possible to commit atrocities in the name of atheism as it is in the name of faith. I've argued that that's not the case, not because atheists can't be every bit as fucked up as the worst religious fundamentalists, but because atheism doesn't give rise to communism (or any other ideology) the way faith gives rise to religions. I actually thought we were more or less on the same page there. We're not. I mentioned a ways back that we seemed to be on tangents. I thought perhaps we had cleared that up. Evidently not. I've said several times that I wasn't claiming atheism caused communism or that the moral crimes committed by Stalin were done in the name of atheism. What I've been saying is the the real driving force behind such crimes seems to be something not linked to either theism or atheism. If that's true,that means the issue of faith causes religion but atheism doesn't cause communism, and what justification was used, be it religion, or communism, doesn't matter. If I'm correct then those factors are no longer relevant to any goal of eliminating that type of violence, or assigning responsibility.


I've never once argued for religion to be removed. In fact, I believe you're right, we'd find other means and reasons to kill each other. But they won't be atheistic in nature the way killing someone because they have the wrong altar in their house is religiously motivated, and hence, ultimately, follows from faith. Then you need to read your own posts more carefully. I'm not sure what other implication I can take form your "take away the weapon" analogies or your statement above about "no faith no religion"

A little hypothetical: Say we've got a situation where one person is violently angry at another, perhaps because the other slept with their spouse, or stole them some money, or whatever. They're both confined into the same space for some period of time. Do you think the situation would lead to the same consequences if one of them has a knife as it does when there's no knife? Don't you think, on average, the consequences will end up being worse in the case with the knife? Surely, one of 'em might end up dead in both cases, but thanks to the ease of killing the knife provides, I'd wager that that's more often the case if the knife is present. This analogy fails. I've allowed the weapon analogy even though it's imperfect but let's keep in mind that religion is not a weapon. Christianity also teaches forgiveness and mercy. so the knife seems equally likely to keep violence at bay.

Religion is like the knife: not in itself bad, but easy to abuse to perpetuate bad actions. Atheism is like the lack of knife: not in itself able to prohibit committing bad actions, but at least it doesn't make them any easier.

And here again you're comparing the complexities of a belief system {religion} with something that is not a belief system. It doesn't work. Stop doing it.

Not only that the analogy is flawed. The knife is just as useful as it is dangerous. Are you saying atheism isn't useful or dangerous?

[cosmosdan]

You are wrong... in fact, you are wrong according to the very source (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/religion?qsrc=2888) you are citing as authoritative! Shame on you! :p

Ok, maybe the first listing doesn't apply to buddhism. But so what? Just because it's listed under definition #2 doesn't make it any less valid. The word "set" has a 119 different listings, and I dare you to argue that only listing #1 is valid!

Thanks for pointing that out. I thought the whole semantics bit was so lame I didn't even bother to go to dictionary.com.

[Half Man Half Wit]

I notice that another poster just just pointed out to you that some people are exposed to the organization and told it's "right" before they have faith.
Well, perhaps you could tell me then what believing that this organization is "right" is, if not faith? Otherwise, a rose by any other name...

I think religion and the nature of a what particular religion a person joins is based on a mix of factors that could be compared to a list of ingredients pretty easily.
I never said anything about why any particular person joins a religion, and if you believe it's relevant to the argument I'm making, you haven't understood it.

It depends on whether the goal is to prevent violence or just change the description of the violence.
I wasn't aware that it's either -- my goal certainly was merely to show how religion can be used in a destructive manner in which atheism can't be.

Great, but when you advocate, no gun, and make a statement like, no faith, no religion, what do you mean? Your argument seems pretty inconsistent.

I don't advocate 'no gun', and by saying no faith, no religion, I pretty much mean that there's no religion without faith; not all that difficult. I've been consistently saying that religion isn't the reason why people harm each other, but provides means by which people can harm each other. Not sure what you're not getting about this.

So few are? Any data to support that statement? Almost any organization can be corrupted. I fail to see your point.
It would seem so. First, data: several ten thousand years of killing each other should suffice to show that people, on the whole, aren't mainly on the 'love, peace and harmony'-track. Second, yes, any organization that provides means of control or influence over other people can be corrupted in such a way as to exert negative influence and make people do bad things. That's what I've been saying all the time, basically. Third, atheism doesn't lead to such an organization.


If that's true,that means the issue of faith causes religion but atheism doesn't cause communism, and what justification was used, be it religion, or communism, doesn't matter.
Nope. While communism probably isn't responsible in a direct moral way for the atrocities committed in its name, it did provide the means by which these atrocities were committed. Same thing with religion -- I've provided a hypothetical example earlier, it probably escaped your notice, so I'll just repost it:

the population of Country A is devoutly religious, and their head of state is also their religious Head Honcho. What he says is not merely mortal, but divine law. Transgressions against the Head Honcho's words are transgressions against the almighty himself. Naturally, this can be used to keep the public in line and have them do as they're told very easily, seeing how there's an eternity of hellfire waiting for everybody showing the slightest signs of rebellion. If Head Honcho says somebody is the enemy, he is The Enemy because god said so! And if Head Honcho says the enemy should be killed, then by god, the enemy will be killed.

Now, let's have a look at Country B. They don't do religion, simply, and their head of state is just that, a political leader. What atheistic measures does he have to keep the public in line? Do what you're told or else, nothing's gonna happen to you? Sure, he could resort to military or political means, and he probably has other oppressive means at his disposal, but those aren't in any way atheistic in nature. His power doesn't derive from atheism the way Country A's Head Honcho's power derives from religion. It can't, in fact.

Then you need to read your own posts more carefully. I'm not sure what other implication I can take form your "take away the weapon" analogies or your statement above about "no faith no religion"
I haven't found where I said anything about 'taking away the weapon', but the second statement was actually part of a conditional, you just lost the 'if' -- as in 'if when there's no faith, there's no religion, then...' -- somewhere along the way.

And here again you're comparing the complexities of a belief system {religion} with something that is not a belief system. It doesn't work. Stop doing it.
If there's no religion when there's no faith, then I'm validly comparing the consequences of faith with those of atheism.

Are you saying atheism isn't useful or dangerous?
Actually, yes -- atheism is not useful or dangerous.

What I'm claiming is merely that religions wouldn't exist without faith (let's just drop that whole 'leads to' business). Thus, because of faith, there's religion. Religion can be used to exert control and influence about its followers -- by saying 'god wants you to do X'. If bad people are at the top of a certain religion, they can use this religion's means of exerting control and influence to make its followers do bad things -- by saying 'god wants you to kill the unbelievers', for example. If a person has faith in that religion's god, and has faith in that religion's top level people telling him the true will of god, he'll then have to believe that it's right for him to kill the unbelievers (or renounce his faith). Thus, he'll probably kill unbelievers. Which is bad.

Now, with atheism, the position of not having faith, there is no such chain of causality. Communists may be atheists. Nazis may be atheists. Heck, ostensibly religious people may be atheists. But they all may equally well be convinced Roman Catholics (yes, yes, I know, the bad people aren't 'true' Christians; however, they might think they are, yes?). You cannot create an ideology from atheism because it doesn't make any positive statement about the world -- that is, it doesn't say 'some aspect of the world is so-and-so'; rather, it is a position of doubting (certain) positive statements made about the world. You cannot get atheists to do something based on their atheism; but you can get believers to do something based on their faith (not all believers not all of the time, but some believers sometimes).

To be absolutely clear, I'm not arguing that religion is evil. I'm not arguing that people do evil solely because of religion (though I do believe religion may be a contributing factor, simply because of the ease with which it allows people to exert control over others). I'm not arguing that there can't be any good done in the name of religion. I'm not even arguing that mankind is worse off with religion than it would be without (I believe that's the case, but that's totally unrelated to my argument here). I'm merely arguing that faith and the rejection thereof have totally different consequences: faith is instrumental for the existence of certain structures that themselves have a variety of effects, some good, some not so good -- religions. Atheism doesn't constitute a building block of comparable structures in the first place. Other structures that can be used in a similar manner as religions may exist, and might totally replace religions in all effects should religions be removed, and those structures may even contain an atheist doctrine, but their existence doesn't depend on atheism. I don't see why any of this is so damn controversial.

[cosmosdan]

Well, perhaps you could tell me then what believing that this organization is "right" is, if not faith? Otherwise, a rose by any other name... Possibly indoctrination, or cultural and family pressure. Those seem realistic.


I never said anything about why any particular person joins a religion, and if you believe it's relevant to the argument I'm making, you haven't understood it. Excuse me, you said faith causes, or leads to religion right? I'm saying there are other factors and faith may not always be the primary one. That seems relevant.


I wasn't aware that it's either -- my goal certainly was merely to show how religion can be used in a destructive manner in which atheism can't be. Yes, an orange can be used of orange juice and an apple can't be. I agree. My point is neither theism or atheism {the proper comparison} lead to moral crimes without some other factor that both can be vulnerable to.

<snipped for brevities sake>


It would seem so. First, data: several ten thousand years of killing each other should suffice to show that people, on the whole, aren't mainly on the 'love, peace and harmony'-track. Second, yes, any organization that provides means of control or influence over other people can be corrupted in such a way as to exert negative influence and make people do bad things. That's what I've been saying all the time, basically. Third, atheism doesn't lead to such an organization. That's not data. You made a claim you haven't supported. can you?

I'll respond to the rest after work.

[Half Man Half Wit]

That's not data. You made a claim you haven't supported. can you?
You're actually questioning my claim that people harm each other? That few people are good through and through?

[cosmosdan]

You're actually questioning my claim that people harm each other? That few people are good through and through?

I didn't realize your claim was that broad and non relevant. We were talking about believers and the extremes of moral atrocities and the good done by believers. I assumed your argument was that believers do more bad than good. Believers and people in general don't have to be good through and through to accomplish good things. The point that I've been trying to make is the same faith you say can lead to moral crimes also leads to a lot of positive acts. No faith, no religion, we lose the positive as well and still haven't addressed the real cause.

What I'm claiming is merely that religions wouldn't exist without faith (let's just drop that whole 'leads to' business). Thus, because of faith, there's religion. Religion can be used to exert control and influence about its followers -- by saying 'god wants you to do X'. If bad people are at the top of a certain religion, they can use this religion's means of exerting control and influence to make its followers do bad things -- by saying 'god wants you to kill the unbelievers', for example. If a person has faith in that religion's god, and has faith in that religion's top level people telling him the true will of god, he'll then have to believe that it's right for him to kill the unbelievers (or renounce his faith). Thus, he'll probably kill unbelievers. Which is bad.

Now, with atheism, the position of not having faith, there is no such chain of causality. Communists may be atheists. Nazis may be atheists. Heck, ostensibly religious people may be atheists. But they all may equally well be convinced Roman Catholics (yes, yes, I know, the bad people aren't 'true' Christians; however, they might think they are, yes?). You cannot create an ideology from atheism because it doesn't make any positive statement about the world -- that is, it doesn't say 'some aspect of the world is so-and-so'; rather, it is a position of doubting (certain) positive statements made about the world. You cannot get atheists to do something based on their atheism; but you can get believers to do something based on their faith (not all believers not all of the time, but some believers sometimes).

So, you're saying religion wouldn't exist without faith but you're not really advocating no religion. Slightly confusing.
Here again you're incorrectly equating religion {a system of beliefs} with atheism {not a system} but I think I understand. Theism, faith, then religion.

Any organization can be corrupted by a lust for power, wealth, control. That's where the example of communism is relevant. If a moral crime is committed it really doesn't matter to the victim[s] whether the person is a religious zealot or a power hungry atheist.

If it seems far more likely for a theist to be corrupted I'd say that's because there are far more theists than atheists. Now we are beginning to see people whose actions are motivated by atheism and atheist organizations so we see it is possible for either a theist or atheist to be moved to action, based on a belief or a lack of it. I'd say an atheist who acts on their atheism has more of a positive belief than a lack of it.

I don't see any meaningful difference between "God said to do it" and "the leaders of my organization said to do it" when it comes to a moral crime.

So, I think I see your point,

my goal certainly was merely to show how religion can be used in a destructive manner in which atheism can't be.

My point is that either a theist or an atheist can be a member of an organization with a dogmatic , controlling mind set and be party to moral crimes. I think it is other factors besides atheism or theism that are key. If that's the case, whether a particular act was justified by religion is irrelevant to the core problem.

Neither theism nor atheism by themselves can be used in a destructive manner. Without other factors and actions both are equally neutral.

[Half Man Half Wit]

OK. I give up. I can only so often try to clarify my position. At some point I have to acknowledge it's futile, and I think that point is now.

[cosmosdan]

OK. I give up. I can only so often try to clarify my position. At some point I have to acknowledge it's futile, and I think that point is now.
I agree, we've reached an impasse. It's not that I don't understand your position. I just don't agree. Such is the nature of debate. Cheers.