You mean the way your fervent denial of facts and reality does you?
I must say, I pity when religion turns otherwise potentially intelligent people into self-important retards, which I see a lot when the lies and delusions they use to buttress their beliefs are challenged. This sort of mental abberration almost justifies the idea of putting the lot of the nuts out of their misery.
Nobody has said that before !!! Wow!!!
The false pity!!!
Woooooooowwwww!!!eleven!!!
So we’re back to this. If you’re not conflating communists who are responsible for deaths because of communism, then I need an example of 10s of millions of religious people being killed by atheists.
Unless you’re saying that Stalin was responsible for 10s of millions of deaths because he was an atheist, meaning he was amoral due to his lack of grace. But then you’d still be stuck with convincing me that all those people were killed because of their religion. Which is not true.
I still suspect you are using the communist=atheist argument which you are now trying to backpedal from.
Really, theists simply can’t understand what atheism is. Many atheists have philosophical beliefs but atheism itself is simple a lack of belief. Why is that so hard to understand?
I think the difference here is that a lot of us who are even marginally religious are skeptical of the conflation of the abuse of religious appeals in service of geopolitical goals with the idea that those conflicts are religiously motivated.
Ultimately, it’s a confluence of factors. Certainly, religion provides a lever that can be used to move portions of the population. On the other hand, saying “the Crusades were about religion” sounds to me like saying “World War I was about the assassination of Ferdinand” or “the Revolutionary War was about taxation”–the rallying cries used to motivate the public are not the same as the reasons for the war in the first place, and I don’t think you can ultimately lay the blame for many of these conflicts at the feet of religion any more than you can lay the blame for WW1 on Gavrilo Princip.
Ultimately, my studies and understanding of history is that bad people can be motivated by greed and power, and they’ll grab whatever popular ideologies or methods of population control they can use to support that. I don’t believe that any given religion is any more or less pernicious than any non-religious ideology in that regard, they’re simply more wide-spread and historically have been more strongly felt so they’re more useful levers. In the absence of religion, people still have beliefs and ideologies, and they can still be motivated to do evil while thinking/believing they’re doing good–this thread itself is a fine example.
Similarly, it was never the case that anybody ever killed anyone simply because of theism, but only in the name of some specific religion or some specific doctrine. Nobody ever killed anybody just because he believed that God exists. No matter how you try to rationalize the fact away, it still remains that radical secularists in the Soviet Union killed tens of millions of Christians attempting to uproot and destroy a Christian civilization.
No matter how you slice it, Marxism is an explicitly atheistic and materialistic philosophy. These are central doctines, not merely tangential. Trying to remove them from Marxism would be like trying to remove theism from Christianity or Islam. All Marxist theory is derived from its materialist metaphysics, just as Christian and Muslim doctrines are derived from their theism. You can’t just shove Marxian atheism and materialism off to a dark corner somewhere and pretend that they somehow aren’t important.
Wiggle as frantically as you will, you still can’t wiggle out of the fact that people following an explicitly atheistic and materialistic philosophy have killed more than a hundred million people around the globe, justifying their actions with social, economic and political doctrines derived from atheism and materialism.
Your inability or unwillingness to recognize and accept this fact tells me you are yourself spectacularly ill-equipped to identify fantasy.
Nonsense. Most atheists in the West are atheists because they are materialists; their atheism derives from their materialism. Most of them are being spectacularly dishonest when they say they merely lack belief in God or gods.
Whatever Stalin’s actual motive, it is certain that his justification was the doctrine of an explicitly atheistic philosophy. And as I’ve pointed out above, you cannot disentangle Marxian metaphysics from Marxian economic, social and political doctrine.
Just as you conflate Christian or Muslim atrocities with theistic atrocities.
The atheism of Marxism isn’t the driving force of the ideology. That would be the dialectic, that revolution is inevitable, the people must rise up, yadda yadda. That’s what got people to commit vile deeds. Just like “your God wants you to kill these people” is what gets religious zealots to commit vile deeds.
No Communist – not Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, nor any of the proletariat – ever killed someone else because there is no god. To the extent that communists drove religion out of their countries, they did so because they wanted people devoted to the dialectic, not some other higher power.
You suspect wrong. Your defense of ahteism is of the “no true Scotsman” variety.
Not because there is no god, but because the others beleived it.
The doctrinal purity needed for a group of atheists to become muderers in the name of atheism, for many people here, is astonishing. “No true Scotsman” part two.
Because if they believed in god, they wouldn’t believe in the dialectic.
Communist ideology is more than being anti-god.
(sigh) As I have already pointed out, *nobody ever killed someone else simply because of belief in God. Theism by itself has never been a motive for killing. Theism and atheism by themselves have never been a motive for anything. * Theism and religion do not automatically lead to genocide any more than atheism and secularism automatically lead to genocide. It is immensely exasperating to hear some boneheaded atheist insist that religious philosophies and ideologies cause mass bloodshed but secular philosophies and ideologies never do. That is a bald faced lie.
Oh, secular philosophies and ideologies, absolutely.
But not atheism per se.
Frankly, I’d be happy with “All ideologues should be executed,” not necessarily religious people.
There is nothing false about it. You are a sad, strange little person, and you have my pity. Fare well.
Except there’s nothing similar about it at all, which is why your false analogy is, and always will be, a worthless and pathetic excuse for rational argument.
Let’s be clear - anyone who says or implies that marxism is significantly about atheism is being retarded. This includes you.
Whereas anybody who says or implies that christianity is not significantly about theism is being similarly retarded. This includes you.
Unless one or (preferably) both of these statements is true, your argument fails massively, in a way that will not excape any intellectually honest (or honestly intellectual) person.
Who needs to rationalize it away? Of course the communists professed to be secular, and of course they attempted to wipe out the christianity. The thing you fail to realize, though, is this fact doesn’t support your dumbass position.
Have you ever heard of the statement “correlation does not equal causation”? Look into it, because this is where you fail. (Though to be fair, you might be failing in many other places as well.) It is certainly and obviously not the case that atheism was the root cause of communism and it’s anti-religious behavior. It’s not even debatable that the communists said, “we’re atheists, and atheism says that the means of production belong in the hands of the people.” Seriously, you’d have to be as dumb as a brick or as dishonest as Nixon to even imply such a thing.
No - what obviously happened was instead: Communism was formed based on principles that had nothing to do with atheism. Comminusm positioned itself adversarially against religion, becuase they were competing ideologies. And then because communism was opposed to religion, as a result of that fact, it declared atheism to be a tiny part of the party platform.
In other words, you have the causality completely backwards.
Central ‘doctines’? Do you have any clue whatsoever of what you’re talking about? Or are you just a compulsive, chronic liar with no shame whatsoever?
I don’t feel any need to wiggle when you’re just shoveling transparently false and retarded bullshit. And yeah, your “no U believe fantasy!” is such compelling argument; I quail at your brilliant wit. You moron.
Nor theism per se. Secular doctine is no less likely to lead to disaster than religious doctrine.
Let’s discuss this for a moment. What, do you suppose, is the central tenant of Christianity?
Here’s my bet - “There’s a god and he had a son named Jesus and this fact relates on your life/afterlife and your activities therein in some way.” (I’d get more specific but Christianity is a very broad target.)
This is an explicitly theistic tenant. Christianity is literally all about its theism. As opposed to, say, the fact that Jesus was a carpenter. They believe this too, but it’s hardly the main idea or a driving principle.
With marxism, of course, the driving principles have nothing whatsoever to do with theism or atheim; they have to do with social engineering. The atheistic aspect of the platform is tacked on.
Yeah, that whole “and thou shalt have no other gods before me” is rather a sticky point. You have to work to encourage that sort of exclusionism into a secular philosophy, whereas “my god is the only true god” kind of comes naturally to theistic philosophy.
Just out of curiosity, because I couldn’t find anything on google; did the stalinists actually end up killing a disproportionate percentage of religious people compared to the percentage of the population at large? I know their rhetoric, but do the numbers bear that out? I expect the answer is yes, but at the same time it seems like they were mostly just getting rid of anyone they wanted to.
The problem with these types of arguments is that atheism is simply not analogous to an actual belief system. To quote someone or another: “atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.” So unless you have a case where a group of atheists killed religious people specifically to cleanse the world of religion, you’re just bundling the crimes of the not-X group to draw a false comparison to X.
It makes no more sense than Scientologists refuting allegations of being a crazy fucked up cult by pointing out the misdeeds of non-Scientologists like Timothy McVeigh and that old guy who drove through the Farmer’s Market in Santa Monica a few years ago and Hitler and whoever didn’t slap Beyonce when she first sang “Put a Ring On It” for them.
No, you are missing the point. “Doctrinally pure” atheism isn’t going to drive anyone to do anything. Good or bad. How would it? It’s an absence of belief.
No, the bald faced lie is you claiming people are saying that.
That doesn’t work either. Atheism is the assertion that there are no gods; it isn’t the claim that gods or the belief in them is undesirable or that people should be killed over it. Atheism can’t drive anyone to do anything without adding something else to the mix; there’s nothing there to do so.