Well, this is true only if you re-write the definition of terrorism regularly.
It’s a safe bet the Red Brigades and Baader-Meinhof Gang were all atheists. You could claim, of course, that atheism was incidental, and not the main focus of their activity, but that strikes me as a copout.
Sounds like a movie on Lifetime in Hell.
I"m pretty sure that all of the members of the Red Brigade did not believe in UFO’s. Down with these non-UFO Believing terrorist groups!
Watching Lifetime is a pretty decent approximation of Hell.
It’s been a while, but I don’t believe that SPECTRE has anything in its bylaws about religion or piety.
Not, uh, that I’m a member or anything. Now excuse me, I have to go feed my fluffy white cat and explain my newest diabolical plot to a bumbling henchman who I will proceed to execute in hideous and convoluted fashion in an act of pointless exposition.
Stranger
But by its very name, it predicates itself upon a belief in an afterlife, no?
astro asked for an organization that specificially identifies itself as atheist. The Secular Humanist Aid and Relief Effort’s website begins with the words Beyond atheism, Beyond agnosticism. They are making a point of not being about either of those things. (And of course, they are certainly not about religion.)
The Secular Humanist Aid and Relief Effort is a charitable program organised by the Council for Secular Humanism, and the motto you quote belongs to the latter. In either case, an athiest or agnostic charitable organisation is ‘beyond’ simply being a philosophical group, whilst adhering to those principles.
For what it’s worth the Council’s deceleration explicitly states that,
This seems a fairly close approximation of the OP’s conditions.
I don’t know about North Korea, but China certainly isn’t “atheist” and neither is its government. No one is required to take an oath of atheism renouncing their religion when they join the CCP afaik. Fu Tieshan was a Catholic and vice chairman of the National People’s Congress and Hui Liangyu a vice premier in the Ministry of Agriculture is a Muslim, those are just the first two I can think of off the top of my head. There are probably more.
I do see. That’s the point I was getting at, although rather obliquely. There don’t seem to be any large groups that perform charity or commit terrorism because they don’t believe in god. I think you overstated the case though, as there are lots of people who don’t believe in god and are really excited about it. As someone who has never believed in god I don’t really understand what happens to people to make them so angry at something they don’t believe in or at people who do believe in it. But they’re definitely out there, which is why I generally don’t self identify as an atheist in conversation even though I meet the literal definition perfectly. So I think it’s a fair question to ask whether any of the people who are really into not believing in god formed a charity or a terrorism group. As far as I know they haven’t.
Oh, I don’t know… back then, terrorists didn’t phone up newspapers to claim their attacks, but there were quite a few arsons in churches in the Spain of the 1930s. My grandfather claims to have been part of several, as well as lynchings of “people of the cloth” (priests and nuns). And yet for some reason, he doesn’t think that the people who tried to lynch his father for being a cop were in the right, even though he probably knew a few personally.
My mother claims that the reason she became so church-going was specifically because it pisses her father off no end.
No, the atheism being incidental (and not their cause) is the point. There are serial killers who are self-professed Christians – does that mean Christianity is an organization based on serial killing?
The question and the responses point out that the reason people do good works in the name of their religion, rather than just because (as part of a secular organization that doesn’t specify a religious affiliation nor disavow one, or on their own), is often because of the tribal aspects of religions. This is what we, our group, is doing. Non-believers tend not to have that tribal aspect to their non-belief.
Now mind you some non-believers are very tribal in their non-belief system. You can find them on these boards on occasion, framing belief or non-belief as an us vs them formulation. The militant atheist who feels the need to get others to join his or her non-belief system. But overall I think they are the exception not the rule. Most non-believers have other tribal identities instead.
That’s actually a really good way of putting it.
Great post, DSeid. I think what you propose is also linked, via identity, with how it’s generally easier to get people to help someone they know or someone specific (the whole idea behind “sponsor a child” programs; the reason everybody in my high school who could do so became an organ donor, as one of us needed a new kidney so it was seen as “helping José Luis” and not “helping some sick dude”). People whose tribe is very linked to the specific religion will be more likely to have conversion programs or programs which focus exclusively on correligionaries than people whose tribe is something else.
Sure, but the tribal identities of atheists and other secular types don’t impel them towards charitable giving nearly as much as religion does. Religious people donate far more to charity than do the secular (cite), and even contribute in ways not affected by income like donating blood as well.
Religious people tend to be happier, too (cite, cite, cite, etc.), and therefore have the emotional energy available to be altruistic.
It seems the answer to the OP is 'there are some, but not many". As mentioned, most atheists/secular types use charities founded on religious principles or by religious people when they do their (substantially lower) charitable giving.
Regards,
Shodan
Where do you get that “substantially lower” horseshit?
A lot of the “charity” that religious groups preform is actually missionary work. I want to give all the churches a big pat on the back for the soup kitchens, food banks and such they do - I’m sure they help a lot of people. But … there is no denying that the handouts come with a price and that price is listening to the “message”. Remember that every single thing that a religious organization does and every single dollar they collect is tax deductible. So when religion X takes in $100 tax free dollars and then spends $5 on charitable work they are hardly even meeting the test that most of us would use for to measure a “charitable” organization.
So, the day that “atheism” becomes like other religions - meaning when every dollar I give to any atheist organization is automatically and unquestioningly tax deductible - there probably won’t be that many atheist charities.
A lot of what gets counted as religious “charitable giving” also involves donations to churches, rather than specific charitable endeavors.
This is interesting. I hope your grandfather is still around to answer some questions. My guess would be that they attacked churches and priests because they were seen as tools of repression, and not because of any belief in a diety.
But I would love to hear his take on that – was it the faith they were attacking, or the church’s role as a patriarchal institution of control?