Al Qaeda are the merest dilettantes in the body-count Olympics. They’re not historically impressive enough to make such a comparison worthwhile. If they ever got power to rival a Stalin, Hitler or Mao, then it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they wiped out disliked popuations. I figure they’d have a good shot of emulating the Ottoman Empire, and I’d hate to be the modern equivalent of an Armenian that got in their way.
Numbres-wise; agreed.
Yeah, but if we’re comparing mere numbers, we need to control for 20th-century technology and population growth. Suppose Pope Julius II had gas chambers and trains and machine guns? What if the Thirty Years’ War was fought with tanks and bombers? People who were atheist (but nevertheless dedicated to something just as irrational as religion) who come to power are relatively recent and get the benefit, as it were, of having deadlier tools at their disposal, plus a whole lot more people that can be slaughtered.
Meh, the problem isn’t theism or atheism, it’s power. A fundamentalist Christian who is part of a checks-and-balances government is a lot less dangerous than an atheist dictator, and vice-versa.
Anyway, “atheism” is not a belief system in and of itself.
You are the one that is guilty of committing the fallacy of equivocation. He didn’t use “alive” in a different sense and blood cells are distinct organisms.
It seems you’re implying that medical science thinks something differently about human life than atheists on this board. I’ve seen no evidence of this. Your cite says that “human development begins at fertilization”, not that “life begins at conception”, as you put it, which implies that a single celled zygote is a human or deserves the respect or rights of a human. That’s not what your cite says.
Again, you seem to be implying something that differs from something atheists on this board might disagree with and I’m not seeing it. What is the point of writing “not merely alive in the same sense that a single cell might be”? Not merely alive? I’ve never read anyone on this board claim an embryo isn’t a distinct organism that doesn’t have differences from a blood cell (or any other kind of cell).
What was the point of your link? What was written there that you think any atheists on this board may disagree with?
No, it’s a common sense view. Everyone on this board knows that an embryo is alive. What you mean by distinct, I’m not sure, but I’d bet we all agree with that also. I don’t see what you think some atheists disagree with.
Life doesn’t begin at conception, IMO it’s more accurate to say it never ends. The sperm cell is alive, the ovum is alive. The real question is when does this newly modified cell (an egg that accepts DNA from the sperm) that is unquestionably alive and was so before fertilization become human, and worthy of the protections granted by society to all humans.
You might want to check out the underlying study. Click the figure links near the bottom of the page for javascript charts. Some of the relationships are highly dubious. The homicide relationship is driven by 2 countries - the US and to a much lesser extent Portugal. It’s not robust. The suicide and life expectancy charts are a mess, very noisy. And no effort was made to control for confounding factors.
Since the study limits itself to the relationship between pairs of variables only, it represents suggestive evidence at best. That said, they did identify some reasonably tight scatterplots. Greater absolute belief is associated with higher infant mortality and teen abortion. Atheism and agnosticism are associated with lower measures of the same.
A far more sophisticated paper concluded that “…economic growth responds positively to the extent of religious beliefs, notably those in hell and heaven, but negatively to church attendance. That is, growth depends on the extent of believing relative to belonging.” Religion and Economic Growth | NBER Future work will attempt to evaluate the effects of Jack Chick tracts.
It was taught to me in school that the first Christians were communists in it’s purest form because it came from the word Communion. The sharing of all things.
It apparently has developed over the years to have a different meaning it is still not a religion.
Life is a passed on thing, even if one believes the Genesis story it was passed on from person to person for generations. If your ancestors eons ago hadn’t existed neither would you. You owe your life to them, or the first life that existed.
Blood cells are NOT organisms! They are parts of a larger organism. That is a huge and rather basic distinction, one that every seventh grader should know.
He IS committing the fallacy of equivocation. When pro-lifers say that the embryo is alive, they are talking about it being a living and distinct organism. It is pure sophistry to argue that blood cells are also alive, since they are not alive in the same sense that an organism is.
I said nothing about the atheists on this board. What I am saying is that medical textbooks affirm that the embryo is a living organism, which means that this belief is not exclusively religious in nature. When people (whether theist or atheist, Christian or non-Christian, conservative or liberal) insist that this is simply a religious belief, they are simply mistaken.
I don’t know what you’re arguing about here. There is no doubt it was the religoids who prevented public funding of embryonic stem cell research. If you want to throw in a few atheists as well, I won’t argue the point, though. But to imply that the two groups have equivalent ratios to their opposition is pretty ridiculous.
Communism isn’t a religion any more than Capitalism is. They are political/economic systems with followers who sometimes treat it with a religious zeal. Both have had horrible consequences over large groups of people. They have brought a lot of destruction and exploitation while secretly believing their actions will result in converts.
If you’re not talking about atheists on this board, what’s your point? Who are these people that claim that the belief that an embryo is an organism is simply a religious one?
What’s the practical difference between a religion and something treated with religious zeal?
That’s like asking the difference between Catholicism and a Thanksgiving turkey.
I dunno, I bet a lot of Catholics skip church and yet really like turkey. Mine isn’t a flippant question - in the absence of evidence that God exists and such, what’s the practical difference between someone who goes to church regularly, gets an emotional lift from it, tries to live by the sermons delivered and preaches to others… and someone who goes to party meetings regularly, gets an emotional lift from it, tries to live by the speeches delivered and lectures to others?
If the main difference is God, isn’t it of some relevance whether or not God actually exists? If he doesn’t, all we have are two people who like their own beliefs but nobody else’s, in competition for converts.
(my numbers)
I’d wish to stop this hijack at some point.
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Agreed on the idea that modern technology makes it easier to wipe ridiculously high numbers of people and that people in that past couldn’t. What those people would have done is in practical terms unanswerable. I would imagine, though, that the thirty years’ war wouldn’t have been that long.
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I mostly agree, particularly if we’re talking about a modern multi-religion multi-cultural society.
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I agree that “belief system” is not the best name - even if it isn’t wholly wrong. Philosophy? Life-outlook?
Dismissing your god for the same reason you’ve dismissed all the other gods?
Uzi, for one. As I cite, I refer you to my original response on this topic.
Note that my comment addressed the claim that an embryo’s status as a living organism is a purely religious belief. I most certainly did NOT claim that all atheists on the SDMB espouse this claim. I didn’t even claim that a significant number of them do, though I suspect that’s true. Heck, my comment applies equally well to anyone – whether theist or atheist, Christian or non-Christian, conservative or liberal – who erroneously says that people who believe that the embryo is a living organism are basing this on nothing but religious faith.
As proof, I cited embryology textbooks and other medical references that make the same claim. As I said, one might disagree with those claims (misguidedly so, IMO), but the point remains that even these secular sources claim that the embryo is a living and distinct organism.
The same can NOT be said of individual blood cells or skin cells. They are not organisms by any stretch of the imagination.
Wouldn’t that be a hijack of a hijack anyways? 
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I was wondering how one would call what Atheism is.
It’s not a religion and belief system is not quite right.