This is particularly true if Lissener’s social preferences mean that the majority of the people he has as friends are on the Atheist Agnostic side. Given that Lissener doesn’t know the religious stance of the vast majority of the people he meets on a day to day basis, the only way he would know is if either 1) He is close enough to them to learn their religion in which case a high proportion of them will be Atheists and also people he likes, or 2) An evangelist who makes a point of shoving their beliefs in everyone’s face which Lissener unsurprisingly finds off putting.
Similarly someone who tended to hang out with a lot of mild mannered Christians would think that they are nice as compared with with Dawkins and the like who are their only models of Atheists.
I have absolutely no idea. I’m pretty sure apostasy and blasphemy are considered crimes in some countries, in some cases capital crimes, so I doubt the number is zero. But in these cases it would be the religious doing the killing. I can’t imagine a situation, past or present, where a lack of belief led to the murder of believers. A competing belief, yes, but not a lack of belief. To posit otherwise would be to suggest something like passionate apathy exists, which as a nearly tautological oxymoron strikes me as unlikely.
Same here, with the exception that there are a handful of issues, like gay marriage, where more religious people are on what I consider the wrong side and for what I consider a rampantly stupid reason.
But other than that subset of issues, I don’t see a correlation.
Shodan suggests that atheists kill lots of people because they lack the religious morality to guide them away from mass slaughter. Stalin did deliberately kill a lot of people, and he may have caused the deaths of many others by mismanagement. Some may have been singled out on the basis of their religion or ethnicity. Mao caused a lot of deaths, but from what I can tell, the lion’s share were not intentional (the Great Leap Forward was just not a good idea from the get-go). Pol Pot, well, it looks like he was either a major asshole, or stupid, or both. All tolled, though, these deaths count for nowhere near “hundreds” of millions – a lot less, if you take out the apparently unintentional ones.
But, numbers aside, the larger point is the suggestion that these deaths would have been prevented by a bit of proper churching. Was Stalin an evil atheist, or did he suffer from crippling paranoia? Would a christian, jewish, islamic, buddhist or hindu Stalin have been a better person? That much is about equivalent to asking whether or not Noah failed to prevent the big cats from getting into the unicorn paddocks and eatng them all before the ark could land.
In the end, we have no useful evidence that shows a moral/ethical difference for any given person as an atheist vs. as a believer. We do know, however, that some people use religion to justify serious nastiness, but I have never actually heard of a person using unbelief as an excuse to be brutal or viciously cruel.
An argument that fails because religion *isn’t moral. *And certainly isn’t averse to mass slaughter.
Neither. He was a Communist and a megalomaniac. Of course, atheism-bashers ignore the fact that atheism and Communism aren’t the same thing so they can portray atheists as all monsters.
Worse, probably. I’d give a “Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist or Hindu” version of Stalin much better odds of just deciding to nuke the world at some point. Especially Christian given how enthusiastic for the Apocalypse they often are.
Atheism doesn’t kill people, fanaticism and lust for power kills people. Stalin didn’t kill people because he was an atheist, but because of his fanatical lust for power.
Of course, much the same holds true for religion. The Spanish Inquisition didn’t kill people because of Christianity, but because of its fanaticism and lust for control. In fact, it bears a lot of similarity to Stalin’s “League of Militant Athiests”:
Nonsense, that’s a false equivalency. Nothing about atheism demands that non-atheists be oppressed, harmed, or killed*; but oppressing and killing non-Christians is a central part of the religion, demanded by its worldview and for most of its history by the overwhelming majority of its adherents. The Inquisition and other similar or worse Christian groups were just acting as their religion clearly demands; it’s the Christians who call for tolerance and the like who are twisting their religion.
*Because atheism doesn’t make any demands at all. It has no commandments, no prohibitions; it’s not a belief system, it’s disbelieving in one thing. Communism on the other hand is a belief system, a system that is a religion in all but name - which is why it tends to be so murderous.
I’d say that Stalin wasn’t predominantly motivated by atheism, while Hitler was very much motivated by antisemitism, part of a long Christian tradition up to that point. But Malthus’ link demonstrates that 1930s militant atheism killed hundreds at the very least, probably thousands. And actually if you tally up the clergy arrested and executed the numbers range from 20,000 to 200,000.
Check out the links Der. The League Of Militant Atheists published reams of propaganda and agitated for the violent persecution of the religious, resulting in thousands of deaths. Now I understand that most of Stalin’s targets were Kulaks. But it turns out that a few mustache twirling atheists actually existed.
Bolshevek oppression of the church, 1928-1941: USSR anti-religious campaign (1928–1941) - Wikipedia
Bear in mind that these attacks on the clergy occurred during a time of vicious and wide oppression and purges, with a death count among the wider populace numbering in the millions.
All that said, I’d say there’s a shorter line people Hitler and sectarian Christianity than between Communist Atheism and modern atheists. Neither Dawkens nor the Flying Spaghetti Monster folk advocate persecution in any recognizable fashion, while Christian anti-abortion terrorism occurs with some regularity. Both linkages are pretty remote though, IMHO.
That’s militant antitheism, not atheism. Atheism is purely self-referencing, the state of not believing in gods. Opposition to the religious beliefs of others is antitheism.
For example, Der Trihs aside, it is not actually a tenant of Christianity to militantly oppose the beliefs of others - quite the opposite, what with all that meek and mild, turn the other cheek stuff (I myself am not a Christian, BTW).
This of course has not stopped certain Christians from doing exactly that - setting up inquisitions to persecute heritics and Jews.
Likewise, there is nothing in atheism that requires any athiest to actively persecute believers - rather, one would assume, to feel sorry that they are deluded enough to take such superstitions seriously. Yet that has not stopped atheists in the Soviet system from setting up an athiest version of the inquisition.
In short, both theists and atheists can be “antitheists” when it comes to the beliefs of others. All that is needed is the power, self-righteousness, and lack of moral relection to impose one’s will on others by violence.
Agreed. That said, the distinction is this: both the meek and mild and the militant Crusader are called Christians; both believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, though their beliefs diverge from there. This needn’t be true of atheists who oppose religious belief and those who do not, as there is a handy term for the former (though, very strictly speaking, you can be an antitheist without being an atheist, though it is surely rare).
This distinction matters, because it’s important to instill the fact that atheism is not a belief system and has no doctrines. Any beliefs an atheist holds beyond lack of belief in a god or gods is something separate from atheism, just as any beliefs a Christian holds beyond belief in a god or gods is something separate from theism.
I’m not sure using different terms makes much pratical difference.
To my mind, the interesting question is this: is the observed immorality (for brevity, let’s call it an “inquisition”) a consequence of (say) either a person being a believing Christian on the one hand, or an atheist on the other?
My answer is that, in both cases, it is not.
Indeed, in the case of the Christian, one could go even further and state that holding an inquisition is antithical to what the Christian holy books actually state (though acknowleged, that in various forms of Christianity the belief system is only partly based on the gospels).
In the case of the atheist, of course, atheism imposes no moral beliefs one way or the other; the source of morality isn’t atheism per se; as you state, atheism imposes no positive beliefs at all - it is a mere description of an absence of belief in a god or gods. An atheist could be either highly moral or highly immoral and of course that would have nothing to do with atheism.
The roots of inquisitions lie elsewhere - they do not grow organically out of either belief or non-belief, but out of the politics of violence and subordination. The Spanish Inquisition may have been staffed by priests and monks, but it was more the direct ancestor of the (non-religious) SS or Soviet KGB than a natural outgrowth of belief in Christ (the incompatibility of Christ with the Inquisition is a major plot point in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, in the story-within-a-story “The Grand Inquisitor”.)
While it is possible to just be an atheist(someone who does not believe in gods), is it possible for someone to just be a theist(someone who believes in god or gods)? If not, then how is it possible to compare the ethics/morals/actions of the real former to that of the so-far hypothetical latter?
I don’t think it is possible for someone to be “just an atheist”. There is, of necessity, going to be more to their personal philosophy than simply a lack of belief in god(s).
