Because getting rid of the tool would cause far more harm than just letting it exist.
I am generally curious about this, how do you suggest that we get people to give up their religious belief? Ask them nicely? How exactly do you see this playing out? How can we actively get rid of religion without trampling on people’s freedom?
In history whenever groups have advocated getting rid of religion, the slaughter of religious people is not far away. It would be ironic to slaughter all the religious believers so that religion won’t exist to cause slaughters.
In this thread I think the biggest goalpost shifting is being done on what “religion” actually is and why it always leads to violence. People have been very adamant that we need to get rid of it, yet no-one has really been able to give a good reason why or even what precisely it is that we ahve to get rid of.
So is it that basically anyone that does not chare your unique view on the world has abandoned reality and reason? Are you really that arrogant?
Also, since we are talking about rationality and reason, can you give some rational, reasonable evidence that religion has been grossly detrimental to society. I think it is really telling that the sorts of evidence for the evils of religion people cite are things like the crusades, or the inquisition, things that happened centuries ago. Are you actually interested in forming views based on evidence or do you just want to shout at religious people how evil they are?
So again it comes down to anything that you don’t agree with is a religion. Care to enunciate exactly what facts or logic religions are in denial of? Secondly it seems as though you are a moral realist (in that you believe objective moral values exist). How do you define that objective morality in absense of God?
I will grant you that Communism is not the sum total of atheism. There are other types of atheism. The way I see it atheism is the opposite of theism. Theism is merely the belief in God, atheism is merely the disbelief in God. Taken just like that neither view really motivates someone to do anything. However no-one just believes in these atheism and theism. Everyone adds extra beliefs onto these statements which define their worldview. On the atheist side Communism is one set of possible extra beliefs. There are others, such as naturalism or existentialism. Despite the differences between these beliefs the statement that “no atheists have committed atrocities because of their atheist beliefs” is false because Communists, being a subset of atheists, have committed attrocities to advance their communistic ideology.
Not really. The reason I suggested violence is twofold. One is that historically violence towards religious people is usually where the sentiment of “we need to get rid of religion” ends up. Secondly education has been tried before and failed. There are plenty of smart educated people who also are believers in religions. In fact that is why I think we are starting to see atheists becoming more militant. I think that atheism is starting to lose much of the intellectual ground that it occupied in the middle of the 20th century, and as a result atheists are becoming more intolerant, anti-intellectual and shrill in their critiques of religion. So I didn’t bring up education simply because I don’t think it would work.
Unless of course by “education” you mean “indoctrination”. Still I don’t think that would work either, unless you also backed it up with efforts to intentionally keep the people ignorant and also gave out harsh punnishments to anyone who became religious. Of course by that stage any pretense that you are doing this to make the world a better place has completely gone out the window.
Nonsense. That is, again, just an attempt to equate Communist fanatics with all atheists so you can pretend we are all mass murderers.
No, people have given definitions; you just don’t like them.
No, I said nothing like that; you are just (unsurprisingly) twisting my words.
Don’t be silly, naturally a thread on the subject of historical evils committed by religion would neglect more recent evils; those aren’t the point. I can go on and on about evils being committed in the name of religion right now, and have in the past. Religion is still committing massive amounts of evil today, as it always has and as I’m sure it always will as long as it exists.
Many or all of the laws of physics for one. And there’s the fact that there’s no evidence for any of them. And the fact that they wildly contradict each other. And contain internal contradictions. And generally outright contradict reality; the Christian Problem of Evil being a classic example. And so on. They are all gibbering nonsense.
God is morally irrelevant, even if he was anything other than incoherent nonsense. Nor do I buy into objective morality, or care if it exists or not.
Wrong. Plenty of people are just atheists; very, very few people are just theists. Nor does being an atheist require the elevation of fantasy over reality; theism does. Nor for that matter is the argument about “theism” in the first place; it is about religion. Nor is the constant attempt to lump together atheism and communism anything but an attempt to demonize atheists.
This holds largely for the US. Where you have, from what I gather, a bad educational system.
It’s not by chance that you have a proportionally large number of religious nutters, and people who vote republican.
This is called projection.
wikidef: a psychological defense mechanism where a person unconsciously denies their own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world.
No, that’s just standard Christian persecution fantasies. Christians are the sort who think they are being persecuted if the people they are oppressing or killing fight back or complain about it.
Not that many. And it also depends on the quality of the education; American science education is seriously deficient because it is designed to cater to Christianity. Nor does being “smart and educated” keep them from being intellectually crippled by being religious.
Now that’s a classic case of psychological projection if I ever saw one. That’s not atheism you are describing, it’s American Christianity. Anti-intellectual, ignorant, shrill, losing intellectual ground, intolerant, indoctrination, harsh punishments - that’s Christianity, not atheism.
With pleasure. For the Spanish Inquisition, we have an upper limit of 2,000 deaths. For Chairman Mao’s reign, different sources provide widely varying death tolls, but the very lowest I’ve ever seen is twenty million persons killed. That’s more than 2,000 murders per day. Keep in mind that’s using the higher estimate for the Spanish Inquision and the lowest estimate for Mao. If we used more accurate numbers, we’d probably find that Mao was doing a Spanish Inquisition every few hours for 27 years, on average.
First of all, please provide a cite to justify this sentence.
Second, concerning the Spanish Inquisition, while it’s not an institution that I’d particularly want to see returning, it was a much better insitution than the secular courts of its time. A look at some facts tells us:
To your first question, I believe that the communist atrocities from only the 20th century vastly exceed those committed by religion over the millenia. In answer to your O’Casey quote, I’d just point out that politicians have slain their tens of millions, not just thousands. As far as history books, try A History of Russia, by Paul L. Dukes. He documents 23 millions death by Stalin and millions more by other Soviet leaders, and needless to say Stalin ran a distant third behind Hitler and Mao in the 20th century’s mass-murder sweepstakes. So maybe you should think twice before directing me to read “any history book” and find proof that these guys killed only “thousands”.
Mao and Stalin both proudly slaughtered religious believers because they believed that exterminating religion was necessary. In the Soviet Union, tens of thousands of clergy were massacred or sent to the gulags along with countless other believers. In China, during the Cultural Revolution, Mao attempted to exterminate all religious believers, some by murder, others by torture and forced labor. Those are not lone examples, but similar things have happened at various times in France, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Germany, Guatemala, … For example, Randy Sullivan of Rolling Stone reported on the Bosnian War and on how the atheist authorities in Serbia were especially irritated by the abiding Catholic faith of the Croats. In one instance, Serbian soldiers abducted a group of Catholic nuns from a convent, gang-raped them repeatedly, then held them prisoner until they could be sure that the nuns were pregnant, so that they’d have to choose between having an abortion or carrying a child of a Serbian rapist.
Again, where’s the evidence? Since you have to go so many centuries back to find your examples of Christian atrocities, atrocities which are extremely small compared to those committed by secular governments more recently, doesn’t that rather suggest the opposite? If religiously-motivatved violence occurs automatically as you seem to think, why can’t you point to any examples of Christians committing mass violence in recent times? When I look around the world, I see huge amounts of mass violence and human rights abuse from secular regimes and institutions and not much chance of most of it ending anytime soon, so it certainly looks to be like that’s what is self-generating.
First of all, you’re obviously not familiar with Der Trihs. Second, consider this. During the war in El Salvador when right-wing death squads fought against communists and both sides were willing to mass slaughter the populace with indifference, who stood up for the rights up the people of El Salvador, other than the Catholic Church? During the even longer and bloodier war in Guatemala, which went along basically the same lines, who stood up for the indigenous people of Guatemala, other than the Catholic Church? In the current situation in Honduras, who stands up for the rights of workers and the extreme poor, other than the Catholic Church and some Protestant groups? To anyone who knows the history of these countries, it’s obvious that thousand and possibly millions more people would have been killed if the Church hadn’t been there to fight for peace and human rights. The non-religious people who are supposed to help each other out without religion were simply missing in action. So is it your position that huge numbers of people in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and other countries should have been killed because the institution that saved their lives is “easily wielded for evil”?
(Incidentally, as you can see in this thread, many of your fellow atheists do not think that this particular instance of assistance to the war victims in El Salvador was a good thing.)
To my mind, 'foregiving" or “condemning” religion on historical grounds is a futile exercise. Religion as an institution is a part of human social evolution, like tribalism. I suppose it is possible to imagine human-level organisms developing civilization without religion or tribalism, but they would not resemble us much.
We might as well foregive or condemn humanity for being what it is.
I don’t think they did. The common portrait of the Spanish Inquisition is not based on history, but rather on propaganda. During the religious controversies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Protestants found it useful to accuse the Catholic Church of all manner of horrendous crimes, often making up the ‘facts’ as they went along. Many of the fictions they dreamed up eventually found their way into mainstream history books. For example, your claim that the Inquisition tortured people to force their conversions is flatly false. Historian Yves Dossat did a study of historical records from of Inquisition cases in one Diocese and found that more than 80% of people who were accused were found innocent and released. Among those who were convicted, only a very small percentage were sentenced to prison. Defendants had the right to counsel from a lawyer, to know the charges against them and respond to those charges, to have time to prepare their defense, to present evidence for themselves, and to call opposing witnesses into question, all of which was in contrast to the secular courts of that time. [(Cite)](http://www.catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/protestantism/holinquisit.htm#MYTH 3)
I think religion changes enough that it doesn’t really seem all that fair to lay any kind of responsibilty for atrocities (or triumphs) in the past at its feet. A Christian today might well be appalled by the beliefs of a Christian of 200 AD, and vice-versa. Too, we have the difficulty of seperating out both religion from context, and specific religion from general; as people have already said, we can’t simply look at the actions of a religious person or group and say that those actions were taken because they were religious. On top of that, we can’t even really look at a person’s actions and say what level of religious adherence is at fault; is a Catholic who commits atrocities doing so because of his Christianity, his Catholicism, his Catholicism of the time, his particular congregation’s views, his own personal beliefs? The further in we go, the more likely it is that there are causing reasons for their behaviour (because there simply are more potential reasons), but we have to generalise less too.
Really, i’m uncomfortable with assigning blame or praise to anything so potentially nebulous as a philosophy. Nice as it might be to look at the world and see which are the problematic viewpoints, so that we know where to be extra careful, the truth is that atrocities are a result of people, not philosophies. Religion (or irreligion) is a vast enough subject that we really can’t just say “This philosophy is inherently a force for good/evil in the world”, or set blame to it which needs to be forgiven or forgotten.
The Spanish Inquisition was really small potatoes, persecution-wise, and made (in)famous by Protestant popaganda. It was horrible, but not the be-all and end-all of horrors that it is remembered.
Far more significant a crime was what we would now term the “ethnic cleansing” of Jews and Muslims from Spain, of which the Inquisition was merely the tail end effect. But it is questionable how much this had to do with religion specifically, as opposed to simple ethnic conflict - that line is pretty fuzzy.
More sleazy tricks from you. Yes, the Inquisition tortured people to force their confessions of guilt rather than to change their mind. Well, that changes everything, doesn’t it ?
You don’t get it, do you ? It could have been 100% and it wouldn’t change a thing. There could never have been any torture beyond the Comfy Chair and it wouldn’t change a thing. The people were being arrested and put on kangaroo trials for not believing in the right sky pixie*. *Or worse, for believing in the right sky pixie but not in the right way.
You can not make that look anyway other than absurd and abject, no matter how you try. Trying does make you no better than a Holocaust denier in my book, however.
No. Your demand here for a cite is absolutely specious and vacuously rhetorical. You know bloody goddamn well of the volume of wars and atrocities, both large-scale and personal, that have been wrought around the world in the name of or for the cause of religion. As has already been pointed out, the actual body count of the Spanish Inquisition ALONE is not at all the whole picture, as you tried to portray it! There were untold tortures, confiscations, imprisonments, banishments…
For fuck’s sake, I have been the victim of religious harm! :mad: As a matter of fact, it’s only thanks to the historical intervention of secular humanism that thinkers like Der Trihs and I are not dead RIGHT NOW, slain for our skepticism. Historically, in theocratic Christian regimes, this very discussion would be illegal. It is only thanks to secularism, that it is legal.
The foreskins and clitorises of the 20th century ALONE, sliced off of unconsenting infants in the name of religion (note that nowadays, circumcision in the West continues based on pseudoscientific “hygenic” justifications) FAR EXCEED the number of any victims of any atheistic totalitarian regime, anytime, anywhere. That’s just basic math.
This statement is a reflection of exactly the sort of moral sickness that religious belief leads to. “The Spanish Inquisition wasn’t all that bad…” :eek: Racists say the same thing about the Third Reich.
Communist. Not atheist. Thanks for making that distinction, and sparing me the tiresome task of having to point out to you–again–that the two aren’t at all synonymous. Point closed.
Seriously? You don’t understand that “thousands” is just a figurative term here, a placeholder for the sake of basic comparative illustration? Wow, MAJOR whoosh!
(Politics, btw, is a necessary evil. Religion is not.)
Again, you got majorly whooshed with the O’Casey quote. Why are religious folks always so narrowly literalistic??
No. We’re done here. You already admitted that these were Communist murders.
Again, I sit shocked, in disbelief at the reprehensible misrepresentations that religious apologists will engage in. A religionist using the recent BALKANS WAR as an indictment of atheism??? Seriously??? Do you really not understand the BROAD religious violence that was systematically waged there? Do you really not understand the ethnic and religious conflicts that formed the foundations of that bloody war? Or are you just trying to ignore them? You point out the microscopic speck in the secularist’s eye, ignoring the old-growth forest, in your own! This is pot-kettlism on a positively COSMIC scale. :eek:
Nope. My missing foreskin alone, is more than enough. (Surely you won’t be so specious and ignorant as to try to argue that modern American circumcision was not inspired by 19th-century Christian religious masturba-phobia, and modeled on an ancient, barbaric, tribal religious custom!)
In a larger geo-context, examples of very recent, very modern religious atrocities ABOUND, of course. But I reckon you’d also try to find some sleazy way of dismissing the abuses of $cientology, the religious genocides of Rwanda and Sudan, the Jonestown and Branch Davidian and Heaven’s Gate murder/suicides, the physical and sexual abuses of thousands of children at the hands of Catholic clerics, the forced clitorectomies of African baby girls, the murder and dismemberment of albinos in Africa, and so on, and so on, and so on… All 20th century. And all the just off the top of my head. I didn’t even do any Googling. ITRc, you have singlehandedly pushed me further towards anti-theism than Harris, Krakauer, Hitchens, and Dawkins EVER could. :mad:
There have been a small number of “war and atrocities” committed “for the name of religion”, small in number and consequence compared to those committed by secular people and institutions who were proud of their total rejection of religion. However, in post 24, you said such atrocities had been committed “in every nation” and “for at least the past 3,000 years”. I think that what you said is false, and I’m asking you to provide a cite to back it up. If you’re unable to do so, then I’ll feel quite safe concluding that what you said in post 24 is false. Please don’t retreat do that silly, old ‘you know bloody gaddamn well line’. If what you said in post 24 was actually widely known, then providing a cite for it would be trivially easy for you.
Since Kobal declines to provide a cite to back up this claim, why don’t you provide one?
This claim is flatly untrue. Skeptics have lived and freely expressed their views in countries with Christian majorities for millenia. If you want me to believe otherwise, please provide a cite.
When, exactly, did I say “the Spanish Inquisition wasn’t all that bad”? I don’t recall saying that; in fact, I said the exact opposite of it. I said: “The Spanish Inquisition is not an institution that I’d like to see return.” If the best that you can do is try to pin fake quotes on me, maybe you should try harder.
Stalin, Mao, Castro and all were communists and also atheists. As I’ve and others have already pointed out, they specifically murdered, tortured, and imprisoned huge numbers of Christians and other religious believers because they believed that the extermination of religion would be a good thing. If you’d like to actually respond to this fact, rather than just saying “communist” over and over again, you’re welcome to do so.
Well, that leads us straight back to the claim that religion has caused more wars and atrocities then secular institutions, which I’ve yet to see any evidence for.
I’ve done nothing of the sort; please stop misrepresenting me. Among the tens of millions who were killed, tortured, imprisoned, or exiled during the Stalin years, some were chosen because of Stalin’s economic dogma and some because of his atheistic dogma.
Let me get this straight. Yugoslavia was ruled by two atheist dictators from the end of WWII until 1997, Tito and Milosevic. Like their fellow atheist dictators in many other countries, they werre murderous, and particularly murderous towards religious believers. The common figures I’ve seen are 250,000 murders for Tito and 105,000 for Milosevic. Now, apparently, you’re telling me that because these atheists murdered so many Christians and Muslims, this apparently proves that religious people are violent? That’s kind of like blaming the Polish for all the violence they commited against Germans in 1933-1945. You point to “ethnic and religious conflicts” in the Balkans generations before the Bosnia War. There were a few religious conflicts, though most violence was more from tribal groups clashing over land and ancient feuds. That has nothing to do with the war in the 90’s. The war in the 90’s began because Milosevic refused to allow the Catholic Croats and Bosnian Muslims to seperate from Yugoslavia peacefully. He attacked them, they–quite reasonably–fought back.
Huh? American circumcision was based on medical advice, with scant ties, if any, to the ancient Jewish practice. There are medical arguments both for and against it, so listing it as an “atrocity” is a desperate grasp at a straw that only a desperate person would make. As for “unconsenting infants”, we stick unconsenting infants with needles for medical reasons all the time. So the infants get a few minutes of pain; it’s part of life.
I could, of course, move through the list, pointing out instances of your untruths and distortions. (For instance, there was never any religious genocide in Rwanda; there was an ethnic genocide.) But you’re obviously trying to lead us off track here. As anyone can see, your attempt to prove “religion” to be evil has changed direction. Whereas you formerly insisted that religious people were “easily turned to evil” all the time, you now have to pick mainly at minor cults and distractions. Being a mainstream Christian I’ve nothing to do with Scientology are any of that crap, and in fact it all serves to remind me of why I made the wise choice to be a mainstream Christian. To attack Christianity for the deeds of Scinetologists is like saying: “Republicans are evil, thus all politicians are evil, thus I’ll spend my life attacking Democrats.”
Your attempt to blame Christians for the atrocities committed by atheists isn’t doing much to convince me of the merits of atheism, now that you mention it.
A lot of you here are missing the point. IANAA, but atheism is not a group you join, it’s a form of independence.
Atheists are not responsible for each others’ actions the way religious people are because atheism is not a certain something, it a lack of something.
If you’re a Catholic, then you’ve chosen to associate yourself with the organization that perpetrated the Spanish Inquisition. If you’re an atheist you have no more to do with Stalin and Mao that you do with the Spanish Inquisition.
Again…people using people…Jim Jones used them in spite of his own death. He is the one that developed the method for their deaths…religion (dare I say of the “Communist” stripe?) along with cyanide and koolaid. It also could be argued that his charisma rather than his “religion” was a better tool to get the masses to drink the poison.
Your other argument about “psychological disease” that religion is just plain wrong. People suffer from a variety of mental illnesses and do horrible things without religion being involved. There are religious people who are peaceful throughout their entire lives where religion is involved…I only have to go as far as my mother-in-law to see that. Therefore, the two are not mutually exclusive.
I’m not seeing the logic here. If I choose to be a member of the Democratic Party, then I’ve chosen to associate with the Democratic Party, but it does not make me responsible for what the Democratic Party does. Moreover, it does not make me responsible for what the Republican Party does, nor the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, and so forth. So how would me being an Episcopalean make me responsible for the choices of the Episcopalean leadership, much less the leadership of other denominations or other religions?
Here’s a further consideration. If someone were to bash members of the Democratic Party based on the fact that they joined a party which defended slavery in the mid-19th century, we’d all agree that that person was desperate, and clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as excuses for attacking the Democratic Party. Similarly for anyone who brings up the Spanish Inquisition in order to bash the Catholilc Church, only more so, since the Spanish Inquisition is much farther removed in time from us than the Democratic Party’s support for slavery.
On the other hand, if a person does devote himself to attacking the Democratic Party and blocking everything it does, then he is responsible for cases where he helped block an action of the Democratic Party. Likewise if Cyningablod devotes himself to attacking all religions and, imagining for a second that he succeeded, then he would be (jointly with others) responsible for the huge numbers of deaths and other disasters that would befall in those areas of the world where religion is a main provider of food, medicine, education, and other necessities, and where religion is a bulkwark against secular tyranny.