Really?
Tell me, if the point is not what CosmicRelief explicity identifies as “the point”, then what is the point?
Good, Now you know exactly how I’ve felt throughout this entire thread and just about any other where I discuss religion.
In his post, CosmicRelief either said one of two things: that religion is always bad, or that religion is very often bad. If he’d care to defend either statement, I’d be perfectly happy.
If I claimed that Rome was a conquering empire, would I need to show that all Romans were conquerors?
Define religion, first. I remember asking if the Bible could be used as a source and was told “Yes”, but then I was told that acts by God and act by people directed by God do not count. I then remember asking what a good example of religion being bad could be.
And didn’t receive an answer.
What are you talking about? First of all, if someone is only thinking that someone else is wrong, no one knows it and it could hardly be considered an attack. The only thing up for consideration here are posts, or speech, or writing of other sorts, all of which involve actions.
Second, I strongly suspect that both your examples are provisional. I even tweaked DerTrihs about his, and I don’t think he considered it an attack; his response wasn’t at all defensive. I haven’t read the Stoids thread. Hyperbole isn’t the same as absolutism.
A provisional statement doesn’t have to include tons of weasel words. All we need is for the speaker, when questioned, to admit he might be wrong. Often this only happens in a meta-discussion of the issue. When I was doing debating, I learned that you don’t cede points to your opponents, even if you might think they are right. Debaters learn to debate sides they disagree with, after all.
Now sometimes an attack is really an attack, and not just a disagreement. But not all disagreements are attacks, and polite disagreements are only considered an attack by those who hold absolute positions. Bitching about the president of the US, of whichever party, is not as dangerous as bitching about someone with absolute correctness on his side - eg Communist bans on dissent and blasphemy laws.
He said, as you quoted in post #190:
The point, as best I can tell from not entirely overlooking the first two sentences:
Religion claims to be morally superior. Ergo, it’s notable how often it has failed dramatically to show moral superiority, and fair the make judgements about that failure.
Atheism claims no moral majority whatsoever. So it is a huge strawman to claim that it is somehow failing for on occasion not meeting a standard that it does not set for itself.
There are two ways of interpreting this. First, religion somehow makes its adherents more moral. We’ve got plenty of counterexamples to that. The second is that a religion as an entity is more moral (though some adherents may not be.) We’ve got plenty of counterexamples to that to.
Is there supposed to be some correlation between morality and correctness: that is a religion which is more moral is more likely to be true? If that’s the case, then western religions are right out. Maybe there is some pacifist and moral cargo cult somewhere that is closer to being true.
No, that’s just you spinning up another strawman to poke at. Have fun with that. When you’re ready to acknowledge the bloody history of multiple religions at multiple times all over the world, then you’ll be ready to have a grown-up debate about this subject.
They had failing experience in spades. And flawed experience at that, given what I assume would be their hopes. Years of putting forward a political/economic theory and failing to get it used - a system that pretty much doesn’t survive in its exact form at all today - doesn’t make you the wisest people in world affairs. It makes you a failure, if a committed one.
To go with your analogy; the other teams knew enough about Belichick’s team to beat them (I assume. I’m even guessing you’re talking American Football, here ;)). He didn’t know enough about his team, or other teams, to get his lot to win. Were I looking to discover the person who knows the most about a confrontation - whether it’s football, idealogies, war, whatever - why on earth would I ask the loser? By definition, the sum of all their knowledge of their own side’s capabilities, the other sides’s capabilities, and how the two matched up, were lacking.
As I think I asked in my original post; why is it you’re willing to take the word of failures whose idealogy you considerably oppose? Richard Dawkins has oodles of experience as a proponent of atheism. Will you be taking his word on how atheism and Christianity interact?
First of all, it is American football, and the Patriots, who were undefeated up to the Super Bowl, were considered the next best thing to football deities. Then, they lost, to the NY Giants. 
The problem with the analogy is that Marcuse never ran a Communist country, and never, to my knowledge, spoke officially for Communism. I’m not absolutely positive he was a party member. He’s the kind of guy who is a loudmouth and wouldn’t have lasted five minutes under Stalin. So using Marcuse to define what Communism states is kind of like using Bishop Spong and the Jesus project to understand the latest Vatican findings.
Now Belichick would be a good source of information on the rules of football, but so would any other coach. Some guy sitting at home yelling at his tv is probably not as reliable, and that is a better analog for Marcuse.
Ah. I was sort of working under the assumption that these were top figures with highly significant acts and support to their names. Would I be wrong in saying that perhaps their significance is that they they’re Marxists who happen to have said Christianity was its bane?
Marcuse was a popular radical in the '60s. I don’t recall him saying anything particularly nasty abour religion, but I never paid much attention to him. I think it perfectly plausible that he said everything ITR champion implies he said. It’s just that no one really gave a crap, except radical SDSers and the like.
Let me make my point once again.
To endlessly say that “atheism” makes no claims whatever doesn’t answer my argument. If there are certain trends or events whose appearance is tightly correlated with the growth of atheism, then it’s reasonable to investigate the connection between them and atheism. If the investigation points towards the existence of a definite connection, then it accomplishes nothing to keep saying “atheism has no dogma” like a parrot with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
There are certain facts about human nature, which operate regardless of whether we believe in them. If religion and atheism are competing methods for dealing with those facts, it’s reasonable to ask which method deals with them better. To say that religion should be judged only by a tiny handful of failures while atheism gets to ignore its much larger failures is not a useful tactic. For those who got sent to the gulag because the morality of certain atheists, it doesn’t help to know that not all atheists supported it.
If Stalin had stuck with the morality taught by the Russian Orthodox Church, he would not have believed that he had the right to toss tens of millions of people to their death based only on abstract theory. More generally, a strong Church would have prevented the rise of Soviet communism and all its attendant horrors. Hence if some person, call him Bob, worked overtime to undermine that Church, his actions helped bring about the communism takeover. For Bob to protest that it wasn’t part of his morality to help communism doesn’t change the facts.
Supposing for a moment that I buy into your logic, let’s ask some of the winners. Pope John Paul II, who by all rights is one of the major figures in the West’s struggle against communism, also believed that Christianity was absolutely necessary to prevent the spread of communism.
In this case, their word lines up with the word of countless other intelligent people who have investigated the issue very carefully.
Dawkins is good at manipulating people into believing his schtik. Marcuse was good at manipulating people into believing his schtik.
We are not allowed to link the actions of those who directly followed the orders of God in the Bible with religion, yet you continue to try to link atheism to Communism. I don’t really mind the marked cards in this deck-as an atheist, I’m used to it. But at least deal some of those cards. Once again I ask: Could you please give us a good example of religion doing something really bad? If you can’t come up with a real example, give us a hypothetical, just so we’d know what would qualify under your rather stringent definition of “religion”.
My defintion of religion is the standard, dictionary definition. I’m not sure why you’re bringing that up, since contrary to what you say, I’ve never mentioned the definition of religion in this thread. Which makes sense, since religion is not the topic of this thread.
(As for the fact that you’ve chosen to not allow yourself to link the actions of those who directly followed the orders of God in the Bible with religion, whoop-dee-doo for you. But this thread is about religion. Remember?)
That should say, “this thread is not about religion”, obviously.
In any case, my complaint was this. In post 200 you complained about people who rephrase soneone else’s arguments. Now here you are making up arguments out of whole cloth and trying to pin them on me. Have I ever said that no religion ever did anything bad? No, I haven’t. You made that up and then falsely claimed that I said it? Have I ever tried to dispute the definition of religion? No. You made that up as well.
I don’t belive you’ve shown such a study. Can you show one? If not, this applies equally to christianity, and thus certainly doesn’t support your position at all.
Tiny handful? Much larger? You’re assuming a conclusion you can’t possibly prove, and which is vital to your position.
And so you’re saying that just if any theists have done any evil at any time, we should be sure to immidiately condemn religion as a whole, without regard for what other theists were doing at the time. Right?
Prove this, please. Your entire position hangs on it. Note that you have to not only prove that he wouldn’t have done evil in the name of communism, but you also have to prove that he wouldn’t have done evil in the name of that abstract theory known as the Russian Orthodox Church.
Basically, your position depends on you proving that Stalin was actually a nice, harmless guy. Have fun with that.
Actually, a strong buddhist church would have helped stifle the atrocities of christianity. Ergo, all those christans who undermined the spread of buddhism must be right bastards for doing that, and for them to protest that it wasn’t part of their morality to let another religion take over doesn’t change the facts.
Every single one of your arguments collapses the minute you stop assuming your conclusion that Christainity is best, period. So good luck preaching to your local choir, because you’re apparently not equipped to argue with anyone else.
Gee, the morality of the Russian Orthodox Church didn’t help the enslaved serfs, and it sure didn’t help my ancestors when they were attacked by the god-fearing Cossacks. Communists attacked people for standing in the way of Communism, not solely because of their religion. (Though Stalin seemed to be heading that way as his mind started to go.)
I think the reason we keep saying this is because it is true, and because you refuse to acknowledge it. Face the facts, admit it, and we’ll shut up.
These horrible things are also correlated with the growth of science. Is science responsible, then?
No, atheism is not a method for dealing with these facts. Atheism is just a statement of lack of belief. Science and logic are methods for dealing with them, which have proven far more effective than religious methods. Even I wouldn’t say science and logic are equivalent to atheism.