The atheist double-standard

Great Debates
221

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
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.
[/quote]
And what trends would that be ? Increased social justice ? Less violence ? Higher levels of education ?

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
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.
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Except that atheism isn’t a method of dealing with anything. It’s just disbelief in gods. It doesn’t even mean that you can’t use the “religious methods” you support, since one could logically be an atheist and still support religion, if you thought it was good for society.

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
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.
[/quote]
Except that what we are really seeing is atheism being judged by a “handful of failures” - which aren’t even really failures of atheism, at that - and religion ignoring it’s norm of failure. Even if you ignore the fact that the evils of Communism were committed in the name of Communism not atheism, there’s the problem that Communism really is the aberration. Evil and stupidity committed in the name of religion is the NORMAL EFFECT of religion; Communism is an aberration among atheist groups - which is exactly why the defenders of religion harp on it so much. If I want to talk about the evils of religion, I don’t need to restrict my accusations to a single group with a few prominent nasty leaders. I can draw from thousands of years and thousands of sects of various religions that have engaged in innumerable evils and stupidities in the name of their religion.

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
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.
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What makes you think that ? He behaved the way religious fanatics always do when they can; killing and oppressing the unbelievers. His behavior was positively Christian. He WAS religious; it’s just that his religion pretended it wasn’t a religion.

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
More generally, a strong Church would have prevented the rise of Soviet communism and all its attendant horrors.
[/QUOTE]
How do you know it didn’t help cause Communism ?

222

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
More generally, a strong Church would have prevented the rise of Soviet communism and all its attendant horrors.
[/QUOTE]
Do you not see that as the reason for the communist regime to oppose the church? That reason being the same regardless of atheism?

223

[QUOTE=yoyodyne]
Do you not see that as the reason for the communist regime to oppose the church? That reason being the same regardless of atheism?
[/QUOTE]

Of course this is the reason the communist regime opposed the church. Asking whether it would have been the same regardless of atheism is a meaningless question. There would have been no communist regime without atheism.

224

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
Of course this is the reason the communist regime opposed the church. Asking whether it would have been the same regardless of atheism is a meaningless question. There would have been no communist regime without atheism.
[/QUOTE]

Justification, please. Atheism didn’t overthrow Kerensky, and it didn’t defeat the White Armies. If the Russian Orthodox Church wasn’t strong before the revolution, I’d like to see your definition of strong. It had a problem in that it supported a corrupt regime, of course, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t strong.

And remember that Communism existed along with Catholicism in Poland, if uncomfortably.

225

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
Of course this is the reason the communist regime opposed the church. Asking whether it would have been the same regardless of atheism is a meaningless question. There would have been no communist regime without atheism.
[/QUOTE]
Why not ? You don’t really need much effort to change Communism into a Christian movement; it’s similarity to the more ruthless versions of Christianity has often been noted. If history had been a little different, “Communism” could have been a Christian movement identical to the real world version of Communism, except for switching a few words in the proper places.

And once again, Communism isn’t atheism. It’s Communism.

226

[QUOTE=ITR champion]
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.

[/QUOTE]

You’re obviously still not understanding us.

Let me rephrase your argument in less politically laden language to help you understand just how ridiculous and off-track this argument sounds. Essentially, you are arguing that because the New York Yankees (a baseball team) failed consistently at winning any games of soccer in their past, they are a failed soccer team.

The problems with this argument is obvious. First, no one claimed that the Yankees were a good soccer team. Hell, baseball hasn’t a thing to do with soccer. No one on the Yankees team is even interested in talking about soccer.

Second, the argument assumes that atheists are equivalent to a baseball “team,” but there’s nothing to this argument either. Atheists don’t have a team. The only thing that makes two atheists remotely similar is the fact that they don’t believe in a god. One could be a Buddhist Tibetan meditating on a cliff in Asia, while the other could be the obnoxious Mac guy who always blogs during his lunch hour.

So what your argument is actually doing is scooping up a bunch of disjointed, unrelated people from the masses of humanity and dumping them in Rigley, expecting them to play a killer game of ball, and take that world series.

It isn’t a perfect analogy (and no analogy really is perfect), but the other methods or argumentation are obviously not making their way to the finish line.