The point is, you have two sides making arguments attacking points the other side didn’t make. An atheist sees an attrocity made by someone of faith and concludes (rightly or wrongly) that it was ispired by his religious belief. The theist, knowing HIS beliefs don’t lead to that, find a counter example of a non-religious people commiting similar atrocities. The real crux of the issue is that people are commiting attrocities, to commit these acts people need justification, and for those who don’t commit them, they need something to blame.
I think religion is a simple and obvious solution for either perspective simply because it permeates virtually every culture, and so it’s simple to leverage it or find some aspect of it to justify your actions. It’s this very same aspect that makes it easy for those outside of the religion to blame it for being violent or non-tolerent or whatever.
Simply put, evil acts are committed for a variety of reasons, and to simply blame religion or atheism ignores the simple fact that it occurs on both sides of the argument. Evil acts are commited by evil people, and there are evil theists just like there are evil atheists, but in either case they’re both heavily outweighted by good people of the same belief system. Why do we have to say Hitler, Mao, and Stalin did these things in the name of religion or atheism, when they really did it just because they’re evil people?
Only if the people committing the atrocities say religion drove them to it. Mafioso tend to be Catholics, but I’ve never heard anyone blame the Catholic Church for the Mafia. The church can be blamed for the Inquisition and the Crusades, however.
And on a similar note, even the threads of surveys showing that the better educated tend to be more atheistic are taken to mean that people already well educated tend to be atheists, never that atheism somehow makes you better educated or smarter.
Do we judge anything by the number of criminals who explicity list that thing has a cause? Only a few criminals ever said, “I committed that murder in the name of crack cocaine”, yet who would deny that crack cocaine is key in the chain of causes for a lot of murders?
It certainly wasn’t a captialist sociology professors who told me, “The first fallacy you must get over is the belief that there are individuals.” (He wasn’t a Christian either.)
But more generally speaking, some communists may have believed in the existence of individuals while other did not, but they all put much less stock in the power and worth of individuals than others did.
Well, o.k. then. Tell us about a lot of murders where atheism was the key cause. Not Communism, which merely uses atheism as one of its tools of suppression, but atheism itself.
The music or art communities have certain works that they view as flawless, certain dead individuals who they view as near-perfect, and certain signs and images that they lavish with respect. Does this mean that they’re “religious in nature”? If not (or even if so) could you nail down a specific definition of what you mean by “religious in nature”?
See post 67 of this thread for a claim that atheists in the future will make up for any atheist failures in the past.
I’ve already explained why I don’t accept that dismissal of the crimes committed by atheists under communism–see post 44–and will not bother repeating myself again. If you’d like to answer my argument rather than repeating the claim that I’ve already answered, that would be fine with me.
You are really reaching with your interpretation of that post. But even if it says what you think it says, can I use “godhatesfags” as a cite for all of Christianity?
That’s not what Revenant Threshold was saying at all. All he said was the fact that event A has not happened in the past does not mean it will not happen in the future.
In turn, tell us of murders where theism was the key cause–not Christianity or Islam which are merely bodies of doctrine which include theism among other doctrines, but theism itself.
If you’d like to nitpick my interpretation, go right ahead. As for the question in your second sentence, it has no relevance to my post. (But the answer is no. (Or precisely, yes you could but it would just make you look stupid.))
Even as a theist, I’ve always agreed with you on the strength of this argument. Of course, I also draw a strong distinction between hierarchal bureacratic religious institutions and actual theism- which I very frustratingly find many theists and many atheists sloppily ignore.
