What is your point? Are you disagreeing with my statement or do you just enjoy making points by taking sentences out of context?
[QUOTE=What I posted]
At this point, I think it is more about a large portion of a particular religion than religion as a whole. What Christians seemed to have matured out of a century or two ago, too many Muslims still seem to be living in the dark ages. Of courses Jews seemed to have got over these particular insanities over a thousand years ago.
Why is this one very large and popular religion still living so much in the dark ages is I think the question.
[/QUOTE]
Thank you for your content-less little testimonial to the obvious and for quoting out of context.
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
No, it’s an argument that communism isn’t really atheism at all, but just another religion. Atheism has no ideology.
[/QUOTE]
Are you really as shallow as you sound?
[QUOTE=tagos]
That is simply a belief that invisible pink unicorns and their ilk have no role in the institutions and organisation of societies. Totalitarian ideologies just replace God with the State as the object of veneration and the source of legitimacy.
What China, the ussr and fascism got up to is not in any way related to atheism and so are not ‘balancers’ when religion is righteously pitted.
[/QUOTE]
You can always tell when an atheist knows he doesn’t have a case. He starts blithering about invisible pink unicorns.
[QUOTE=Liberal]
The image and name of the Kims are deeply ingrained as the sacred goods of North Korea, and a special etiquette has evolved in dealing with them. Rules exist for handling, carrying, hanging, and even disposing of Kim faces and portraits. There are also rituals for their printed names.
[/QUOTE]
I fail to see how this is an indictment of atheism. This sounds so very exactly like religion to me.
But perhaps we shouldn’t quibble over whether humans acting badly is about faith, or a deity, or an economic philosophy.
Let’s make a quick list of humans at their very worst and committing atrocities:
Islam (in its current extremist form)
Christianity (in some cases, mostly in the past)
Communism
Kim Jong Ilism
Fascism
What did I miss?
It can be argued that, say, fascism was just a fancy way of expressing atheism, but I have never in my life met an honest atheist who ever thought that Hitler was a nice guy. Far from it.
What do the things on my list have in common? Hmm, how about group think? Idolatry? Us vs Them thinking? Fanaticism? Extreme devotion to a charismatic leader? Damning your neighbor so that you don’t look so bad? Extreme authoritarianism?
I suggest that if we want to get anywhere, we think in those terms. All of this “My god is better than your non-god” is not only counterproductive, but ultimately leads to the kind of bad behavior we all pretend to loathe.
Not that I wish, G-d forbid, to detract from the perceived civilized-ness of the Jewish religion, but - it’s easy to get over the kind of insanities associated with religious authorities exerting temporal power when your religious authorities have no temporal power.
[/QUOTE]
That is a fair objection. Christians have overall learned to be a lot more tolerant than their history at least. So far, in the only place the Jews have temporal power, they don’t appear to be guilty of these excesses. Far too many of the Islamic countries are guilty of this type of behavior.
[QUOTE=Liberal]
Will you kindly stop speaking on my behalf? Because you’re either too stupid or too unscrupulous to get it right. Everybody BUT you can see what I reiterated in post #27, just above. A third grader can understand the difference between “people treat communism like a religion” and “communism is a religion”. You must have been absent that year.
[/QUOTE]
You refuse to see what Der Trihs is saying, because you don’t like him, but you go into other threads and make what is essentially the same argument when it suits you. Der Trihs was painting with too broad a brush, but plenty of people understood the essential point he was trying to make, even you. But you sneer and call it ignorance, because you dislike him as a poster. Fine. But you aren’t fooling anyone.
[QUOTE=LonesomePolecat]
You can always tell when an atheist knows he doesn’t have a case. He starts blithering about invisible pink unicorns.
[/QUOTE]
Hey - this is the Pit right? so I can say screw you quite legitimately?
Have you got an actual argument or are you just going to continue making shit up? Secularism’s meaning is only in dispute, like gods, in your head.
Atheism is simply the lack of belief in gods and no matter how you puff, preen, rant and rave you cannot create a political ideology from it let alone say one or more variety of totalitarianism is its political ideology.
[QUOTE=tdn]
What do the things on my list have in common? Hmm, how about group think? Idolatry? Us vs Them thinking? Fanaticism? Extreme devotion to a charismatic leader? Damning your neighbor so that you don’t look so bad? Extreme authoritarianism?
[/QUOTE]
Your list is missing the Society of Friends (Quakers), Hinduism, and other pacifist philosophies that actually are religions. That means your list of tyrannies cannot be ascribed to religion as a whole.
It seems to me that naming something after a major figure in one’s religion would be more an honor than anything else. But perhaps that doesn’t apply to teddy bears.
[QUOTE=Liberal]
Your list is missing the Society of Friends (Quakers), Hinduism, and other pacifist philosophies that actually are religions. That means your list of tyrannies cannot be ascribed to religion as a whole.
[/QUOTE]
If I understand you correctly, the atheists only need to come up with a short list of good atheist organizations and all our sins in Russia and China will be like water under the bridge. Is that correct?
[QUOTE=Liberal]
Hinduism, and other pacifist philosophies that actually are religions.
[/QUOTE]
Hinduism is not a pacifist philosophy. Some Hindus are pacifists; the vast majority are not.
(And just to take one small example: The essence of the Bhagavad Gita, after all, is Krishna telling Arjun to murder half his family because that’s his duty as a Kshatriya.)
[QUOTE=Liberal]
Your list is missing the Society of Friends (Quakers), Hinduism, and other pacifist philosophies that actually are religions. That means your list of tyrannies cannot be ascribed to religion as a whole.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
All religions do (“it tells them from childhood that it’s good to terrorize unbelievers”). It’s their nature. The nature of faith.
[/QUOTE]
Bullshit.
"Howsoever men try to worship me, so do I welcome them.
By whatever path they travel, it leads to me at last."
An English translation of Chapter 4, Verse 11, Bhagavad Gita
[QUOTE=LonesomePolecat]
I’m saying that human nature doesn’t change with ideology. Bullies will be bullies. If they don’t persecute one person for naming a teddy bear Muhammad, they’ll persecute someone else for using a sheet of newspaper with Stalin’s picture on it for toilet paper.
[/QUOTE]
“Yes” would have been enough.
Since I never said “all atheists are good”, I fail to see how this refutes my point. It’s the same as with the Soviet argument, which I should really have responded to preemptively as the probability of it coming up was somewhere above 1.
The only person? I’ve heard it hundreds of times. Don’t entirely disagree with it either.
So, like I said, in a world without religion she wouldn’t have been arrested for naming a teddy bear Muhammed. It appears we are in agreement.
[QUOTE=Priceguy]
So, like I said, in a world without religion she wouldn’t have been arrested for naming a teddy bear Muhammed. It appears we are in agreement.
Sidenote: Communism does not equal atheism.
[/QUOTE]
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest if she’d allowed the kids to name it Adolf or Josef it wouldn’t be clobbering time for teachers either. It’s almost like there is something about the name Mohammed, something religious even, that seems to be the active variable.
[QUOTE=Liberal]
Your list is missing the Society of Friends (Quakers), Hinduism, and other pacifist philosophies that actually are religions. That means your list of tyrannies cannot be ascribed to religion as a whole.
[/QUOTE]
And I never tried to, so I think you’re missing the point.
I was not making a list of religions, I was making a list of movements in which mass atrocities occurred. Is it possible for a religious sect to be peaceful? Of course. Very few (but there are some) would argue otherwise.
But let’s look at the list of the most violent and intolerant movements. What do they have in common? It is often argued that fascism was atheistic, but that’s extraordinarily off-point. Hitler was their god. At the heart of any violent fanaticism is a leader of some sort. God, Allah, Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong Il. At the heart of it is a mindless devotion to the leader. At the heart of it is extreme intolerance of any dissent in thinking. And often, at the heart of it is a fear of appearing to dissent, and a willingness to point fingers so that you look like you’re toeing the party line.
[QUOTE=acsenray]
Hinduism is not a pacifist philosophy. Some Hindus are pacifists; the vast majority are not.
[/QUOTE]
And yet, since we’re making comparisons between various religio-political systems, I think it’s fair to point out the paucity of Crusades, Inquisitions, and assorted Holy Wars conducted in the name of Vishnu or Shiva.
This is an incredibly simplistic and superficial reading of the text.