What is your point? Are you disagreeing with my statement or do you just enjoy making points by taking sentences out of context?
Thank you for your content-less little testimonial to the obvious and for quoting out of context.
Jim
Are you really as shallow as you sound?
I am missing where atheism claimed to be the religion of peace and toleration?
If Islam declared that it was the religion of assholish judgmentalism I doubt that the OP would have been written.
You can always tell when an atheist knows he doesn’t have a case. He starts blithering about invisible pink unicorns.
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.
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.
Jim
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.
You’re missing the point. We’re not allowed to judge Islam. Nothing it does is bad.
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.
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.
I am also missing the difference between a statement and question in my first sentence. :smack:
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.
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?
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.)
Hinduism is not a pacifist religion.
It’s hard on for throwing widows onto the barbie is also a strike against.
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
“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.
Sidenote: Communism does not equal atheism.
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.
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.
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.