19 Jul 2011, 9:01 pm
Oodain
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19 Jul 2011, 9:30 pm
19 Jul 2011, 10:36 pm
John_Browning
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20 Jul 2011, 6:54 am
Vexcalibur wrote:
John_Browning wrote:
That's why the 2 largest atheist societies in the 20th century combined killed 120 million people- including people whose only act of dissent was not giving up their faith. That's why there are no known religious adherents left anywhere in North Korea- including the concentration camps. In 600 years of crusades, they killed about 2 million people. At that rate, atheists during the cold war killed people at about 7200 times more people a year than the crusaders did. 
It is the same old BS attack that assumes atheism = communist. And the claim comes that they killed people in the name of atheism rather than communism . Which is an incredibly stupid claim similar to thinking that since most Nazis considered themselves Catholic , their kills are attributable to Christianity.
Communist countries may have been atheistic in name, but the reason you go around killing people who don't quit their beliefs is that you want them to worship you. Those tyrannical countries were about making a religion of worship to a single person or regime but by another name. A cult of personality.
Germany was predominantly Lutheran, Hitler hated Christianity, and many of his senior officials practiced old Norse beliefs or the occult. Atheism is a core tenant of communism and the atheists wanted to purge any dissent to their new perfect society. Poland proved that communism was not the root of the desire to purge all religion because that was a culture that was very religious and Stalin and the Soviet Union never managed to break them of that. It's true that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Chaichescu, Kim Jong Il, Kim Il Sung, etc wanted to be worshiped, but the important thing to point out is that they did not recognize any deity over them. They did not believe in any god and their moral compass reflected that.
Vexcalibur wrote:
Can you blame them? Religion has been so successful at that, that ideologies tried to do it and they were rather successful.
Yes I can blame them. There are many cults in the world that people created to take advantage of people in various ways and leave them with nothing in return. Communist leaders or their political officers were not in any position (for a variety of reasons) to give any spiritual guidance and their psychological makeup prevented them from genuinely caring about their subjects' well being. They resulted to empty propaganda to control them, and when that failed, they used fear.
Vexcalibur wrote:
The current humanist groups are against any sort of non-sense, idiotic ideologies that cause people to kill each other, religions happen to be one of them, communism is also another of them.
You make that sound noble, but such an ideology can do little to bring about any social change without creating their own brand of persecution. Most of the ideologies that kill people involve communism and Islam. Countries that don't have a large, dominant Islamic groups in the region tend to be peaceful. Calling the global war on terror a Christian vendetta is quite imaginative, and the Israelis just finish what their neighbors start. The big religious groups, even if they have small budgets and small congregations, play an important role in their local communities. They are a source of spiritual guidance, food drives, charities, support groups for vices, medical issues, major life events, places that guide kids away from delinquency and make respectable adults out of losers. Despite all this, your humanists try to demonize religions for not openly embracing homosexuality. In the case of Christianity, the Bible has warnings about false teachers with empty dogmas that have a strong resemblance to modern secular humanism about 1700 years before anything resembling secular humanism reared it's head.
Vexcalibur wrote:
Meanwhile, anti-science, anti-rational , anti-individual thought postures not unlike that of those used by communism and nazism are still being pushed by countries that are still living in the medieval age - That is countries that are still not secular aka those Muslim countries. They still believe in the crusades for god's sake.
Are you expecting me to stick up for Muslim countries?
Vexcalibur wrote:
And of course, a similar anti-rational and anti-individual thought agenda comes from so-called 'conservative' groups that would like the west to go back to the medieval age.
Perhaps ask the tea party movement how many of them are campaigning for the return of divine right, prima nocta, paying tribute to lords, using peasant land for other purposes including a knight's fee, allowing officials to charge, convict, and sentence someone even if they are not a judge, banning women from testifying in court, having the government recognize papal infallibility, papal authority over the king, and declaring the US to be a papal territory of the Vatican which would then give the pope the power to allow the king to override the constitution in approved instances, or how about letting the king hold members of noble families hostage and nobles holding common and peasant families hostage to ensure their obedience? That doesn't sounds like conservatives' political wishlist to me.
Vexcalibur wrote:
I for one, think they suck. We already have enough evidence of what religion does when it is mixed with state. The medieval ages sucked, they were a crap sack world and it halted progress for a thousand of years.
When the western Roman empire was destroyed, people simply abandoned their customs, traditions, architecture, everything. Christianity was not responsible for that, the heathen Germanic tribes were mostly to blame. The eastern Roman (Byzantine) empire remained sophisticated--and Christian-- but was destroyed by the Muslims just as the west was getting back on it's feet. Islam allows for conquering to convert people at the end of a sword, but the crusaders were more interested in killing off any threats to Christian communities than converting people.
The Pope isn't mentioned in the Bible. Neither Peter nor Paul would have accepted much less created an office that allowed them to be exalted over other believers. Peter died with the guilt of betraying Jesus during his crucifixion and his last known words were "I am not worthy to be crucified like my Lord", so they crucified him upside down. It is unlikely he would have approved of the basilica being built in his honor, would not have approved of being called "his holiness", would have never referred to himself as "sanctissimus" and would not have used his position to build a private army and personal empire. I do not know if he would have approved of using or permitting military force to defend small Christian kingdoms, but he would not have used it for personal gain. Atheists like to criticize Christianity for suppressing science, but for most of the duration of the Catholic church's dominance of education, very little attempt at new discoveries were ever made because the environment they were living in required other matters to take priority. Think of Maslow's hierarchy of need. Even in parts of Europe where the Vatican didn't hold enough influence to enforce an inquisition there were no earth-shattering scientific experiments- they just used new technologies that were imported. There were no aspiring Copernicus', Huygens', Newtons', Or Galileos during the medieval period because they had to put their priorities elsewhere.
20 Jul 2011, 7:21 am
