Communist as atheists persecuted religions.
You always consider bad things done by religious people (ppl who claims so) encouraged by religion. Louis The Sun King did not persecute protestants because f catholicism...it was perfectly good for him to back up protestant enemies of Habsburgs.
Just as atheism is not to blame for Stalin's action, religion is not to blame for people's actions who do what they want. If you judge with double standars you will be judged with double standards.
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Just as atheism is not to blame for Stalin's action, religion is not to blame for people's actions who do what they want. If you judge with double standars you will be judged with double standards.
True. Trouble is, lots of those people who killed in the name of religion genuinely did believe they were obeying their god's will, and weren't just using it as an excuse to do what they wanted - or are you making a comparatively subtle no-true-scotsman fallacy?
I honestly don't see how this is fundie.
Religion isn't to blame for people's actions. It's people who decide to act like assholes.
If Jesus, Muhammed, and Elijah came down from Heaven to tell people to cut it the fuck out, people would still be waging wars in the name of religion. (Read _The Grand Inquisitor_.)
I don't see how this is fundie either.
If your religion doesn't tell you to kill Jews and hate Africans and all that, it's just a matter of you being stupid and stupid people believing you because you think your religion proclaims it.
In the five years I've been an atheist, I haven't persecuted a single religion or person based on their religion.
Unless you want to count not wanting Jesus and/or the Bible rubbed in my face all the time.
Thing is: religion and atheism are not equal labels in relevance to personal identity or thought processes. Atheism, as lack of a religion label, simply does not have a comparable effect to any given religion in determining their beliefs and behavior. It is akin to lumping everyone without a political party in with one another, and declaring it unfair to say that being part of party A has any effect on behavior, while not saying the same thing about the un-party.
The submitter is an ass. It takes very little understanding to get the very valid point behind the post, but apparently fundie is just another name for someone with poor grammar for some of you.
"This is wrong. Atheism is a denial of religion and therefore a denial of any moral principles that originate from religion. So it isn't something that people would fight, die, or kill for, but it is something that would allow people to fight, die, or kill more easily. "
this is a perfectly reasonable comment. it's a bit of an oversimplification...often the motivation is religious, on some level (and that includes the atheist example, yes I know it's not a religion, don't heckle me). however, at the root of it political and economic motivations are almost always at least as important, and usually more so.
@Dr. Funkenstein
@Thammuz
Unless, of course, your motivation is primarily religious, like those Spanish guys... what were they called again?
Dr. Funkenstein said: In the five years I've been an atheist, I haven't persecuted a single religion or person based on their religion.
Unless you want to count not wanting Jesus and/or the Bible rubbed in my face all the time.
Are you crazy? Not wanting them to shove their religion down your throat is the worst kind of persecution!
Eh, I have to somewhat agree with him here. A lot of politicians used religion as an excuse to get rid of people they didn't want. The First Crusade itself was supposed to be an act of relief for the Byzantines who were being pressed by the Turks.
'Course, there are plenty of incidents that are nothing but religious zeal.
Whether it's tribe, nation, politics or religion, there's always a reason advanced for behaving with lethal barbarity against some or other group of people.
Yes, they are frequently excuses not believed even by the people advancing them, but inculcating an environment of obedience to authority and believing without question does appear to make religion particularly susceptible to this kind of abuse.
What's more, often religion comes with an implicit or explicit hierarchy that means that even if the originator of the abuse was insincere (as opposed to simply mad or bad), those below him promulgate the new doctrine with absolute sincerity, and likewise those below them, and so on.
So that a religious war was really started for political ends soon becomes immaterial. It was still fought by people who sincerely and devoutly believed they were doing so for God.
And fascists as theists have persecuted other religions and atheists.
And you don't seem to understand atheism.
I can be called Pagan and therefore not an atheist. Yet it's not atheists who give me shit nearly as much as it's Christians. Though some atheists do while some Christians don't. numbers wise Christians are far more likely to than atheists
As Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris have pointed out the atrocities of Stalin and other Atheist dictators was not done in the name of non tenant Atheism, They were perpetrated under the dictorial ideologies.
The Atrocities we speak of are those done in the name of their God with their Clergy in compliance. For instance that Gay Nightclub massacre was done under his Islamic prejudices and praised by many fundamentalist preachers in America.
P.S. Stalin was raised strictly by the church and was in training to be a priest,,, or dictator, what's the difference?
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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