Atheists create thousands of Christian martyrs during French Revolution

1. That's not true. For sure, many Atheists have been horrible, mass murdering tools, but this is because of their incidental political ideologies, not the fact that they didn't believe in God.

2. While you might argue that Atheism leads people to these horrible ideologies, I would argue the opposite: these horrible ideologies lead to a rejection of religion. God is a limit on their power. Sure, there exist tyrannical systems like the Church of England that use religion to their favor, but by and large regimes such as Stalin's and that of North Korea desire themselves to be the ultimate judge, not a supreme supernatural being.

3. These systems are similar to religion in their operation, and significantly it is only these religious-like aspects that are not required nor encouraged by a lack of belief in a God that inspire human rights violations.

4. Tell me to my face that because I don't believe in God I necessarily want to kill children, etc.

1. See my post on the NAP (It's in my blog, click the link in my profile just above ^^)

2. Depends what you mean by materialism. If you mean the worship of objects I am a huge advocate of Eastern (including Buddhist) philosophy, and consider the accumulation of material possessions to be a bad way at going about finding fulfillment. If you mean the idea that the material world is all there is... I don't actively believe that, who knows, anything is possible. What I do know is that all the 'evidence' I have seen for a supernatural world is lacking/non-existent. This doesn't lead me to any particular perspective on humanity - truth is subjective/fallible regardless of the existence of supernatural entities.

3. Argument from consequences.

Sure, they tend to be (although they're more likely to be middle to upper-middle class). I don't see the point.

This is one of the most hilarious arguments I've seen on this forum. I am a libertarian, as are many Atheists. We desire non-coercive relations with all. More Atheists are trying to pay off their student loans than are in the elite areas of society.

1. In all my years I have never found a single, not even one Atheist who thinks like this. Not one. Never. Never ever. Please find me a poll showing that most Atheists think this way.

2. Many Atheists have complex ethical beliefs based on the works of Kant and John Stuart Mill. I have met one nihilist Atheist in my entire life (and I have met many).

3. None of this is evidence for the existence of supernaturality.



I hope one day you realize that Atheists are by and large just like anyone else. Until then I await your reply

 

To be fair, he didnt say "most". He said "some". There are millions of atheists out there, it's quite possible that what he said applies to at least two of those individuals. The wording is weaselly for a reason - there IS no evidence that any statistically significant amount of atheists at all have this kind of ethical fault, never mind a statistically higher percentage than a control group. So I don't think he's telling a direct lie, just deceptively trying to insinuate something that is untrue.

 

the irony of the bigger picture here is the supposedly superior moral christian Anansi is disseminating hate, lies and intolerance toward atheists...

a couple of quotes apply here, Anansi may recognize one..."Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”

the 2nd being my all favourite which I've posted a number of times

"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ".-Mahatma Gandhi
which becomes understandable when you read Anansi's posts

 

Oh wow! Like no christian fundamentalist has never done this....check your rap sheet bud its not clean as you think it is.

 

Oops! Didn't notice that, sorry Anansi

Still, 'some' implies a statistically significant number in this sort of use. Without question we're meant to think that a sizable portion (read: Atheists you know) have no ethical compass.

 

1) Disagreeing with you does not = lying. Try to remember this. 2) Atheists believing in supernatural beings? Isn't that a contradiction?

Are atheists in general a privileged group, yes or no? How do they maintain these privileges? Smiles?

Atheists in the West are more likely to be white, upper class, and male. They maintain their privileges with bombs and lies.

Probably hard for you to admit that many atheists flee from moral duty.

quote: Finally, the single biggest predictor of whether someone will be charitable is their religious participation.
Religious people are more likely to give to charity, and when they give, they give more money: four times as much. And Arthur Brooks told me that giving goes beyond their own religious organization:
"Actually, the truth is that they're giving to more than their churches," he says. "The religious Americans are more likely to give to every kind of cause and charity, including explicitly non-religious charities."

LINK

 

True.

Absurd! How can you say that they didn't kill to further the cause of atheism?

League of Militant Atheists

So atheism is useful to these horrible ideologies.

Why not say atheist-like since THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE!

This.

The idol of internet atheists is Ayn Rand, an eltist who celebrated selfishness. Objectivism is bad news for those not adept at capitalism.

She was rather sinister: How Ayn Rand Became an American Icon

Self-serving anecdotal evidence. lol

Both deontological ethics and Utilitarian ethics have failed.

Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue: "Kant himself tries to show that such maxims as 'Always tell the truth', 'Always keep promises', 'Be benevolent to those in need' and 'Do not commit suicide' pass his test, while such maxims as 'Only keep promises when it is convenient to you' fail. In fact however, even to approach a semblance of showing this, he has to use notoriously bad arguments"

According to MacIntyre these non-moral maxims can be universalized and therefore pass Kant's test.

Utilitarians are dangerous. Influential Utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer thinks it is okay to kill handicapped babies.

The case against Peter Singer

 

No, knowingly posting things that are untrue = lying. The only question is whether you realise that it is untrue that materialism and atheism are identical.

Short version: No.

Not hard at all. Many people of all stripes do that, atheists are no different.

Yes, and did you also know that ice cream sales are linked to shark attacks?

(in case you missed it, the point is: there may be a third variable at play, and you cant assume a causative link.)

 

Have you listened to anything? These things are not inherent in Atheism, but are additional beliefs tacked on top.

Yep! But unless childish told-you-so's are counted as arguments that doesn't matter at all.

It is completely undeniable that the Nazis used Christianity to manipulate the German people in the exact same way. Or perhaps you'd prefer to concede that they were genuine in their Christian rhetoric.

Of course, none of this matters, as these ideologies have nothing to do with their respective religious positions.

Are you serious? I've never stopped mid-post before, but you're almost there.

A lack of belief in God doesn't demand any of this additional stuff, and neither do non-religious people act as if it does - because it doesn't.

Cool, thanks for addressing what I said.

Most Atheists are on the left. I myself am a voluntaryist on the right. I believe all obligations must be consented to for them to be valid and that coercion is never right. How horrible of me.

You're the one making the claim - provide some evidence or read Nikzor until you understand burdens of proof.

They clearly haven't, since all normative ethical theories are based on either a set of codes or a consequentialist approach. They are mutually exclusive categories at least in non-specific terms.

The theist ethical code is a deontological code.

Repeat PHIL101.

Kant's categorical imperative is not deontology itself, it is an ethical normative theory that has the characteristic of being deontological (based around rights and duties). Deontology is merely the property of a normative ethical theory as being based upon axioms and inherent duties - it says nothing about what those duties are.

I agree - consequentialism is wrong, although that's an irrelevant argument. Utilitarianism bases its ethics on pure outcomes without any attention paid to the individual's liberties. In this way it loses ethical information, just like how a vector image loses resolution when changed to a scalar format.

 

It is a logical fallacy to suggest that atheism leads to mass murder. Non Sequitur. There is no evidence that it was the atheism that resulted in the person committing mass murder.

Perhaps Stalin's favorite color was red but this does not mean people who like the color red are mass murderers.

Religious belief on the other hand has been the direct cause of mass murder.

 

Why do you say atheism is only incidental to these ideologies? Atheism is a central feature of Communism, for example.

Do atheists torture and kill to further the cause of atheism?

You've acknowledged that "many Atheists have been horrible, mass murdering tools,". Are the leaders of the atheist movement (Lenin, Nietzsche, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens) rather awful? Has the atheist movement been horrible and murderous?

Have some atheist sects/leaders called for intolerance and violence?

The teachings of Jesus (forgiveness, kindness, respect for individuals) are the opposite of Nazi beliefs. Many Christians like Bonhoeffer and Claus von Stauffenberg were killed for opposing Nazism.

Christian Opposition to Nazi Anti-Semitism

I should have specified "Kant's deontology". My point is that Kant's ethics are derived from Christianity. Nietzsche called Kant "an insidious Christian".

Okay.

 

Christopher Hitchens was great at justifying mass murder.

quote: I do not think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged

LINK

Christopher Hitchens has condemned Moslems because they have sinned against secularism. He demonizes religious folk to justify their murder. He aches to kill even without provocation.

quote: It is impossible to compromise with the proponents of sacrificial killings of civilians, the disseminators of anti-Semitic filth, the violators of women and the cheerful murderers of children.
It is also impossible to compromise with the stone-faced propagandists for Bronze Age morality: morons and philistines who hate Darwin and Einstein and managed, during their brief rule in Afghanistan, to ban and erase music and art while cultivating the skills of germ warfare. If they could do that to Afghans, what might they not have in mind for us? In confronting such people, the crucial thing is to be willing and able, if not in fact eager, to kill them without pity before they get started.

LINK

quote: When it came to the defining issues of the post-9/11 era, he was largely indistinguishable from the small army of neoconservative fanatics eager to unleash ever-greater violence against Muslims: driven by a toxic mix of barbarism, self-loving provincialism, a sense of personal inadequacy, and, most of all, a pity-inducing need to find glory and purpose in cheering on military adventures and vanquishing some foe of historically unprecedented evil even if it meant manufacturing them.

LINK

 

So many atheist sects/leaders preach hate, intolerance, violence.

Marx: Of course, in periods when the political state as such is born violently out of civil society, when political liberation is the form in which men strive to achieve their liberation, the state can and must go as far as the abolition of religion, the destruction of religion. But it can do so only in the same way that it proceeds to the abolition of private property, to the maximum, to confiscation, to progressive taxation, just as it goes as far as the abolition of life, the guillotine.

Nietzsche: Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of "pleasure." The human being who has become free — and how much more the spirit who has become free — spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior.

Nietzsche: Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches — and in punishment there is so much that is festive!

Nietzsche: You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!

Nietzsche: The doctrine of equality! … But there is no more venomous poison in existence: for it appears to be preached by justice itself, when it is actually the end of justice … "Equality to the equal; inequality to the unequal" — that would be true justice speaking: and its corollary, "never make the unequal equal".

Sam Harris (an insignificant figure compared to the first two, yet he is the idol of the anti-Christian cranks you occasionally meet up with on the internet): The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live.

 

Because Communism is not a central feature of Atheism. It's not a feature at all of Atheism.

I'm sure some do, just as some religious folk kill to further the cause of their religion. Some people take non-belief way too seriously and try to force it on others. This is not inherent to Atheism nor to I agree with it in any way. Same (I'd imagine) as you feel towards Christians trying to force their beliefs on others through violence.

Additionally, the vast majority of these people actually believe there is no God, a completely different thing. I do not claim there is no God, I have no idea whether a God exists or not, I just don't hold an active belief in one.

They are not the leaders of the "Atheist movement" any more than Jeremiah Wright and Fred Phelps are of the "Christian movement". I'm guessing you'd say that they bring their own additional positions unrelated to your belief set, so criticisms of their views cannot be transplanted onto you. This is the exact same thing. I merely find insufficient evidence for the existence of a God, all else is additional and unrelated to the core requirement of Atheism: that one does not accept the idea that a God exists. That's it.

I don't see how this has anything to do with me or my beliefs, in fact it borders on guilt by association, and a hazy one at that.

You completely ignored my point. Nazis actively used religion to manipulate the German people. It was a part of their nationalism. All I'm saying is that the Nazis used Christianity in this way for their own purposes irrelevant to Christianity in the same way that Stalin used Atheism to advance his own power as the supreme leader without equal in this life or the next.

Deontological axioms by no means need to be derived from religion. I do not agree with Kant's categorical imperative as a normative theory, although I do find some of it plausible. In any case, none of this matters - Atheism does not require you to accept any specific ethical theory as it has nothing to do with ethics or science or anything else of the sort, it's merely a rejection of your claim - namely that there exists a God either on the grounds that there is insufficient evidence to justify such a belief (my position), or that there is positive evidence that God does not exist (not my position, but held by a minority in the Atheist community).


These guilt by association threads are really trying my patience. I don't like it when Atheists use them on Christian tyrants, and I don't like it when Christians use them on Atheist tyrants.

 

I agree with the rest of your post, but I sincerely doubt that atheists kill or maim others to further their non-beliefs. That seems entirely too illogical for me.

 

People can force anything on others. I haven't come across anyone who tried to force non-belief on others, but I'm near certain that it has happened. Forcing belief in no God onto people is a part of some authoritarian political ideologies and so has been done before (ie: USSR), although the faith is inculcated in the state instead and I'd argue this is just as bad/worse.

 

Right, but this is what he asked: "Do atheists torture and kill to further the cause of atheism?"

There exists no "cause of atheism", but I definitely agree that atheists killed or persecuted for the advancement of other ideologies.

 

People can create whatever cause they want in their minds. Often it's simply wanting to force people to share the same beliefs.

Of course, this isn't "killing for atheism", since Atheism doesn't say anything - it's the absence of ideology.

 

You acknowledge atheists torture and kill to further the cause of atheism. Well said.

Check this out: What is the “fine-tuning” of the universe, and how does it serve as a “pointer to God”?

That's silly. These are marginal figures who get a lot of media attention because the media bosses want to discredit Christianity.

Here are some mainstream figures: A History of Liberty

Many prominent Christian leaders on the left too: Dorothy Day, Robert Casey, and many others.

 

Many Christians died for the "crime" of being a Christian. They were killed by fanatical atheists who sought to impose their ideology.

League of Militant Atheists

I'm sure you condemn this ugly intolerance. Why do you want to dishonor the memory of these Christians by lying about the circumstances of their death?

 

Christians exterminated 2/3 of my nation , should we put modern ones in trial ?

 

Really?

When was this?

 

from 310's to about 1000 , more details here

and i am not including those converting to islam or fleeing to Sassanids

 

Evidence? Can you give me a quote?

The work you linked to was written not by a scholar but by "a human resources manager at a bank" named Vlasis Rassias. Rassias is an activist for Hellenic Polytheistic Reconstructionism.

One of the Hellenic Polytheistic Reconstructionism websites: The Church of Hellenes

I've long been interested in mythology, but these people are loons.

 

You missed out the word 'some'. Consider the difference between the following:

1. Religious people are (*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)s.
2. Some religious people are (*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)s.

That one word makes quite a difference, doesn't it?