My Magical Button to Delete Atheism

My magical button to delete atheism would save hundreds of millions of lives.

All the victims of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and the French Revolution would be saved.

No great works of art would be lost, no great architectural achievements, no charities, no hospitals or schools, no orphanages, no great works of music.

I can't think of anything worthwhile that would be lost if I pushed my magical button to delete atheism.

 

Good bye science.

 

Whoha, hold your horses.

Communism in any of Stalin's, Mao's, Pol Pot's or Castro's version (I'm not sure about Pol Pot and Castro, but I assume) was not a product of atheism, atheism was a product of communism. It is a communistic thought that religion has power over the people and nothing should have power over the people, therefore religion must not exist. This initial distrust of religion made people start to question religious indoctrination, which in it's turn leads to atheism. Most people who believe in communism does so because they think that the rich are controlling the poor and this is true for religion too, so secularism is a perfectly logical step for a communist.

What you are saying is essentially that atheism causes communism, something that I have seen very little evidence for. A few people become atheists first and then communists, but they are in minority, and I don't think any of the above people went that route. Thus, as long as you don't remove anything but atheism in itself, you'd just remove a few passages in their texts, nothing major, and not enough to save that many people. Possibly a few who were killed specifically for being religious, but many of those were only criticized and turned in because of other things, and "anti-revolutionary behaviour" was a common way to get rid of anyone you didn't like.

As for works of art and the like, I do, as I explained in the earlier thread, not believe that removing religion would remove them either. In removing religion, you would change them in a way that removing atheism wouldn't, but you'd just get art that didn't consist of old men that are assumed to be God.

If you removed religion, sure, there would not be a "the Last Supper", but that doesn't mean that da Vinci would just go home and nap, he'd draw something else, probably of equal beauty as the Last supper.

The same goes for the french revolution, it was a social movement that recognized that the church was ruling the poor in a way not favourable to their subjects.

Would you not think that without religion, the artists would just draw something else? Would all artist just go unemployed and starve to death because you remove one of the texts with stunning imagery?

And do you think that removing atheism would keep starving Russian, French and Chinese people from revolting against their oppressors or keep people like Stalin, Napoleon or Mao from getting to the places they had, be it through military coups, promising luxuries and rights in democratic elections or simply rigging them?

 

If I have to own the Crusades and the Inquisition, then you have to own everything done by the Communists. Fair is fair.

 

Free will.

But I do understand if that is a problem for you.

 

But that means Brian Eno's music would no longer exist.

 

That argument only holds water if you're suggesting Swensson is a Communist. Are you?

 

Those were beliefs that the people there had. It's the exact same thing as a religion, minus the god. There have been radicals in there beliefs, as well as in religion.

 

http://brainz.org/50-most-brilliant-atheists-all-time/

Just for starters...

It's kinda bold of you to try and blame all that on atheism. Like there is an atheistic belief that says we are supposed to kill people...

 

Since it's per the norm in biblical religions for their god to kill, and command to kill people left and right, sometimes by his own hand, sometimes using his followers, I think they project that onto everyone as a standard.

 

My magic response to those who think religion is the only answer

 

Did they do what they did because of Atheism? Or for various and assorted political aims?

Be honest.

 

As many of these leaders relied upon Christian-inspired messiah/salvation/Armageddon tropes for their atrocities, methinks you have it backward.

Ummm... no. The historical record is NOT fair, and Christianity (and its propagators) does not get some pardon because you think atheism (which is not an absolute beliefs system, and is not essential to communism) needs to share some mythical blame.

 

The church after Constatine decreed that knowledge be destroyed. Much destruction of art and "great architecture went hand in hand with these decrees.

 

First, as someone said, I am not a communist, why should I own what someone of a different view does?

Secondly, I have repeatedly stated that the mention of the Inquisition and the Crusades arguments are not an argument that Christians are bad, it is proof that if you think that Christianity is a moral religion, then people with moral religions can obviously do bad things, which proves that atheism is not necessarily immoral by argument that Stalin was immoral and was an atheist.

I don't really think you own the Inquisition and the Crusades either. Christianity has changed a lot since then, and frankly, no-one should own what people of similar ideologies do just because their similar. Chances are that some of what happened would have happened even without Christianity. The Byzantine Emperor sent for help to kill Turkish nomads, that had nothing to do with religion. Religion changed things into making an ordinary war into a Crusade, but it was going to be a pretty bloody war anyway. I don't know enough about the Inquisition, but I find it reasonable that if it could happen religiously, without religion, they might have taken a few more years to find a cause, but sooner or later, a similar thing would happen.

I think Christianity is more responsible for the Crusades than atheism of Stalin because the Change between Crusades with or without religion changes a war into a Crusade that behaved rather unprofessionally, but I blame this more on the people who explicitly thought that if they send the largest army since roman times to Jerusalem, that will somehow help the emperor in Constantinople than the religion in itself. Stalin's atheism upped an already massive massacre to a massacre using religion as a common justification (I think that a lot of those who were caught on religious charges would have been caught on other charges if the religious ones weren't there) which is conceptually the same, it just possibly ups the body count, and that I blame Stalin for and not his world view. None the less, unless you actually think Stalin did the right thing, or that the Crusades was a good plan, even with the results in hand, you should oppose yourself and thus not be intellectually responsible for it.

Also, I still would like these questions answered:

Would you not think that without religion, the artists would just draw something else? Would all artist just go unemployed and starve to death because you remove one of the texts with stunning imagery?

And do you think that removing atheism would keep starving Russian, French and Chinese people from revolting against their oppressors or keep people like Stalin, Napoleon or Mao from getting to the places they had, be it through military coups, promising luxuries and rights in democratic elections or simply rigging them?

 

No it wouldn't.

They still would have died. None of those murders had anything to do with atheism except in that the people who committed them happened to be atheists. Stalin didn't go around rounding up Christians, he went around rounding up anyone he thought posed any kind of threat to his regime. That's a universal cause for mass murder, regardless of god-concept.

Wrong. Absolutely wrong.

Hospitals would be places where people died more often than lived for lack of care, and schools would be places where the church indoctrinated the young and drove them away from reason and rationality.

Wrong again.

 

Yes, because atheists created and are the only keepers of sceince.

 

Agh, yes, Stalin and his hence men did go around rounding up Christians.

"Stalin followed the position adopted by Lenin that religion was an opiate that needed to be removed in order to construct the ideal communist society. To this end, his government promoted atheism through special atheistic education in schools, massive amounts of anti-religious propaganda, the antireligious work of public institutions (especially the Society of the Godless), discriminatory laws, and also a terror campaign against religious believers. By the late 1930s it had become dangerous to be publicly associated with religion."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Religion

Stalin just 'happened' to be atheist. His 'atheism' had nothing to do with this?

And of course, those who deny that there is any connection between Stalins' atheism and subsequent actions, are of course of the though that religion caused the Crusades and Inquisition. Their own modern Inquisition? Who cares?

 

Christianity has a ban on intelligence. Take The Garden Of Eden as an example. You can do anything in this magnificent garden, except become intelligent-the Tree of Knowledge-or immortal-the Tree of Life. What a fate God has in store for men: stupidity and mortality! A God who offers such a gift to his creatures must be perverse...Let us then praise Eve who opted for intelligence at risk of death, whereas Adam did not realize the stakes of this moment in paradise.The bliss of ignorance!

 

Psst, you can't really delete an absence. You can only try to make whatever you think is absent become present. And good luck with that.

Although I doubt I'd succeed, I could for example do my best to introduce the understanding that seems to be absent to you, but I could never delete it, - it is already not present.

 

Kind of funny to watch atheists continually try to squirm away from responsibility: the desperate lies, the twisting and turning.

Atheism was of central importance to Marxism-Leninism.

See: The League of the Militant Godless

Soviet Propaganda showing Jesus dumped in the garbage:

 

Atheists have often tried to impose their beliefs, persecute those who disagree. Why was religion so savagely repressed by Communist governments? If atheism wasn't so central to Communism an accomodation would have been made with religious groups.

quote: Some actions against Orthodox priests and believers along with execution included torture being sent to prison camps, labour camps or mental hospitals. The result of this militant atheism was to transform the Church into a persecuted and martyred Church. In the first five years after the Bolshevik revolution, 28 bishops and 1,200 priests were executed. The main target of the anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and 1930s was the Russian Orthodox Church, which had the largest number of faithful. A very large segment of its clergy, and many of its believers, were shot or sent to labor camps. Theological schools were closed, and church publications were prohibited.

LINK

 

“The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion” (Karl Marx)

“The World has never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized and tenaciously malevolent as that preached by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin and at the heart of their psychology, HATRED OF GOD is the principle driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. To achieve its diabolical ends, Communism needs to control a population devoid of religious and national feeling, and this entails a destruction of faith and nationhood. Communists proclaim both of these objectives openly, and just as openly put them into practice.” (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, former communist, Nobel prize winner)

“Atheism is the natural and inseparable part of Communism.” (attributed to Vladimir I. Lenin)

“Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.” (V.I. Lenin)

The official journal of the Soviet Academy of Pedagogical Sciences published a government directive Atheistic Education in the School as a resource on how to separate God from human society. The opening paragraph is revealing: “The Soviet school, as an instrument for the Communist education of the rising generation, can, as a matter of principle, take up no other attitude towards religion than one of irreconcilable opposition; for Communist education has as its philosophical basis Marxism, and Marxism is irreconcilably hostile to religion.

‘Marxism is materialism,’ says V. I. Lenin; ‘as such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion as the materialism of the Encyclopedaists of the eighteenth century or the materialism of Feuerbach.’”

LINK

 

Yep Christianity lacks intelligence because a 19 year old kid with no expeirence or education says so.

Mother Theresa is an idiot. So is President Obama. Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Mendel, all Christians.

And, why the creator of the genetic science that Dawkins twists is considered unintelligent?

Well, such is the lot of bigots and the uneducated.

The really part? Atheists actually think that are aove bigotry. Well, here is your proof to the contrary.

So, apparently, rather than make a case about the beneficial things that atheism brings to the table (is there such a thing) I guess we will have to content ourselves with the knowledge that the magic button would not only save lives .... it would eliminate a great deal of mockery and needless emotional derision.

The floor is your atheism.

What positive benefits do you bring to the table?