countjulian

Bede just left an interesting post up on his website...

Astounding. He manages, of course, to leave out the persecution of paganism after the Christians took over, the missionary wars against the Germanic barbarians (think the pagan Saxons who heroically refused baptism),the Northern Crusades, the Albigensian Crusade, the 30 Year's war and all of the other merry holy wars carried out between Protestants and Catholics, the Christianization of the Americas, the Balkan atrocities against Muslims by the Catholic and Orthodox Christians, the fact that the Holocaust's anti-semetism was thouroughly grounded in Christian blood libel and anti-semetism, and while we're on the subject Francisco Franco's reign of terror in Spain after taking control with the help of the Catholic church. Don't forget the numerous damage caused by the church's stand on birth control, the NLFT's campaign in Triprura, the Rwandan massacres, and the other numerous conflicts being rage in Africa between Christians and Muslims.

Not only that, but he manages to imply that all apistoi in the West would be debased off all morality were it not for Christianity, and thus implying that all people who have never been Christian are thus amoral. That's pretty funny in and of itself, because the Christians got all of their more profound moral insights from Greek philosophy, mainly the Stoics and Cynics. There's a reason the EU recognized classical culture, not Christianity, as Europe's main cultural heritage.

Revisionist

Bede should know better, since he is such a huge critic of the numbers branded about on how many people the Catholic Church killed.

The numbers you often here about how many people Mao and Stalin supposedly killed are based on incredibly bankrupt scholarship. For instance, the Christian fascist supporter of Franco, Solzhenitsyn, never once used any sort of demographic analysis to arrive at his numbers. His numbers, which go to such absurdities as 50 million, come straight from his ass.

Djugashvillain

That's right. I still hear the ridiculous 40-50 million deaths from the 1928-33 collectivisation drive and from the 1936-38 Yezhovschina. The actual numbers are more like 4-5 million killed, through starvation or oppression by local Soviet officials, and about 700 000 during the Yezhovschina, and as for those who died in the GULags (kulaks, apparent fascists, saboteurs, anti-communists) I cannot recall what the current estimate is, but it is in the hundreds of thousands. So fifty million? Hardly. The total amount of murder commited during Stalin's 1929 (effective)-53 reign is significantly less by a number of millions than the Holocaust, an event that was in large part made possible by hundreds of years of anti-Jewish Christian bigotry.

And I challenge whether or not these killings were done in the name of atheism, or whether atheism just happened to be the alignment of those doing the killing. And since atheism has no doctrine that demands the killing of non-atheists--indeed it has no doctrine at all, being by definition a complete lack of doctrine--, and there is no evidence that there were any killings made in the name of atheism, I fail to see the direct connection between atheism and murder, other than atheists are capable and sometimes commit murder. The crusades, however, were undertaken for blatantly religious reasons--a good example is the Albigensian crusade, the Cathars being persecuted for their fundamentalist Benedictine practises.

This is misleading. A more accurate measure of the scale of mass murder is to calculate the proportion of those killed against the population prior to attack. 7 million (a generous estimate) killed in the Soviet Union in a population of some 180 million? A little under five percent of the population. 10 000 killed in Jerusalem? I somehow doubt that Jerusalem's population was anywhere in the vicinity of 200 000, which would put it on equal footing with the Soviet Union. What must be understood is that as population increases so does the scale of dictatorial oppression; this does not mean that those who had less people to kill were any less potentially dangerous or murderous than their modern counterparts, and saying that, 'Well, Christians killed ten thousand in the twelfth and thirteenth century, therefore they are more moral people than those atheists who killed millions in the twentieth century', while it may seem to be a reasonable position is actually, as I said, misleading: as population increases so does the scale of state oppression, and unless you want to demonstrate that there was an atheist conspiracy to increase the world's population in order to more effectively murder it, it is a position that is to be abandoned.

RUmike

That's refreshing to hear, at least.

Amaleq13

If being a Christian is the only thing keeping him from becoming a mass murder, we should not attempt to disabuse him of his faith.

David B

Basically, falling for ideologies is bad news. Religion is a subset of ideologies.

David B

Djugashvillain

And one of the ironic things about the Soviet Union is that communism did start to become the state religion. Stalin tried to prevent this early on by discouraging his personality cult, but he soon gave way due to its political usefulness. Kruschchev, even, when he succeeded Stalin in 1956, though at first discouraging personality cults, allowed a small one of his own to flourish. And instead of the icons common in the peasants homes of Mary or Jesus or St. Paul, they replaced then with images of Stalin and/or Lenin. Was this in praise of atheism? No. It was the once religious population turning their faith towards the only state sanctioned doctrine: communism.

hallq

Bede sickens me:I think it's a reasonable assumption that willingness to rationalize away murders committed by one's own side is a bigger contributor to mass murder than any brand-name of ideology.

alexjohnc3

I can't imagine someone being moral just because they're scared of being sent to Hell. Does he have any reasons for "being moral" besides the fact that he's scared of his god? Maybe... reasoning?

I also don't understand what point Bede is trying to make. Trying to make a connection between atheism and mass-murderers? Just because they happen to lack a belief in God doesn't mean they're going to go around killing people. To my knowledge most atheists are moral and this is because they find reasoning in doing so, not because they're scared that they'll be punished, like some, many, or most (I have no idea) Christians.

gregor

No news that Bede is in full, Catholic defense spin mode.

But can anyone really assert that without a belief in a deity (and maybe only Yahweh) that you're a hair's breath away from mass murder? It's a comment so frequently thrown out by Xians that it's a meme without any basis in individualized belief.