GunnerJ

Understood, but this could be so many people from such a large a group that there can be no definative answer. Making this fact clear to him was my aim.

Jagged

Well the same argument can be made for "holy wars" however. Religion has often simply been used as an excuse to further a political agenda.

danlowlite

First point is correct, precisely what I meant, but on the second . . . But that wasn't the claim. The claim was that atheists haven't done that (mass murder). They have, regardless of their sub-ideology.

But at least I didn't upset anyone unintentially that time. :-)

AspenMama

Please note: This thread consists of several posts taken out from here: http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...threadid=51008. I have moved this thread to a more appropriate forum with the approval of my fellow moderators.

AspenMama, SL&S Moderator

pariah

you mean COMMUNIST china and russia? they didnt have freedom of religion...so i beleive it

but it wasnt just a bunch of atheist citizens who just got together one day and said "hey, lets go kill some christians!! YEAH!!!"

it was the gov

Starboy

If the atheist governments you cite killed the religious exclusively then perhaps you might have a point. However the regimes you cite were equal opportunity killers and didn't really discriminate between the religious or any other group or persons that it declared to be an enemy of the state. I think the record will show that they killed many more people for causes other than religion than those that were killed specifically for religion. Now Christians on the other hand cannot say the same about their bloody past.

Starboy

Godless Dave

The Communism came first. Generally Soviet Communists were atheists because they were Communists. They were not Communists because they were atheists, although some might have been atheists before they were Communists. Communist ideology, especially as modified by Lenin and Stalin, encouraged or required Communists to be atheists. There is nothing in atheism itself or the philosophies containing atheism that suggests Communist ideas. Marx's antogonism towards religion was motivated by when and where he lived. All the major European powers at the time had established churches, and the churches were a tool of the state (and in Marx's view, therefore tools of the ruling class, the capitalists), used to quiet dissent and teach obedience (and again in Marx's view, to weasel a little more cash out of the working classes).

But Lenin realized that religious ideology would compete with Communist ideology for people's minds. Totalitarianism was a key part of Lenin's version of Communism; he wanted the state to have a monopoly on ideas, political power, wealth and the people's loyalty. The established Russian Orthodox Church had all four. Lenin decided to destroy them rather than co-opt them, probably suspecting they would never truly renounce their loyalty to the old regime.

Stalin just liked killing people, in my opinion. If Communism hadn't come along he would have found some other authoritarian ideology to exploit.

The Communist Party members and KGB agents who killed and otherwise persecuted Christians, Jews, and Muslims because of the victims' religion did it because they were Communists. They were atheists because you had to profess atheism to join the Communist Party, and you had to be in the party to be in the KGB or have any kind of rank in the military. Stalin exploited atheism as an excuse for killing people much like Hitler exploited Christianity to get people to kill Jews.

To me, and I think most other atheists, replacing God with the state is anathema. If I want to be a freethinker I can no more worship a government, country, or ideology than I can worship a god. No gods, no masters.

Starboy

It is a Christian myth that the Communists eliminated the religious from Russia. To be sure the religious were greatly discouraged and like so much of Russia did not exist simply because the government said they did not exist, but many in the population were religious, held services, communicated with religious organizations in the west and so on. There was also a booming black market in bibles, crucifixes and other religious paraphernalia. My father was almost caught smuggling such things into the Ukraine in 1978.

Starboy

GeoTheo

I think you are all a bunch of phonies. Hem haw hem haw hem haw. Stalin and company weren't "true" atheists , eh?
People kill people. end of story.

Starboy

All this does bring up a distinction between an atheist and an antitheist. Certainly an antitheist is an atheist but an atheist is not automatically an antitheist.

Starboy