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Killed in the Name of Belief or Killed Without Belief

Every monarchy in Europe was a "religious government", until recently. If you count countries with atheism as an official policy, then you must also count countries with religion as an official policy. The Queen of England is still the head of the Church of England, so all of their wars until the present day count too.
 
Ikari said:
Yeah, but the Christians built the guillotines.
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Hardly: the French Revolution was first (to my knowledge) manifestation of politicized atheism in history.

I am not trying to idealize religion, or whitewash the history of Christian civilization. I'll be the first to say that religion-based morality is deeply flawed, resting on a contradictory heap of taboos supported by nothing but the illogical appeal to authority.

But it is a morality, warts and all. Just as LowDown says, a barrier - however imperfect - to wholesale slaughter of innocents.

Put yourself into the shoes of an uneducated, simple Russian soldier in 1917. Everything is falling apart. The monarchy is gone; the war (unimaginable, bloodiest war ever, without reason or purpose) is lost - yet somehow never ending; out of sudden, there are hundreds of parties and groups, each claiming that their way is the best way...Your confusion is approaching its theoretical limits.

And one group in particular is making a remarkable claim: they have discovered the root of all evil: there's a "class" of people among us, hiding in the plain sight, that is blocking our predestined march toward beautiful, fat, pain-free future, and causing all the suffering. Get rid of them, every single one - and things will change.

What do you have to lose? "Only your immortal soul" - the priest says. But if there's no such thing as "immortal soul"...
 
Cyrylek said:
Hardly: the French Revolution was first (to my knowledge) manifestation of politicized atheism in history.

I am not trying to idealize religion, or whitewash the history of Christian civilization. I'll be the first to say that religion-based morality is deeply flawed, resting on a contradictory heap of taboos supported by nothing but the illogical appeal to authority.

But it is a morality, warts and all. Just as LowDown says, a barrier - however imperfect - to wholesale slaughter of innocents.

Put yourself into the shoes of an uneducated, simple Russian soldier in 1917. Everything is falling apart. The monarchy is gone; the war (unimaginable, bloodiest war ever, without reason or purpose) is lost - yet somehow never ending; out of sudden, there are hundreds of parties and groups, each claiming that their way is the best way...Your confusion is approaching its theoretical limits.

And one group in particular is making a remarkable claim: they have discovered the root of all evil: there's a "class" of people among us, hiding in the plain sight, that is blocking our predestined march toward beautiful, fat, pain-free future, and causing all the suffering. Get rid of them, every single one - and things will change.

What do you have to lose? "Only your immortal soul" - the priest says. But if there's no such thing as "immortal soul"...
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Who gives a **** about the immortal soul? I don't want to lose this mortal life. And if I don't want to lose it, well I'm pretty god damned sure others don't either. And as such, I now must interact in a system in which people need to not kill each other off haphazardly.

This whole "atheists can't be moral" BS is just that. BS. Like somehow being atheist prevents you from contemplating metaphysics.
 
Ikari said:
Who gives a **** about the immortal soul? I don't want to lose this mortal life.
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But you will - if you happen to be on the wrong side of the barricades, facing an enemy who does give a **** about his soul anymore - or anything else, apart from his ideological delusions.
 
Cyrylek said:
Hardly: the French Revolution was first (to my knowledge) manifestation of politicized atheism in history.

I am not trying to idealize religion, or whitewash the history of Christian civilization. I'll be the first to say that religion-based morality is deeply flawed, resting on a contradictory heap of taboos supported by nothing but the illogical appeal to authority.

But it is a morality, warts and all. Just as LowDown says, a barrier - however imperfect - to wholesale slaughter of innocents.

Put yourself into the shoes of an uneducated, simple Russian soldier in 1917. Everything is falling apart. The monarchy is gone; the war (unimaginable, bloodiest war ever, without reason or purpose) is lost - yet somehow never ending; out of sudden, there are hundreds of parties and groups, each claiming that their way is the best way...Your confusion is approaching its theoretical limits.

And one group in particular is making a remarkable claim: they have discovered the root of all evil: there's a "class" of people among us, hiding in the plain sight, that is blocking our predestined march toward beautiful, fat, pain-free future, and causing all the suffering. Get rid of them, every single one - and things will change.

What do you have to lose? "Only your immortal soul" - the priest says. But if there's no such thing as "immortal soul"...
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In the words of Spengler: The remarkable thing about the French Revolution was that it even happened. After 1800 years of mental enslavement to Christianity the French proved there was still human life in the Northern Hemisphere.........
 
Cyrylek said:
But you will - if you happen to be on the wrong side of the barricades, facing an enemy who does give a **** about his soul anymore - or anything else, apart from his ideological delusions.
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All sorts of things can cost me this life, but I can reason well enough to understand a base morality that can lead to the proliferation of the greatest number of lives. I'm still a rational individual, regardless of theistic belief, and morality is realm of humans not just the theists.
 
LowDown said:
That's what I'd call a lame dodge on the part of atheists. Whenever atheism is associated with good things then the good things are due to atheism. Whenever atheism is associated with bad things then there's no connection between the bad things and atheism. Is that about the way it goes?

With the USSR, Red China, etc., the connection between official state atheism and what those regimes did with their recalcitrant citizens is very clear, at least to reasonable people. The moral tradition providing restraint was simply absent. Nothing had been provided to replace it.
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capitalism and its close friend bigotry and ignorance cant kill people , it needs zombies ..
 
Ikari said:
This whole "atheists can't be moral" BS is just that. BS.
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I couldn't agree more.

But it doesn't mean that losing faith makes you more moral. At the moment of "spiritual crisis', you stare into the abyss. And, yes, some of us atheists will emerge from the crisis in a pretty good shape. But most people - especially if the "crisis" was imposed on them, unloaded like a ton of bricks - not a natural phase of their own mental development - they will 'emerge' as automations with hijacked programming, manipulated by self-proclaimed gods - demons of the worst kind.

It happened. It did. On a mind-boggling scale. There's no way around it.
 
Bonzai said:
In the words of Spengler: The remarkable thing about the French Revolution was that it even happened. After 1800 years of mental enslavement to Christianity the French proved there was still human life in the Northern Hemisphere.........
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Tell that to Antoine Lavoisier.
 
Medusa said:
capitalism and its close friend bigotry and ignorance cant kill people , it needs zombies ..
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Ah, but the (totalitarian) socialism and its Siamese twin bigotry can kill people just fine - and does not need any extraneous 'zombies' - or any excuses. Unless, of course, there is an immortal soul, or something else standing in the way...
 
Cyrylek said:
Tell that to Antoine Lavoisier.
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The English speaking countries have so far been able to avoid a similar revolution because their governments and intellectual strata have been able to mitigate the worst of the abuses of the monied/privileged class and the church..............So far................
 
How come the Nazi inspired Holocaust and the genocide of Native Americans aren't on there?
 
Ikari said:
All sorts of things can cost me this life, but I can reason well enough to understand a base morality that can lead to the proliferation of the greatest number of lives. I'm still a rational individual, regardless of theistic belief, and morality is realm of humans not just the theists.
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Once again: I do agree. I am the same as you, when it comes to religion.

But we cannot pretend, against all the overwhelming evidence, that all, most - even many - people in the world are like us. It may sound terribly arrogant, but we are the "elite": the lucky bastards who have (if we can be bothered) the best education, the best jobs, the best everything in this wonderful, secular, scientific world of modern liberal democracies.

Unfortunately, this is not the whole world. I know because I grew up in that "atheistic" Communist utopia. Would they be better off, "morally", if they have listened to the priest, not the NKVD executioner? Frankly, I don't care about their morals or their souls.

I know, however, that my grandmother would not be the ONLY survivor, in the family of 16, by 1929.
 
Cyrylek said:
Ah, but the (totalitarian) socialism and its Siamese twin bigotry can kill people just fine - and does not need any extraneous 'zombies' - or any excuses. Unless, of course, there is an immortal soul, or something else standing in the way...
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There are plenty of religious socialists. None of them are motivated by a non-belief.
 
Bonzai said:
The English speaking countries have so far been able to avoid a similar revolution because their governments and intellectual strata have been able to mitigate the worst of the abuses of the monied/privileged class and the church..............So far................
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Good evening, Bonz. :2wave:

Most churches do an outstanding job of helping the less fortunate, and many charities count on the donations of the "monied" class, at least in the US. :thumbs: What abuses are you referring to?
 
Hard Truth said:
How come the Nazi inspired Holocaust isn't on there?
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Hitler appealed to Christians to attack Jews because Jews killed Jesus. Hitler also appealed to Pagans to attack Christians because Christians were responsible for the "Holy" Crusades, and Hitler also appealed to Muslims to attack Christians for harboring Jews, and to attack Jews for I forget what reason. Hitler was very religious when he tried to convince the Pope to go along with his plans, and then every anti-religious when convinced atheists to assist in systematically attacking Christians. he didn't embrace any one religion, he pitted them against each other. His motive was money. His plan was called "democratic socialism" which was actually "dictator-led communism" and he was just using religions as scapegoats to justify military takeover of Europe. It's a common myth that he believed in Christianity, but actually he renounced his parents' Christian faith at the age of 14, and more than 4 million Christians were killed in his death camps. It's a less common myth that he practiced pagan rituals, but actually those "secret pagan meetings" he attended were more likely drug buys for his meth addiction . He didn't stick to any religion, not even to atheism, so his motives were just not religious. He just liked to pit everyone else against each other.
 
Manc Skipper said:
There are plenty of religious socialists. None of them are motivated by a non-belief.
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As you may guess, I am not a fan of Al Sharpton or Hugo Chavez. Still, neither of them had ever proposed anything like the "radical solutions" their atheist counterparts in Russia or Cuba had embraced with abandon.
 
Actually, I agree that the root of the problem is not religion. The root is the human tendency to divide ourselves into "us" and "them." The dynamic is often the same, while the criteria can change radically. One day it's nationality; the next it's race; the third day, it's religion; the fourth, political philosophy.

That said, I agree with Redress. This "chart" is vague, gives no dates, excludes the massacre of Jews by the (Christian) Nazis, excludes the massacre of Christian Armenians by Muslim Turks, ignores the Palestine-Israeli conflict, ignores the centuries of conflict and oppression and intolerance based specifically on religious intolerance. It provides no real information that addresses the issue.

That said ;) there is nothing about either religion or atheism that specifically sparks violence. Religion is certainly not capable of restraining violence, either of an individual, criminal or society-wide manner, it's just another us/them excuse. Violence is simply a part of the human experience.
 
polgara said:
Good evening, Bonz. :2wave:

Most churches do an outstanding job of helping the less fortunate, and many charities count on the donations of the "monied" class, at least in the US. :thumbs: What abuses are you referring to?
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Their attempts to influence the course of human society in this "world"......................
 
Redress said:
Religion is used as a motivation for a large number of deaths. The fact that people are also killed for other reasons does not make it any less true that religion is a motivation for millions of deaths across history.
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This I believe is not exactly correct. Religion is used as a pretext, religion is used as an excuse for, but as a motivation, I think very little had to do with it. I'm not saying it has had nothing to do with any of it, but by and large the first two far outstrip the third
 
Hard Truth said:
How come the Nazi inspired Holocaust and the genocide of Native Americans aren't on there?
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Both of which were largely inspired by Christianity, they absolutely deserve to be on there, but the graph is clearly biased, they didn't want to put anything on it that didn't show what they wanted shown.
 
ChezC3 said:
This I believe is not exactly correct. Religion is used as a pretext, religion is used as an excuse for, but as a motivation, I think very little had to do with it. I'm not saying it has had nothing to do with any of it, but by and large the first two far outstrip the third
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islamist suicide bombers are motivated by the idea of having 72 virgins in heaven.
 
Diogenes said:
I suggest that it is fanaticism that motivates people to kill. The fanaticism may arise from religion but is equally likely (and more deadly) to arise from political beliefs as noted by the right side of the chart.

It's too bad the chart doesn't include the Nazi holocaust.
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This probably going to be the most brilliant statement on this thread...and it is the 3rd post I read. I have always said that politics is far deadlier than religion, but that the biggest danger is fanaticism. Anyone telling you that you need to kill for a cause, or that someone else needs to be killed for a cause, is probably selling something or gaining something when you do.
 
Medusa said:
islamist suicide bombers are motivated by the idea of having 72 virgins in heaven.
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That's poppycock for one, second, that is metaphysical lust that is their motivation, not religion.
 
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