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But the few that are are the ones causing the biggest problems in the world.



Oh, but they are. They very firmly believe that their beliefs give them the right to be violent and advocate violence against those who do not follow their beliefs, or hide behind their beliefs when their violence is questioned.

You may not want them associated with your own particular brand of religion, but that does not make these people any less religious.

   

Hell, look at the number of people who have been killed under the false and cynical guise of "protecting democracy"!

   

Then you haven't met enough religious people.

You've been around this board for how many years? How can you say this with a straight face? There are some downright violent, disrespectful and very religious pricks around here, you would have to be blind to not notice that.

Or maybe it's just not clear enough. So let's set something straight: politics can also be your religion.

   

Defines who? I'm not trying to paint all religious people as violent, I'm saying that being religious doesn't exempt you from being a violent person. If you are not a violent person to begin with, then obviously this doesn't apply to you.

   

Religion and violence is all around us.

   

You didn't watch the clip, did you ridenrain?

   

Point taken but it needs to be expanded. As the totalitarians (from Robespierre on through to Pol Pot) merely exchanged God for Collective Man as the central object of worship, the societies they created (as such) really can't be correctly seen as atheist or secular. Most of the totalitarians were either abetted by the existing religious institutions (Nazi Germany) or were able to successfully exploit the blood-drenched societies that had been thoroughly raped, brutalized, and made used to state-sanctioned cruelty and mass murder by the domestic religious leadership working in concert with the local monarchy (Soviet Union). If one were to say that the totalitarians used a perversion of atheism as a foundation of their social engineering than I'll concede the point. But the same things really don't apply to a secular Western society or to contemporary Western atheists no matter how vehemently the religious claim try to say that it does.

I'll finish by reminding everyone of one of Hitchen's points that illustrate the difference between a modern atheism and the religious. It wasn't atheists that blew up a Shia mosque in Samarra back in 2005 that set off the sectarian civil war in Iraq. It was the Sunni co-religionists of the Shia who willfully did so. This would be useful as a reminder that the religious are always capable of conceiving, implementing, and exploiting a type of horrific violence that atheists wouldn't even dream of. As an atheist I'll admit that I find medieval Christian-inspired architecture and art quite wonderful to view. I wouldn't even imagine doing anything that would destroy any of it, or hurt any of the people who have it as part of their faith, nor supress their right to worship freely and peacefully. But at the same time, using something like Westboro Baptist or Al Qaeda as a dual starting point, I doubt it would be all that hard to find Protestant or Muslim radicals who would like (for example) to wipe every Catholic church or catherdral from the face of the earth. Religion might provide the inspiration for the creation but it also always provides the justification for the killing and destruction. As such religious violence should always be seen separately from the violence perpetrated in the name of survival or self-defence, or that committed by the mentally insane.

   

Which is only made possible in a society infected from top-to-bottom by a dangerous crusader busybody mentality that affects Left and Right equally. I lost track of how many American liberals (the same ones who've been yelling "illegal invasion of Iraq!" for the last six years) I saw on blogs who were spastically pushing for the overthrow of the Burmese government after the cyclone wiped out half of that country, or who want to dump half of the US military into Darfur to hand out food. Apparently to these kinds of folks the alleged good intentions are more than enough justification to not bother learning the lessons taught by the consequences of bothering people from wildly different cultures or admittedly despicable foreign governments who want to be left alone to their own devices.

   

I'm personally rather uncomfortable with the idea of invading a country like Burma just to deal with its sick government. Given the current devastation and the violence that went on display while the monks protested months ago, I don't think it would make matters improve. Make no mistake, I doubt a single civilian in Burma wants the junta to continue its brutal reign, and I can see how some people would argue that invading would serve a better purpose than invading Iraq did, but that is also pure ideology.

Comparing Iraq and Burma is a mistake, though. Iraqis lived better under Saddam Hussein than they do now. They had health care, clean water, reliable electricity, education, universities which women were allowed to attend. It was possible to live a moderately carefree life so long as you didn't criticise the government or Saddam Hussein. The Burmese junta, on the other hand, seem to have little more intention than enslaving the population. Burma is one of the most impoverished countries in the world, and many western nations are guilty of aiding and abetting the junta's use of slave labour. It has been reported that since the cyclone, forced labour camps have been set up as "relief".

   

I don't think I know of any examples of atheist extremism. I suppose you could say that China invading Tibet might be one. But my point here is that atheists are not necessarily free from religion, they can only hold a different set of beliefs. Atheists could just as easily start a war against theists, and they would be no different.

Of course, it depends on how one defines oneself as an atheist. Do you firmly believe there is no god, in the self-contradictory manner that you hold a belief in the concept of god and that such an entity does not exist, or do you simply not believe in the concept of a god or gods in the first place?

   

   

Were you high when you wrote this reply, or just lazy? That quote was seriously messed up.

Anyway...

Those three may not have been big followers of established religion, but at least one of them was a very religious person, in that he believed in his ideas so strongly that he would systematically kill millions for them (Hitler, not Stalin. Stalin was just schizophrenic and paranoid), and all of them are the figureheads for personality cults. Religious belief was definitely involved in their reign.

   

awesome... loved the video...good message..

   

I enjoyed the video, knowing full well that it was played for laughs. The unfortunate part about it though, is that some anti religous zelots will take this as, pardon the pun, gospel and use it to try and discredit any and all religions.

   

Interesting website for anyone interested in a statistical examination of mega-murders committed by governments over the last two hundred years:

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/

I use this as another illustration of what happens when the state isn't secularized, as some erroneously claim, but instead is made into God by it's fascist/Nazi/Communist "worshippers". For those who say that the older medieval-era religious tyrannies wouldn't (or won't, in the specific instance of the contemporary Islamist fascist movement) have racked up the same sort of body count, I'd say that it was merely because they never had the industrial capacity to engage in the same wide-scale mass-murder that the 20th century tyrannies had available to them. There is certainly not much difference between the intentions of the religiously motivated from five hundred years ago and the intentions of the so-called "secularists" of the 1920 to 1945 period.

   

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