Atheism

We can easily spot the inanity of that assertion by the crap you post..

In you case, belief equates with stupidity..

"Belief"...in discussions of religion and philosophy...denotes guesses...that the "believers" (whether theists or atheists) want to disguise by using "belief" rather than "guess."

A belief that there is a GOD (except for theists who claim knowledge of a god because the god has favored them by revealing itself to them)...is just a blind guess about the REALITY of existence...that there is a GOD.

A belief that there are no gods...is just a blind guess about the REALITY of existence...that there are no gods.

There has been studies done on the correlation between belief/atheism and intelligence, I think.

My point is not about whether atheists in general are smart. My point is that the arguments presented by A2K atheists are often ludicrous, waaaay below par. Like the one above saying Stalin used the orthodox church hierarchy (re-painted in communist red) to kill millions of people... Such contempt for historical facts is worrying me.

What sort of group breeds arguments as stupid as that? I venture to say: an insular group, people not used to be challenged, and not used to have to convince anyone.

Atheism will never make much progress if stupidity and scorn is all it has to offer. I'm pleading for a more serious intellectual effort. Facile arguments are for losers.

Like you?

I know it was easy but pertinent..

I agree with you. I don't think I have done either, myself, here on a2k - maybe, but I don't remember doing that. I well remember my own believing and after a period of anger in my twenties/early thirties, I reassembled, with more of me starting understanding, getting the way of the world, and the re-seeing good parts I had tended to skirt in my then religion repulsion. A friend, Bonnie, was ahead of me on stuff, traveled more, had a wider view.

Also, I happen to like a lot of (not all) men.

You think? LOL Please provide the source for that study. Whatever correlation that study seems to imply doesn't correlate with common sense.

Belief in god(s) or atheism has nothing to do with IQ. THAT'S A FACT YOU CAN TAKE TO THE BANK.

Alright, I trust you. All the more reason to raise our game.

There are places in the world where the Church is an important purveyor not only of health and education services, but also of morality and dignity. DRC comes to mind. Priests are pretty much the only 'officials' you can trust there. Sad but true. In other places, the priests slow down progress.

Lol. You don't know how he common mind makes function? Imagine, believe, learn, know, act in that order.

Squabbles about atheists starting wars are idiotic because they assume that atheists go to war becaue they're atheists. Hitler stated that he was and and always had been a Catholic. Silly and obscure arguments about whether or not he as a "closet atheist" are meaningless. He didn't invade Poland, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France because they are christian nations and he wished to extirpate christianity. I defy anyone to come up with a shred of evidence for such a program. His invasion of the Soviet Union was part and parcel of a program he outlined in prison after the failed Beer Hall Putsch--my master race needs living space. That he was an idiot about military matters doesn't alter that he thought he had good military reasons for what he did.

Stalin joined the invasion of Poland because he wanted a buffer between the Soviet Union and Germany. That he was naïve in thinking that little strip of land would help the defense of the Soviet Union doesn't alter his motive. He invaded Finland because Karelia comes to within visual distance of Leningrad/St. Petersburg, the second largest city in the Soviet Union. It was the Japanese invading Mongolia, then a Soviet puppet state, that lead to war with Japan. He did not start his far eastern war. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, that can hardly be laid at Stalin's door.

The problem with the fallacy of atheists starting wars is that you'd have to show that atheists started wars because they are atheists, and not for the several very compelling economic, political, ideological and/or military reasons that one can see time and again in history. Good luck with that.

I agree, of course. It would be the height of inanity to suggest that despots and dictators did what they did in furtherance of some sort of atheistic agenda. (Has anyone suggested that, btw?) But what I find equally inane is the strong suggestion contained in the quote posted by Wilso that the likes of Stalin and Hitler were inspired by early Christian example. Puh-leeze!

Conclusion. They weren't religious/non-religious wars.

Agreed.

I get all all of that, multiplied, part of who I was, thinking of going into the Maryknolls at seventeen, and I suppose I need to acknowledge more, that I now, a million years later, remember my some of my thoughts back then.

Yes, christians frequently drag out claims that atheists have started wars--the implication being that they start wars because they are atheists--as a tu quoque fallacy. It's pretty easy to make a claim about religious wars, so christians come back with what is basically an "oh yeah? well look at you guys!" kind of argument.

Incidentally, all wars are subject to review on the basis of motive. Nobody could get anybody interested in a crusade against the Cathars, until the pope Innocent III got together with the kinf of France and promised to declare the nobility of languedoc Cathar heretics and their lands forfeit. Hey, prest9-chango! there was now an economic motive for the French to go to war.

There never really was a Thirty Years War, it's just one of those names that some historians will slap on a series of events to tidy up history, which tends to be messy. However, a lot of Germans did got to war, and the motive was religious adherence. The Swedish king, Gustav II Adolph (a.k.a., Gustavus Adolphus) invaded Germany, and upset the entire apple car for the HRE, who seemed to have won. Gustav was killed in battle in 1632, leaving his four-year-9ld daughter Christina on the throne. His chief minister then turned back to attack Denmark, whose filthy rich, drunken king thought to take advantate of the situation (Protestant versus Protestant, by the way). But Cardinal Richelieu became alarmed that Austria would grow too powerful, so he convinced the Swedes to stay in the war by agreeing to pay a subsidy. Later, French troops became involved, and sometimes even fought with the Swedes. So Catholic France spent a lot of money to keep Protestant Sweden in the war against Catholic Austria (the HRE) so that they would not become too powerful. Politics and money trumps religion every time. I've pointed this out over the years, but you'll still get goofs who come around trying to make extravagant claims about religions and war. So other goofs make claims about atheists and wars.

A Short History of Violent State Atheism

Atheism is a great idea. In some places and at some times in its history, this great idea came into power as a state ideology. In such cases, and not unlike some other great ideas before it like monotheism, state atheism often motivated campaigns to try and eradicate the competition (i.e. all religions) through banning, murder, torture, detention, psychiatric treatment or other forms of violence to religious officials and discrimination toward believers. Below are the most radical cases.

This is not to say that atheism or atheists are bad, just that obviously, religion holds no monopoly on violence.


Albania

State atheism in Albania was taken to an extreme during the totalitarian regime installed after World War II, when religions, identified as imports foreign to Albanian culture, were banned altogether.[25] The Agrarian Reform Law of August 1945 nationalized most property of religious institutions, including the estates of mosques, monasteries, orders, and dioceses. Many clergy and believers were tried, tortured, and executed. All foreign Roman Catholic priests, monks, and nuns were expelled in 1946.

China

During the Cultural Revolution, student vigilantes known as Red Guards converted religious buildings for secular use or destroyed them.

Cuba

Originally more tolerant of religion, Cuba began arresting many believers and shutting down religious schools after the Bay of Pigs invasion, its prisons since the 1960s being filled with clergy.[48] In 1961 The Cuban government confiscated Catholic schools, including the Jesuit school Fidel Castro had attended. In 1965 it exiled two hundred priests.[49]

The Communist Party of Cuba defines one of its aims as "the gradual overcoming of religious beliefs by materialistic scientific propaganda and the cultural advancement of the workers."

France

The de-Christianization of France during the French Revolution is a conventional description of the results of a number of separate policies, conducted by various governments of France between the start of the French Revolution in 1789 and the Concordat of 1801, forming the basis of the later and less radical Laïcité movement. The goal of the campaign was the destruction of Catholic religious practice and of the religion itself.

Under threat of death, imprisonment, military conscription, and loss of income, about twenty thousand constitutional priests were forced to abdicate and hand over their letters of ordination, and six thousand to nine thousand of them were coerced to marry. [ this being France after all ]

By the end of the decade, approximately thirty thousand priests had been forced to leave France, and others who did not leave were executed. Any non-juring priest faced the guillotine or deportation to French Guiana. By Easter 1794, few of France's forty thousand churches remained open; many had been closed, sold, destroyed, or converted to other uses.

USSR

State atheism in the Soviet Union (gosateizm) attempted to stop the spread of religious beliefs as well as remove "prerevolutionary remnants".

Within about a year of the revolution, the state expropriated all church property, including the churches themselves, and in the period from 1922 to 1926, 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200 priests were killed (a much greater number was subjected to persecution). Most seminaries were closed, and publication of religious writing was banned. The Russian Orthodox Church, which had 54,000 parishes before World War I, was reduced to 500 by 1940.

Although all religions were persecuted, the regime's efforts to eradicate religion, however, varied over the years with respect to particular religions, and were affected by higher state interests. Official policies and practices not only varied with time, but also in their application from one nationality and one religion to another. Nationality and religion were always closely linked, and the attitude toward religion varied from a total ban on some religions to official support of others.

Adapted from: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism

Conclusion: thank you for you very amusing link...

And you weren't a bad person for it... Anyway, I like to bash religion too and each denomination has its share of perverts and assholes, but to think that religion never ever played a positive role in society is I think naive and simplistic.

Wikipedia has been a dubious source for religious subjects, including atheism, for more than a year now, for almost two years. I first noticed it in May, 2013, and commented on it then. The earliest revision date i have seen since then is early February, 2013. At the top of the article excerpted by Olive Tree (he seems not to link articles directly), the last revision date is given as eight days ago. That notice serves as a link to the revision history page. As is the case with the excerpted portion of the Wikipedia article on the testimonium which Olive Tree pasted into the thread on the historicity of Jeebus, the history pages and the linked talk pages are a very interesting picture of the editorial wars at Wikipedia with regard to any article on religion. In one of the editorial comments in the history page for the testimonium article, the word vandalized is used--and it is appropriate.

My post was a response to the question of the fallacy of atheists starting wars. So, let's see. How many wars has Albania started? Oh, that's right. None. How many wars has Cuba started--of yeah, none. How many wars has France started? Since 1853, i believe the answer is none. Certainly the role played in the 1853 Russo-Turkish war by Louis Bonaparte (the self-styled Napoleon III) was scurrilous, but i doubt that he had any atheistic motives. I'd certainly need to see clear-cut evidence to believe it. The real Napoleon treated the Pope pretty shabbily, but it would be laughably absurd to allege that he had atheistic motives.

How many wars has China started since the 1949 communist takeover? I believe the answer to that is none. (While it is true that China invaded Tibet in 1950, that is something which China has done time and again over the ages. The power of the Buddhist monasteries was taken away, and their feudal relationship with the people ended, meaning they can't support tens and tens of thousands of monks any longer. I'd say the people of Tibet are better off for that. There is no evidence to support a claim that China invaded Tibet to further atheism.)

So how many wars did the Soviet Union start? I know of only three. One was the invasion of Poland by the Red Army in 1920. It was turned back at the gates of Warsaw by French and Polish troops (mostly French). I know of no reason to consider it to have been motivated by proselytizing atheism. One was the invasion of Finland in what has become known as the Winter War, but the purpose of that war was to take over Karelia, which reaches to within a few miles of what was then called Leningrad, the second largest city of the Soviet Union. The other was the invasion of Afghanistan in 1978, which was undertaken in support of an already existing marxist government in that country.

It is true that many hundreds (the figures in that article seem suspect) of Orthodox clergy were killed. However, the dates in the article are unreliable, too. Most Russian clergy killed after the Bolshevik revolution were killed during the civil war between the Whites and the Reds. Clergy who were not involved (as hundreds were) were left unmolested. The article distorts history in another regard, too. Petr Alexeevitch Romanov, styled Peter the Great, created the Russian Orthodox Church as a state bureaucracy. There had already been a failed attempt assert the supremacy of the church over the state during the reign of his father, Alexei Mikhailovitch. Even before the Bolshevik revolution, and after the Russian revolution (the former was in November 1917 by our calendar, while the latter took place in March of that year), Kerensky's government had stopped paying salaries to the Russian Orthodox clergy and was no longer funding the maintenance of church properties. That was undoubtedly a product of the ineptitude of Kerensky's government, but the neglect of the clergy and of church property (which for more than two centuries had actually been state property) can not reasonably be laid at the door of the Soviet Union.

Essentially, i see another flawed, vandalized and biased article from Wikipedia, where no article on religion is any longer reliable.

Setanta has been a very dubious source lately, lying about Louis Feldman and all....