Did Jesus Actually Exist?

@Olivier5,

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Yes, "the meek will inherit the Earth". In fact they have: we call it democracy.

Just who are you calling "the meek". I don't see a single soul in our democratic government that I would call "meek".

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@Olivier5,

Just for the record, Hitler was not an atheist. Not by his own report, at least. The Christians just love to drag that red herring over the course.

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@Setanta,

I never said he was. But Stalin and mao were, and they killed far more people than Hitler.

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@Olivier5,

The big villains of the world are those who lust for power, and the worst of them are those who lust for what they believe to be god-like power.

When religions and isms appear in conditions of human woe, some would like to name them the villain. The reality is that they are merely the corrupted vehicles of the true villains, our fellow humans.

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@Olivier5,

And then you allege that they killed people because they were atheists, or because their victims were not? Got some evidence that that was case or is this must more of your typical ipse dixit spew?

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

I wrote:
I prefer to keep an eye on the things I know of.
Whatever that means... I do that a lot, too. Don't worry for me.

Of course not. In the end, we are all responsible for ourselves.

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@Setanta,

Quote:

And then you allege that they killed people because they were atheists, or because their victims were not?

You've misunderstood me again. I was just showing how Z’s assumption that anything bad done by a Christian should be blamed on Jesus is baloney. If he’s right, then anything bad done by an atheist must be blame on atheism itself.

This said, Mao and Stalin did target religion, and a good case IMO can be made that the "death of God" by the end of the 19th century has unleashed these furies of the 20th. In a world where there's no heaven and hell, what can stop a mass murderer? As Voltaire once said: "I wouldn't like to live in a kingdom of atheists because I'd be afraid they'd kill everyone." (paraphrasing)

Now, AFTER those catastrophic 20th century mass murders, famines and genocides, some of us have built a 'civic moral' of sorts that tells us about the dangers of such things as racism, dictatorship, or utopia... We learned the hard way, like a teenager becoming adult will make a number of mistakes with his new freedom, and learns as a result to drive safer or not trust everybody (s)he meets.

So I'm not arguing to come back to the 18th century... or to a faith-inspired polity. God forbid. :-)

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@Olivier5,

In fact, it's more of your ipse dixit bullshit when you start blathering about targeting religion. When Petr Alexeevitch ("Peter the Great") was the emperor, he made the Russian Orthodox Church a bureaucracy of the state. When the Bolsheviks took over, the paychecks stopped coming in and the state no longer maintained the churches and monasteries. There were quite a few Orthodox priests and monks who were killed by Trotsky's Red Army during the civil war with the Whites. However, they were killed for aiding and abetting Kolchak, not because of their religion. Similarly, christian missionaries were targeted in China, and by the Nationalists as well as the Communists, because they symbolized the hated westerners. I know of no reliable evidence of long-term, systematic programs to eliminate people because they were christian adherents, and won't believe that allegation on your part without evidence.

You're spouting simplistic gross generalities.

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So you're like a dedicated christian apologist, huh?

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Quote:

When religions and isms appear in conditions of human woe, some would like to name them the villain. The reality is that they are merely the corrupted vehicles of the true villains, our fellow humans.

I agree about the primacy of individual responsibility. Don't hide behind your ideas to justify your own greed or violence. BUT the best of Z's posts on this thread was IMO about the fact that ideas do have an impact. They are murderous ideas, and they are generous ideas.

E.g. the antisemitism latent in the Gospel explains much of the persecutions bestowed onto the Jews in Christian Europe over the centuries. It's probably not enough to explain the holocaust, but pogroms and evictions, certainly (added to greed of course: some of the kings and noblemen involved had borrowed a bit too much from Jews... expelling them was therefore quite convenient financially, e.g. in England).

This said, I also believe that the gospels contain much of what would later evolved into humanism, and then the human rights movement. So they also contain "good' ideas.

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@Setanta,

Quote:

christian missionaries were targeted in China, and by the Nationalists as well as the Communists, because they symbolized the hated westerners. I know of no reliable evidence of long-term, systematic programs to eliminate people because they were christian adherents, and won't believe that allegation on your part without evidence.

That's a straw man. I did not mention Christians, just religion. The entire cultural revolution was based on anti-religious ideas, and destroyed many Buddhist or other temples. The manipulation of the Tibetan religion by the current Chinese regime (they chose who the 'right' lamas should be), and its opposition to all sorts of religious figures and groups right now is a testimony to the fact that, in a dictatorship, there can be no other value system than the state's.

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@Olivier5,

Certainly the Bolsheviks and the Chinese communists wanted to eliminate religion as a force in society. That's a given. However, what i wrote was not a straw man. You were trying to suggest that Stalin and Mao were out to eliminste the adherents, not just the religion. Of course, in the Russian Empire, eliminating the religionists would have entailed killing off nearly the entire population.

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This, by the way:

Quote:

This said, Mao and Stalin did target religion, and a good case IMO can be made that the "death of God" by the end of the 19th century has unleashed these furies of the 20th.

. . . was hilarious. You should consider a career in comedy.

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@Setanta,

Quote:

Certainly the Bolsheviks and the Chinese communists wanted to eliminate religion as a force in society. That's a given. However, what i wrote was not a straw man. You were trying to suggest that Stalin and Mao were out to eliminste the adherents, not just the religion. Of course, in the Russian Empire, eliminating the religionists would have entailed killing off nearly the entire population.

If you can prove I said that, by my guest. If you can't, just stop lying.

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@Setanta,

Thanks. You should consider it too. The role of Tartuffe would fit you well.

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@Olivier5,

You seem tailor made for Jacques le fataliste--tout ce que l'on fait dans la vie est écrit là-haut seems to be your motto.

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Actually, if you add Hilter's crimes to Stalin's and Mao's, you're pretty much up there already. All done in a few years only, by a few atheists at least for the last two... Atheism is thus the worse thing that ever happened to mankind, by your own reasoning.

I realize that you were sneering at Z, nevertheless, you wrote it, you own it.

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@Setanta,

I don't believe in determinism. So you're wrong again.

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@Olivier5,

You are such a weasel. You asked for a quote, and i provided it. You've been attempting for pages to slur atheists as history's worst mass killers. What a ******* bullshit artist.

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@Setanta,

Nowhere in that quote do I say that "Stalin and Mao were out to eliminste the adherents, not just the religion."

Stop lying, you're fooling only yourself.

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Did Jesus Actually Exist?

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