The tolerant atheist

In fact, the US constitution states that the govt is run in an atheitic fashion (within the root definition of "Atheism")

Odd how the myth that the US is a Christian nation is so persistent. Is the Establishment Clause so obscure?

Freedom of religion means freedom OF and FROM, the from guys arent given an even break.

Our historical infrastructure is that the individual colonies were mostly sectarian experiments and each run with a sort of Christian Sharia, and most were generally intolerant of each others beliefs. (Just like todays Christians). Time for the Constitution and this balkanizing was recognized as an impediment to a "UNION" (We can than Washington for that concept)

A-yep.

Really, Farmer? I don't recall ever coming across that word (atheitic) in the US Constitution. Where does it appear? Can you quote the phrase you're referring to?

So don't ask 'irrelevant' questions then l

That was not an appeal to metaphysics, it was a question about the logic of your claim. You undermine your own arguments. First, by suggesting that there was essentially no change in the style of governance in Russia--which fails completely to address the question of why government there was despotic, and certainly does not support a claim that the government of the Soviet Union was despotic because it was atheistic. Then there's this: 'To the common people, religion is true. To the wise, it is false. To rulers, it is useful.' That was exactly my point--a theocracy is likely to be despotic because of its claim of religious authority. (By the way, you've got that statement in quotes, as though you were referring to someone else's idea. Attribution for quoted remarks is helpful, you know.)

I didn't claim the USSR was despotic because it was an atheist state. I understood fresco to be claiming that intolerance of religion is justified by the fact that it is associated with social malignancy. The USSR and Communist China demonstrate that atheists don't necessarily do better. It's just incidental that the only examples we have of atheist states are catastrophic and make Saudi and Pakistan look like icons of sanity.

A theocracy could exert authority through an oligarchy or a republic. Iran is along the lines of a republic.

It's attributed to Seneca. I'm not sure who actually said it.

The US government ideally supports no metaphysical viewpoint. The US is a "believe whatever you like" state.

BTW Only an idealist would suggest "atheism is a cure for social ills". My thesis proposes that a 'social health warning regarding religious beliefs" should be actively promoted by governments, rather than the current passive policy of 'religious freedom.' Call that thesis "militant atheism" if you like, but I would counter with the point that it is exactly the same "logic" of warnings on drug use given the fact that drugs can also be recreational or beneficial for the individual. I am stressing the conflict between individual freedom and social coherence in what has now become a global society.
Current news events should be sufficient to underscore the point.

No, that's true, you didn't. In fact, it's difficult to know just exactly what you were claiming.



Huh? What the hell was that supposed to mean? You would like to say that atheism has a superior track record, or that it was pernicious? Perhaps you should take more care in what you write.



It is rather dubious to claim that the Soviet Union was a case of cultural self-mutilation. While it is true that the state interfered with artistic expression, almost all states do to a great or a lesser extent. The record of the Soviet Union in cultural expression was actually pretty good. Offending the Politburo may have meant that your movies or music did not get distributed, but by and large people weren't jailed for their cultural expression, as was so often the case in the former Russian empire. Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky was one of the greatest motion pictures of its day, with a score by Prokofiev. The film managed not just to be unoffensive to the state censors, it provided a vehicle for the filmmaker and the composer which was right in line with state propaganda. Dmitri Shostakovich flourished in the Soviet State, despite some few official condemnations. Authors like Pasternak, Yevtushenko and Tarakovskaya also flourished in the Soviet state. Rather than using florid claims about the cultural climate of the Soviet Union, maybe you should stick to the political crimes of the regime.

The Soviet Union was an atheistic state in the same sense that atheism is a belief set. Under Petr Alexeevitch ("Peter the Great"), the Russian Orthodox Church was made a bureaucracy of the empire. The reasons go back to the reign of his father, before he was even born--i won't go into those. But even before the Bolshevik revolution, after the earlier Russian revolution, the government stopped paying salaries to priests, monks and nuns, and stopped maintaining churches, monasteries and convents. This wan't because Kerensky and his government were atheistic, they just were not interested in using their few resources to support the church. The succeeding Soviet state did not indulge in religious persecution, simply neglect. (All stories of Russian Orthodox martyrdom, or nearly all of them, arise from priests and monks who actively supported Kolchak's White Russian army in the civil war, or were alleged to have done, and were executed by the Red Army.) No one in the Soviet Union was required to be an atheists, but as American politicians cannot afford so be seen as atheists, so Russians wishing to rise in the Communist party had to eschew any religious confession. The Soviet Union never launched a war to spread atheism, nor to attack its neighbors because of their religious confession. It's a shame that people still subscribe to the boogey man image of communist states. They were bad because of cults of personality--Stalin and Mao--not because of any inherent flaws of "atheism."



This suggests to me that you don't really understand what a republic is. Calling your country a republic does not make it true. But this statement is a non-sequitur in this conversation.



In the post Augustan empire, no one was ever required to practice a more than nominal adherence to the civic religion. I suggest to you that you should avoid historical analogy when it appears that you know little of history. Rome was not analogous to the Soviet Union, just as the Soviet Union was not analogous to the so-called "Islamic Republic."

It is a delight for me to watch theists and atheists arguing about which of the two blind guesses about REALITY is correct...and more beneficial to society.

I don't even mind that the back up given by each side is as self-serving as the nonsense they use to rationalize the blind guesses that got them travelling this road in the first place.

I'm not rooting for either side. Just being the tolerant agnostic.

By 'tolerant agnostic' you presumably mean 'dogmatic fencesitter' with nothing useful left to say.
I wonder how you would have been affected if you had lost somebody on 9/11.

Not actually, Fresco. By tolerant agnostic I mean:


I do not know if there is a GOD or if there are gods;
I do not know if there are no gods;
I see no reason to suspect gods CANNOT EXIST;
I see no reason to suspect that gods MUST EXIST...that they are needed to explain existence;
I do not see enough unambiguous evidence upon which to base a meaningful guess in either direction...

...so I don't.

No fence-sitting involved in my agnosticism.

Just a reluctance to make a blind guess.




Why are you supposing that I didn't?

Nonetheless, you make lots of blinds guesses asserting that you know what's going on on other people's mind.

You pretend to know that atheism is a belief system.

That's an unadulterated blind guess.

Did you lose someone ?

Atheism is, for the most part, a "belief" system.

Sorry you cannot see that.

About that laxative...you ought really to give it a try. You come off so funny with that pained look on your face.

Why are you supposing that I didn't?

You are a fundamentalist agnostic.

Fortunately, you are not in a position to harm people.

You have nothing constructive to tell and making blind guesses about my avatar will not change that fact.

I'll take that as a 'no', on the grounds that you have nothing useful to say.