Is Atheism Depressing?

[PratchettFan]

Historically people of most faiths have killed. Atheists have killed too.

Having faith or not having faith is no promise of a violent free existence.

People are flawed.

I think that pretty much says it. People kill. Religions don't kill, governments don't kill, philosophies don't kill. People kill. All of the other stuff are just the excuses people use to justify killing.

 

[PratchettFan]

If atheists are going to claim that Christians are as bloody as every other ideological group that has ever existed, then they are going to have to live with the comparison between Christians and Nazis. Anti-Christians are certainly not adverse to making the comparison, though it's always a false comparison when they make it.

So long as people continue to make ridiculous claims, they can expect to have their noses rubbed in the truth.

For the most part, the Nazis were Christians.

 

[Dreamy]

Historically people of most faiths have killed. Atheists have killed too.

Having faith or not having faith is no promise of a violent free existence.

People are flawed.

I think that pretty much says it. People kill. Religions don't kill, governments don't kill, philosophies don't kill. People kill. All of the other stuff are just the excuses people use to justify killing.

Yet I have seen it stated that religions are the biggest causes of violence in our history and always disagree.

I am not a huge believe in blaming the impact of music or literature on the actions of people who choose to kill. Mental illness maybe but not objects or things or even a religious doctrine unless it specifically tells it followers to kill.

People alone make this world what it is.

 

[PratchettFan]

Historically people of most faiths have killed. Atheists have killed too.

Having faith or not having faith is no promise of a violent free existence.

People are flawed.

I think that pretty much says it. People kill. Religions don't kill, governments don't kill, philosophies don't kill. People kill. All of the other stuff are just the excuses people use to justify killing.

Yet I have seen it stated that religions are the biggest causes of violence in our history and always disagree.

I am not a huge believe in blaming the impact of music or literature on the actions of people who choose to kill. Mental illness maybe but not objects or things or even a religious doctrine unless it specifically tells it followers to kill.

People alone make this world what it is.

I keep hearing that too. It's bunk. Religion is just one manifestation of human social interaction. But it is nothing but people. People light the fires, handle the swords and pull the triggers. With very few exceptions, music, mental illness, etc. play no part in this. In 99% of the cases, people kill just because they are told to.

 

[whitehall]

Historically people of most faiths have killed. Atheists have killed too.

Having faith or not having faith is no promise of a violent free existence.

People are flawed.

I think that pretty much says it. People kill. Religions don't kill, governments don't kill, philosophies don't kill. People kill. All of the other stuff are just the excuses people use to justify killing.

Yeah for a 10th grade student it might seem that religions or governments don't kill so if we stop people from killing ....gosh what a paradise it would be. The concept is so flawed that even old hippies should realize that it is silly. People have killed for a lot of bad reasons in the past but governments have authorized people to kill for good reasons. If you can't intellectually understand the the difference you might as well pack in.

 

[Dreamy]

I think that pretty much says it. People kill. Religions don't kill, governments don't kill, philosophies don't kill. People kill. All of the other stuff are just the excuses people use to justify killing.

Yet I have seen it stated that religions are the biggest causes of violence in our history and always disagree.

I am not a huge believe in blaming the impact of music or literature on the actions of people who choose to kill. Mental illness maybe but not objects or things or even a religious doctrine unless it specifically tells it followers to kill.

People alone make this world what it is.

I keep hearing that too. It's bunk. Religion is just one manifestation of human social interaction. But it is nothing but people. People light the fires, handle the swords and pull the triggers. With very few exceptions, music, mental illness, etc. play no part in this. In 99% of the cases, people kill just because they are told to.

We are in agreement then.

 

[Thunderbird]

holocaust

Not really. Hitler hated Christianity and persecuted the Churches.

You Mean Hitler Wasn’t A Priest?

quote: Hitler was blunter still on other occasions. "It is through the peasantry that we shall really be able to destroy Christianity," he said in 1933, "because there is in them a true religion rooted in nature and blood." His countrymen would have to choose: "One is either a Christian or a German. You can't be both."

quote: Polish Christians felt the full force of the persecution, as historian John Morley reminds us. "In Poland, both Jews and Christians were objects of Nazi oppression and manipulation." The clergy were a chief target: "In West Prussia, out of 690 parish priests, at least two-thirds were arrested, and the remainder escaped only by fleeing from their parishes. After a month's imprisonment, no less than 214 of these priests were executed... by the end of 1940 only twenty priests were left in their parishes — about three percent of the number of parish priests in the pre-war era." The toll of murdered Polish priests would rise into the thousands; their Protestant counterparts (though a much smaller group) fared no better, with many members of the clergy perishing in the camps.
The Rutgers site's presentation is entitled "The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches," and it notes a deep hatred of Christianity throughout the higher echelons. "Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked to meet this situation [church influence] by complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion." Their assault was massive: "Different steps in that persecution, such as the campaign for the suppression of denominational and youth organizations, the campaign against denominational schools, the defamation campaign against the clergy, started on the same day in the whole area of the Reich... and were supported by the entire regimented press, by Nazi Party meetings, by traveling party speakers."

 

[Thunderbird]

Some more Hitler quotes.

Goebbels' diary, 1939: "The Führer is deeply religious, but deeply anti-Christian. He regards Christianity as a symptom of decay."

Speer quoting Hitler: “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?"

Historian Alan Bullock quoting Hitler: "I'll make these d**ned parsons feel the power of the state in a way they would have never believed possible.... This filthy reptile raises its head whenever there is a sign of weakness in the State, and therefore it must be stamped on. We have no sort of use for a fairy story invented by the Jews." and "The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity.... The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity."

 

[Thunderbird]

Here's Hitler admiring history's most famous atheist:

quote: Hitler often visited the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and publicized his veneration for the philosopher by posing for photographs of himself staring in rapture at the bust of the great man.

quote: Finally there was Nietzsche's prophecy of the coming elite who would rule the world and from whom the superman would spring. In The Will to Power he exclaims: "A daring and ruler race is building itself up.... The aim should be to prepare a transvaluation of values for a particularly strong kind of man, most highly gifted in intellect and will. This man and the elite around him will become the 'lords of the earth'." Such rantings from one of Germany's most original minds must have struck a responsive chord in Hitler's littered mind. At any rate he appropriated them for his own--not only the thoughts but the philosopher's penchant for grotesque exaggeration, and often his very words. "Lords of the Earth" is a familiar expression in Mein Kampf.

LINK

 

[uscitizen]

 

[HUGGY]

Is Atheism Depressing?


No.

 

[Thunderbird]

You forgot the Spanish inquisitions.

Many myths about the Spanish Inquisition - mostly based on anti-Hispanic bigotry.

The Real Inquisition

 

[Thunderbird]

And now let's look at the record of atheism.

Communist atheists in only 80 years killed about 94 million! And the number of deaths caused by atheism is much higher. An atheist, Stalin, along with his fellow Christian-hater Hitler started the worst war in human history. And don't forget all the deaths caused by right wing atheists like Mussolini, who was in part inspired by another blood-thirsty atheist Nietzsche. And don't forget the Armenian genocide, committed by secular fanatics: the Young Turks.

Please also remember that the austere atheist philosophy has never attracted a large number of believers. Under 3% of the world population is atheist. So a small number of atheists are responsible for a tremendous amount of carnage. On a per capita basis atheists are by far the worst murderers in human history.

 

[mjollnir]

And now let's look at the record of atheism.

Communist atheists in only 80 years killed about 94 million! And the number of deaths caused by atheism is much higher. An atheist, Stalin, along with his fellow Christian-hater Hitler started the worst war in human history. And don't forget all the deaths caused by right wing atheists like Mussolini, who was in part inspired by another blood-thirsty atheist Nietzsche. And don't forget the Armenian genocide, committed by secular fanatics: the Young Turks.

Please also remember that the austere atheist philosophy has never attracted a large number of believers. Under 3% of the world population is atheist. So a small number of atheists are responsible for a tremendous amount of carnage. On a per capita basis atheists are by far the worst murderers in human history.

Your intellectual dishonesty is quite bracing.

Atheism never killed anyone.

The single most aggravating argument against atheism - Los Angeles atheism | Examiner.com

The people you're citing, like Stalin, set up religions of the state and cults of personality that worshiped themselves. So did Pol Pot. So did Hitler. So did Kemal Attaturk. So did Mao.

I'd ask you to be less stupid, but it's quite clear that you relish your own ignorance and inability to think rationally.

If you're forced to lie about history to make some point, perhaps you ought to reconsider that point.

Or, in your case, just make up history!

 

[Thunderbird]

Atheism never killed anyone.

So much fun watching atheists squirm away from responsibility. Please avoid making feeble excuses for atheist mass murderers and accept the plain facts. Atheist mass murderers have all too closely followed the teachings of bloodthirsty atheists like Nietzsche, Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitchens & Harris. Atheists have persecuted those who refuse to submit to atheism.

League of Militant Atheists

The people you're citing, like Stalin, set up religions of the state and cults of personality that worshiped themselves.

Atheists so often worship themselves. Atheist tools eagerly fall to their knees to worship some Fearless Leader. Whiny internet atheists are easily manipulated by the media bosses.

John Locke put it well.

God, Locke and Equality: Christian Foundations of Locke's Political Thought

quote: Locke contemplates the consequences for mankind if there were no God and no divine law. The result would be moral anarchy. Every individual “could have no law but his own will, no end but himself. He would be a god to himself, and the satisfaction of his own will the sole measure and end of all his actions”.

I'd ask you to be less stupid,

I'll ask you to be less stupid, because I don't think you can be more stupid.

Or, in your case, just make up history!

Please point out any errors of fact I've made.

 

[mjollnir]

Atheism never killed anyone.

So much fun watching atheists squirm away from responsibility. Please avoid these feeble excuses for atheist mass-murderers and accept the plain facts.

Not squirming away from anything , child. What you stated was utter bullshit, easily understood to be so by anyone with even the most cosmetic understanding of history.

The people you're citing, like Stalin, set up religions of the state and cults of personality that worshiped themselves.

John Locke put it well.

Locke contemplates the consequences for mankind if there were no God and no divine law. The result would be moral anarchy. Every individual “could have no law but his own will, no end but himself. He would be a god to himself, and the satisfaction of his own will the sole measure and end of all his actions”.

That's utterly irrelevant to what I stated, child. Let's have you try and stay on topic, hmmm?

I'll ask you to be less stupid, because I don't think you can be more stupid.

Ha! Ironically, you wouldn't know. You've demonstrated your utter pig ignorance in history and in logic. Care to try for a third?

Or, in your case, just make up history!

Please point out any errors of fact I've made.

I already did, child.

Let's work on your reading comprehension. Tell me, what was it about what I wrote in simply English that causing you such trouble?

 

[Thunderbird]

Not squirming away from anything , child. What you stated was utter bullshit, easily understood to be so by anyone with even the most cosmetic understanding of history.

When you learn to read you'll discover that atheism is at the heart of Communism. How else can we explain the horrendous persecution of religious folk by Communists? If atheism wasn't so central, an accommodation would have been reached.

Example of Communist persecution: Some actions against Orthodox priests and believers along with execution included torture, being sent to prison camps, labour camps or mental hospitals. Many Orthodox (along with peoples of other faiths) were also subjected to psychological punishment or torture and mind control experimentation in order to force them give up their religious convictions During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 Russian Orthodox priests. Many others were imprisoned or exiled.

Here's another example: In 1922, the Solovki Camp of Special Purpose, the first Russian concentration camp and a former Orthodox monastery, was established in the Solovki Islands in the White Sea. Eight metropolitans, twenty archbishops, and forty-seven bishops of the Orthodox Church died there, along with tens of thousands of the laity. Of these, 95,000 were put to death, executed by firing squad. Father Pavel Florensky was one of the New-martyrs of this particular period.

LINK for both quotes

And here are some quotes from Marx, Lenin, and others:

“The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion” (Karl Marx)

“The World has never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized and tenaciously malevolent as that preached by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin and at the heart of their psychology, HATRED OF GOD is the principle driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. To achieve its diabolical ends, Communism needs to control a population devoid of religious and national feeling, and this entails a destruction of faith and nationhood. Communists proclaim both of these objectives openly, and just as openly put them into practice.” (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, former communist, Nobel prize winner)

“Atheism is the natural and inseparable part of Communism.” (attributed to Vladimir I. Lenin)

“Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.” (V.I. Lenin)

The official journal of the Soviet Academy of Pedagogical Sciences published a government directive Atheistic Education in the School as a resource on how to separate God from human society. The opening paragraph is revealing: “The Soviet school, as an instrument for the Communist education of the rising generation, can, as a matter of principle, take up no other attitude towards religion than one of irreconcilable opposition; for Communist education has as its philosophical basis Marxism, and Marxism is irreconcilably hostile to religion.

‘Marxism is materialism,’ says V. I. Lenin; ‘as such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion as the materialism of the Encyclopedaists of the eighteenth century or the materialism of Feuerbach.’

 

[mjollnir]

Not squirming away from anything , child. What you stated was utter bullshit, easily understood to be so by anyone with even the most cosmetic understanding of history.

When you learn to read you'll discover that atheism is at the heart of Communism. How else can we explain the horrendous persecution of religious folk by Communists? If atheism wasn't so central, an accommodation would have been reached.

Exhibit #1 of your bullshit: No, atheism isn't at 'the heart of communism'

Example of Communist persecution: Some actions against Orthodox priests and believers along with execution included torture, being sent to prison camps, labour camps or mental hospitals. Many Orthodox (along with peoples of other faiths) were also subjected to psychological punishment or torture and mind control experimentation in order to force them give up their religious convictions During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 Russian Orthodox priests. Many others were imprisoned or exiled.

LINK

Again, because you have no clue what you're braying about, communism and atheism have nothing to do w/each other.

And here are some quotes from Marx, Lenin, and others:

“The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion” (Karl Marx)

“The World has never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized and tenaciously malevolent as that preached by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin and at the heart of their psychology, HATRED OF GOD is the principle driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. To achieve its diabolical ends, Communism needs to control a population devoid of religious and national feeling, and this entails a destruction of faith and nationhood. Communists proclaim both of these objectives openly, and just as openly put them into practice.” (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, former communist, Nobel prize winner)

“Atheism is the natural and inseparable part of Communism.” (attributed to Vladimir I. Lenin)

“Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.” (V.I. Lenin)

The official journal of the Soviet Academy of Pedagogical Sciences published a government directive Atheistic Education in the School as a resource on how to separate God from human society. The opening paragraph is revealing: “The Soviet school, as an instrument for the Communist education of the rising generation, can, as a matter of principle, take up no other attitude towards religion than one of irreconcilable opposition; for Communist education has as its philosophical basis Marxism, and Marxism is irreconcilably hostile to religion.

‘Marxism is materialism,’ says V. I. Lenin; ‘as such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion as the materialism of the Encyclopedaists of the eighteenth century or the materialism of Feuerbach.’

All irrelevant to what I actually stated.

Child, why are you not only failing to back up your own words, but running in fear of mine?

This isn't hard, but it requires intellectual honesty.

I'm not so sure you can make it.

 

[Thunderbird]

communism and atheism have nothing to do w/each other.

I've been posting the evidence. Why are you ignoring the facts? You seem closed-minded.

Soviet poster showing Jesus thrown out:

Child, why are you not only failing to back up your own words, but running in fear of mine?

When are you going to make a coherent statement that I can respond to?

This isn't hard, but it requires intellectual honesty.

I'm not so sure you can make it.

More name calling. Boring.

Please admit that atheists have been as intolerant and as anti-scientific as anybody.

 

[koshergrl]

Atheism certainly is at the heart of communism.
Marx believed religion kept the masses passive, and in order to free them from their stupor religion had to be eradicated. The enforcement of Atheism was critical requirement for Communism’s success, and thus it had to be implemented at all costs. This meant measures like brainwashing in state schools, closing houses of worship and arresting countless religious leaders.

"
Soviet policy toward religion was based on the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, which made atheism the official doctrine of the Soviet Union. Marxism-Leninism has consistently advocated the control, suppression, and the elimination of religion.[1] The state was committed to the destruction of religion,[2][3] and destroyed churches, mosques and temples, ridiculed, harassed and executed religious leaders, flooded the schools and media with atheistic propaganda, and generally promoted 'scientific atheism' as the truth that society should accept.[4][5]
Religious beliefs and practices persisted among the majority of the population,[4] in the domestic and private spheres but also in the scattered public spaces allowed by a state that recognized its failure to eradicate religion and the political dangers of an unrelenting culture war.[2][6]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Soviet_Union#cite_note-6
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Soviet_Union