["Some examples that religious folk have had trouble with over the years:
The earth moves.
Germs cause disease.
The earth is quite old."]
Oh, two can play this game: Some examples that irreligious folk have had trouble with over the years:
killing political opponents is wrong.
killing inconvenient friends is is wrong.
killing religious people is wrong.
The most famous atheists of all time, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung. and Pol Pot murdered more people than all the religious wars in history. Get out your calculator. Get out your history book. Add it up.
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You're missing the point. The three examples that you list have been problems for both theists and non-theists in the past, and thus have no direct connection to religion either way. The three original examples have only been problems for dogmatic theists and thus are directly connected with religion.
As for the mass death toll for atheist dictators apparently being greater than theists, you're not compensating for the fact that those recent atheist mass murderers had a huge technological advantage over most of the older, religious mass murderers. How's a regular pre-industrial religious psychopath supposed to compete with, say, the war factories of the Third Reich or the Stalin-era Soviet Union? This, coupled with Savrin's argument, utterly demolishes yours.
"killing political opponents is wrong."
Yes... no religious person has EVER killed a political opponent, have they?
"killing inconvenient friends is is wrong."
Goodness... all those inconvenient friends killed by religious people must never have been killed.
"killing religious people is wrong."
Boy... did you ever try looking at the Bible? The damned things chock-full of religious people killing other religious people...
As for the "famous Atheists"
Lenin wasn't one of the "do what I say or I'll kill you" kind of people. Stalin, Mao, Pol pot and possibly Kim Il Sung were... but that's a problem for you as well, since God is one of those people too. (guess they're just after God's heart...)
Mind you... at least he didn't throw Hitler in with the Atheists. Maybe they're learning...
These dictators slaughtered not in the name of atheism but to advance their political causes. I very much doubt that -- except for Jews -- any victims were asked about their religious beliefs or non-beliefs before they were killed. (And the Jews, incidentally, were wiped out by pious Christians.)
Oddly enough, Christians have done all those things.
Lenin et ali didn't kill because they were atheists, they killed because they were brutal dictators. Their actions are as abhorrent to atheists as they are to religious people. Why is that so hard to understand?
Your "God" supposedly wiped out billions and billions from the "Flood" He used to wipe out all but two (I skimmed a babble once but i cant remember the exact number). Then the crusades (again paraded as a mission from "God") then the inquisitions, the war in england between catholics and protestants, Hitler 52 million (claimed to be doing Gods will). Alright now you tell me who kills more.
Three can play this game! As evil as all the men you named are they never ordered the total extermination of the ENTIRE POPULATION of a city (every man, woman, and child) like your God supposedly ordered Joshua to do to Jericho. And the tablets saying "Thou shall not kill" weren't even dry yet! And that's from your own "Bible", not a history book!
As far as I know, no one has ever killed in the name of atheism.
Your example "killing religious people is wrong" seems to imply that killing non-religious people would be alright or, at least, different in some way.
Not again .
The most famous atheists of all time, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung. and Pol Pot murdered more people than all the religious wars in history. But here's the pincher: Did they do it because they were atheists, or is atheism an irrelevance? You know, unlike the fundies out there who kill because they're religious fundamentalists and honestly believe God wants them to blow up courthouses, drown children, and run planes into skyscrapers?
You sound like someone saying brown-haired people are evil and then point to how both Hitler and Stalin had brown hair.
Lenin, Murdered zero people.
Stalin, murdered zero people.
Mao,(tse Dong) murdered zero people.
Kim Il Sung, Murdered zero people.
Pol Pot, murdered zero people.
GW Bush, murdered 3 people.
It´s true that they killed a lot of people, but the calculator doesn´t work, among other things we don´t know how many people have lived since the beginning of humankind and the number of wars and the casualties they have caused. Second, we do know that islamic terrorists exist, that Ivan the Terrible exist, that Vlad Drakul existed, Pinochet................Religion has nothing to do with killing, it´s politics.........disguised as religion.
This has been making the rounds alot lately.
So if I'M an atheist, and some guy who lived a hundred years before I did, was an ahteist, then obviously I support mass murder.
How fucking retarded do you have to make that into something resembling sense in your head?
They were also men, and some of them had moustaches. KILL all moustachiod men! They are genocidal freaks!
Fucking hell.
This doesn't take away from the fact that the superman-deity that you worship is the king of mass murder. not only are you projecting the acts of your own god, your demonizing one side and praising the other side for doing the same thing.
Must be crazy as shit in your head.
All those guys created and nurtured a person cult around themselves, making them gods to be worshiped. Not that atheistic, really. Plus, they didn't do anything in the Name of Atheism.
Thirty Year's War, Crusades, Inquisitions, The Troubles in Northern Ireland, etc, are all about killing (other) religious people AND killing political opponents, in the Name of Religion.
From evilbible.com:
It always amazes me how many times this God orders the killing of innocent people even after the Ten Commandments said “Thou shall not kill”. For example, God kills 70,000 innocent people because David ordered a census of the people (1 Chronicles 21). God also orders the destruction of 60 cities so that the Israelites can live there. He orders the killing of all the men, women, and children of each city, and the looting of all of value (Deuteronomy 3). He orders another attack and the killing of “all the living creatures of the city: men and women, young, and old, as well as oxen sheep, and asses” (Joshua 6). In Judges 21, He orders the murder of all the people of Jabesh-gilead, except for the virgin girls who were taken to be forcibly raped and married. When they wanted more virgins, God told them to hide alongside the road and when they saw a girl they liked, kidnap her and forcibly rape her and make her your wife! Just about every other page in the Old Testament has God killing somebody! In 2 Kings 10:18-27, God orders the murder of all the worshipers of a different god in their very own church! In total God kills 371,186 people directly and orders another 1,862,265 people murdered.
Even if we accept that these people did indeed
- kill more people than all religious wars
- did this in the name of atheism
How does that make the fact that people were killed in the name of religion any better?
That's why I don't like this kind of dick-measuring contest. It reduces murdered people to a statistic and then one side declares victory because they claim their people killed slightly less people than the other. Whoopdedoo. You want a prize for that?
The first crusade, the second crusade, the third crusade, the fourth crusade, the fifth crusade, the sixth crusade, the seventh crusade, the eight crusade, the ninth crusade, 9/11, ISIS, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, the Nazis, mousollini, every conflict in the dark ages, the inquisition, witch burnings, the people of Jericho, the 500 philistines who had their foreskins taken to buy david's wife.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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