Evil and Atheism

This is a topic coming up on the Christian boards a lot and I figured I’d turn to the TA community for some insight. In referencing the atrocities of the crusades, the inquisition, etc. the typical response that comes back cites Hitler, Stalin , Mussillini, Kim-Jong Il and Mao for committing similar atrocities in the name of atheism. They throw out the names but fail to cite specifics.

In my research, I found Mussillini to have converted from Catholicism to atheism and then back to Catholicism, Kim-Jong Il apparently subscribes to the Juche religion, which supposedly is based on Christianity, simply replacing the trinity with the leader and his family, and I can never understand why Hitler even makes it onto the list… He was Christian and acting in the name of god.

As for Stalin and Mao, they ran an atheistic state, but were the atrocities associated with each really done in support of an atheistic ideal, or were their motivations provided separate of their atheistic views?

I’m not much of a history buff and my research has yielded very little useful information.

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Permalink Reply by Sassan K. on July 14, 2011 at 1:49am

“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”

-the great American Nobel Prize winning physicist, Steven Weinberg

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Permalink Reply by Chris on July 14, 2011 at 8:56am

If you stop worrying about religion and start worrying about faith, you start to see the actual crux of the problem for mass murders by states. Because, in the end, all these leaders convinced people to do the killing. The people they convinced were either already killers, or were talked into to it by appeals to faith, be it in gods or the state. This is about mechanisms and states of mind. Religion is a long standing "reason defeater" that is easy to manipulate into whatever you think needs to happen, but it is only one of many.

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Permalink Reply by anti_supernaturalist on July 14, 2011 at 4:05pm

"Atheism" is a red herring -- why xians in the US lie about history

Let's stay "at home" to see what's behind today's corporate support of right-wing religious and political ideology. A xian nation? What liars fundies are. Why must they delude themselves?

For all of US history, political and religious ideology masked genocide and exploitation -- for more than 150 years directed by corporate control.

US history books never accurately portray the crucial roles genocide and slavery (and "God" and alcohol) played in America’s uncontrolled experiment in corporate control, still on-going.

Important components of the “American experiment” in freedom have included “involuntary servitude”, mass murder, land expropriation, internal deportation, and imperial militarism. The last, a form of American political suicide, bleeds our armies and financial resources away in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen.

• Brute facts — not lying religious ideology

The American empire filled out its continental expanse by about 1900. The Canadians kept territory now firmly a part of British Columbia. Mexico — was not so fortunate. Warfare brought the American experiment into Texas. Gold led to the expropriation of California. Even if the slave trade did not follow commerce, genocide did not take a holiday. The last members of a peaceful California tribe were slaughtered almost within living memory.

Mark Twain and other members of the Anti-Imperialist League fought against the likes of Presidents McKinley and TR Roosevelt to stop American gun-boat expansion across the Pacific and in the Caribbean 1898-1907. Today's Republican thugs and know-nothings from Reagan to Bush II to the current crop of mental pygmies for President are atavistic monsters intent on reclaiming an America of greed and worldwide domination.

• Just one facet of current corporate imperialism at home -- the 12 million man march

Creating and exploiting of one the world's great migrations -- of mainly Mexican workers to the US -- escapes comprehension. Twelve million people have moved north! When in any fifty year period in recorded history has such a vast movement of people crossed from one cultural zone into another?

Now the white descendants of those who found land, water, and clean air for the taking (and despoiling) are ethnically, linguistically, and culturally distinct from both its former native inhabitants or their former Mexican overlords. They will not oppose the corporate forces behind a vast migration still underway.

There is no going back. Whatever good and harm results belongs to a new, emerging culture. Entropy doesn’t reverse itself. And, history records mostly human induced entropy.

• But, of course, illegal aliens do not come to enjoy themselves in their ancestors old haunts. They have come in over a short time. If there are criminals among them, that shouldn’t be surprising; the human jackal always follows the human herds. The vast majority want work, not plunder.

They were invited, and are still being invited, by US businesses, small to very large, to labor under generally bad conditions, for bad wages, for which they enjoy the privilege of paying social security taxes whose benefits they cannot enjoy.

Three things Americans have demanded from their "neighbors" to the South: imported illegal labor, imported illegal drugs, and silence about both.

• You don’t see many people crossing our undefended border with our neighbor to the North. Canadians apparently feel well enough off economically, not to envy the “American experiment.” They need not be economic migrants. And our “culture” alone lacks pull.

America's is a pull economy — Americans wanted drugs, and they have them. They wanted cheap labor to exploit and degrade, and Americans have it. But, the long silence is over.

Tell your fundie "friends" they are not only deluded by a dead religion -- but also by right-wing ideology sponsored by rapacious international corporations whose power now exceeds that of any nation.

the anti_supernaturalist