Reply to Reza Aslan: Sam Harris and "New Atheists" aren't new, aren't even atheists

Forum Index » Religion

Reply to "Reza Aslan: Sam Harris and "New Atheists" aren't new, aren't even atheists"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]“The great Enlightenment thinkers Voltaire, David Hume, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke were severely critical of institutional religion, viewing it as a destructive force in society. But they did not explicitly reject God’s existence, nor were they opposed to the idea of religious belief. (There were, of course, numerous other Enlightenment figures who professed atheism, such as Jean Meslier and the French philosopher Baron d’Holbach.) On the contrary, they recognized the inherent value of religious belief in fostering social cohesion and maintaining order, and so sought a means of replacing religion as the basis for making moral judgments in European society. It was political transformation they wanted, not religious reform.

Yet in the century that followed the Enlightenment, a stridently militant form of atheism arose that merged the Enlightenment’s criticism of institutional religion with the strict empiricism of the scientific revolution to not only reject belief in God, but to actively oppose it. By the middle of the 19th century, this movement was given its own name – anti-theism – specifically to differentiate it from atheism.

It was around this time that anti-theism reached its peak in the writings of the German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx famously viewed religion as the “opium of the people” and sought to eradicate it from society. “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness,” Marx wrote in his celebrated critique of Hegel.

In truth, Marx’s views on religion and atheism were far more complex than these much-abused sound bites project. Nevertheless, Marx’s vision of a religion-less society was spectacularly realized with the establishment of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China – two nations that actively promoted “state atheism” by violently suppressing religious expression and persecuting faith communities.“

State atheism seems like the opposite of state religion, but in a way, state atheism becomes a religion itself, without being a religion. The state becomes the religion and whomever is in charge at the head of government becomes the “god.” Those atheist regimes kill a lot of people, their own people. 
[/quote]

This is all bullshit, and you know it, as there are no "atheist regimes" who commit atrocities in the name of atheism.

Atrocities done in the name of religion are extraordinarily plentiful, though, so unless you want to start listing them and get embarrassed, I suggest you drop that failed argument.[/quote]

It’s almost like you don’t have an honest bone in your body. Nothing in the quoted passage (which I didn’t post) said atrocities are committed “in the name of atheism” (your slippery phrasing). It said the atheist states committed atrocities. There’s a big difference, and you know it.

Do better. [/quote]

Your accusation is a confession. If you are not implying atheism was the reason why call them "atheist states"?  You might as well attribute atrocities to Hitler and Stalin both having moustaches, then.

My statement "there are no "atheist regimes" who commit atrocities in the name of atheism. " was MINE, and it is also 100% true, like it or not.

You are the dishonest one sir.[/quote]

I don’t like it when people bring up reading comprehension, but in your case it’s so necessary. Read the article and pp’s last paragraph again, this time without trying to distort it to make your own unwarranted arguments.

You trying to make this about killing being “in the name of atheism” is sleazy word play. It distorts both the passage and pp’s final para. You’re ignoring half the post, about the search for moral values and where atheism doesn’t fit in. Worse, You’re also trying to wriggle out of the association between atheist states and mass murder by creating a completely spurious semantic difference between “in the name of atheism” and behavior of states with enforced atheism.

Dishonest. [/quote]

No.  You are the LIAR who continues to attempt to connect atheism to atrocities committed by Mao and Stalin, while conveniently ignoring the undeniable fact that 99.9999% of the atrocities ever committed on earth were done by religious states and leaders.

Were those all done in the name of religion?  No.  But many were.

How many were done in the name of Atheism?

Zero.

These facts cannot be denied.[/quote]

Do you have a link that gives the details to prove “99.9999% of the atrocities ever committed on earth were done by religious states?”

[/quote]

Lets try some logic.

How many atheist states can you name?  China and the USSR, so far.

So pretty much the rest.  So any other atrocities committed except by those two states.  Maybe there are a few other but the vast majority have been religious, don't you agree?

We can have a discussion here, but let's not be ridiculous and try and gush gallop past the salient points.[/quote]

China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Cuba.

There were many mass killings under communist regimes of the 20th century. Death estimates vary widely, depending on the definitions of the deaths that are included in them. The higher estimates of mass killings account for the crimes that governments committed against civilians, including executions, the destruction of populations through man-made hunger and deaths that occurred during forced deportations and imprisonment, and deaths that resulted from forced labor.

In addition to "mass killings," terms that are used to define such killings include "democide", "politicide", "classicide", and "genocide."

Although any attempt to estimate a total number of killings under communist regimes depends greatly on definitions, attempts have been made:

In 1978, journalist Todd Culbertson wrote an article in The Richmond News Leader, republished in Human Events, in which he stated that "[a]vailable evidence indicates that perhaps 100 million persons have been destroyed by the Communists; the imperviousness of the Iron and Bamboo curtains prevents a more definitive figure.

In 1985, John Lenczowski, director of European and Soviet Affairs at the United States National Security Council, wrote an article in The Christian Science Monitor in which he stated that the "number of people murdered by communist regimes is estimated at between 60 million and 150 million, with the higher figure probably more accurate in light of recent scholarship."

In 1994, Rudolph Rummel's book Death by Government included about 110 million people, foreign and domestic, killed by communist democide from 1900 to 1987. This total did not include deaths from China's Great Famine of 1958-1961.

In 1997, the Stéphane Courtois introduction to the Black Book of Communism gave a "rough approximation, based on unofficial estimates" approaching 100 million killed.

In 2005, Benjamin Valentino stated that the number of non-combatants killed by communist regimes in the Soviet Union, People's Republic of China, and Cambodia alone ranged from a low of 21 million to a high of 70 million. Citing Rummel and others, Valentino stated that the "highest end of the plausible range of deaths attributed to communist regimes" was up to 110 million."

In 2005, a retired Rudolph Rummel, due to additional information about Mao's culpability in the Great Chinese Famine from the work of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, revised upward his total for communist democide between 1900 and 1999 from 110 million to about 148 million by including their estimated 38 million famine deaths.

In 2016, the Dissident blog of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation made an effort to compile ranges of estimates using sources from 1976 to 2010 and concluded that the overall range "spans from 42,870,000 to 161,990,000" killed, with 100 million the most commonly cited figure.

In 2017, Professor Stephen Kotkin wrote in The Wall Street Journal that communism killed at least 65 million people between 1917 and 2017: "Though communism has killed huge numbers of people intentionally, even more of its victims have died from starvation as a result of its cruel projects of social engineering."

The Holodomor (also known as the Terror-Famine) was a famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The term Holodomor emphasises the famine's man-made and intentional aspects such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs and restriction of population movement. As part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–33 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country, millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine. It is Considered a genocide by 16 countries,  a tragedy or crime against humanity by 5 international organizations. According to estimates, up to 12 million ethnic Ukrainians were said to have perished as a result of the famine.

If the negative actions of any and all theists reflect badly upon all theists, all forms of religion and all religionists then it follows that the negative actions of any and all atheists reflect badly upon all atheists, all forms of irreligion and all irreligionists.

Even if we were to ignore the obvious crimes against humanity that atheists involved in the global communist movement in the past century have committed, we can condemn all atheists and atheism simply by examining the one million dead at the hands of "rational," "enlightened" atheist French Revolutionaries.

Historians call the Vendean Martyrs in March 1793 the modern-era's first genocide. The atheist French Revolutionary Army ordered the conscription of 300,000 citizens of Vendée. Having already had all of their churches suppressed and their bishops slaughtered, this infuriated the populace which rose up.

In response, the Revolutionary Army massacred 6,000 Vendée prisoners, many of them women, children and the elderly, after the battle of Savenay. In addition, 3,000 Vendée women were drowned at Pont-au-Baux. In addition, 5,000 Vendée priests, elderly, women and children were tied in groups in barges and drowned in the Loire River at Nantes. By July, AD 1796, nearly 500,000 Vendean Catholics were killed. All of these theists were killed at the hands of atheists.

I'm not sure that the person about to be executed by a Marxist or Maoist atheist is assuaged in the knowledge that his evil, merciless executioner isn't killing him because he's an atheist but rather because he believes in an atheist philosophy and only coincidently doesn't believe in God. Multiply this by all 152 million dead at the hands of atheists in the 20th and 21st century—a carnage which has yet to abate—makes the above claim perfectly worthless. In addition, we have more than sufficient proof that atheists killed in the name of atheism as in the case of the Soviet Union's Society of the Militant Godless, Mao Zedong's Red Guard, the Enlightenment's Reign of Terror, Abimael Guzmán's Shining Path, atheist Napoleon's wars and Plutarco Elias Calles democide of Mexican Catholics during the Cristero Wars.

Why is it that no one has ever been helped anyone in the name of atheism? There has never been anyone who has ever given a crust of bread or a drop of water or a stitch of clothing to anyone in the name of atheism. (Richard Dawkins admits in his The God Delusion that it's "easier to herd cats than to get atheists to cooperate each other.") This goes a long way in explaining why atheists refuse to cooperate with each other and form charitable concerns. Mao and Stalin were busy killing tens of millions of their compatriots by engineering famines in their respective countries so it's hard to imagine they also helped poor people.

The fact that many atheists are glib at the horror of mass murders committed by their fellow atheists goes a long way in proving they are mere contrarians.

Atheists should rather worry about the kind of people they hope to attract to their community when they mock religion. Truly compassionate, generous, gentle, kind and forgiving people won't be attracted to a group that mocks others.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics