But...but..everyone knows atheists have no values or moral compass. They are always committing crazy irrational crimes with their lack of faith...aren't they?
Hey buddy, this thread's only big enough for one Santa reference and I already laid it down. So why don't you make like a tree, and get the hell out of here.
I really don't understand this "religion is the greatest killer" meme. Khmer Rouge? Great Leap Forward? Stalinist purges? Reign of Terror?
None of those things were done in the name of, or by virtue of, atheism. And even when you stack the atrocities and violence committed in the name of religion vs. the same deeds done in the name of political philosophy, religion trumps all, handily.
The sarcastic claim to which I responded implied that atheist regimes never committed brutal crimes; nothing at all in there about them being done in the "name of, or by virtue of atheism." I'm an atheist myself but I really don't see the need to affix a propensity for violence towards people who aren't.
Not Atheism in terms of a capital "A" movement but the Cultural Revolution and Khmer Rouge did specifically target religions and sought to wipe them out and replace them with what they saw as a rationalist materialist ideology. I'm not so sure about that given that the greatest numbers of death of humans at the hands of humans has occurred in the 20th C. by movements, and in opposition, to movements that were not religious in nature. If you total up the death toll of WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Congo, Rwanda and the aforementioned Khmer Rouge, GLF/CR, Stalinist purges and etc.. In terms of total number of deaths that might exceed religious based deaths.
If you take a look back through history, or even open a newspaper in today's world, you'll see the great amount of violence spawned by religion. It's not affixing it to people, it's affixing it to a faith.
And that has nothing to do with atheism. You think WWII (and more specifically, the genocide that killed so many people) had nothing to do with religion, really? Even if you *were* right and religion took 2nd place to politics (which it doesn't; not that it even matters, because irrational belief in a political philosophy essentially *is* a religion), it still wouldn't be anything to be proud of.
