I didnt say anything was "caused" by atheism. Even terrorism isn't "caused" by Islam despite what some people on this board might say. It is Islam being co-opted and exploited by a bunch of nutjobs to justify and sell their radical worldview. Athiesm was a tool of the Stalin era Soviet Union whether you want to admit it or not. No athiesm did not cause Stalin to do anything but it was a tool to silence dissent. By generating an anti-religious fervor, it allowed him to more or less eliminate the Russian Orthodox Church. It allowed him to massacre entire communities in Eastern Europe purely on religious lines. Pol Pot's killings were more anti-foreign and anti-intellectual but the point is that in his quest to remove or kill a large set of people, targeting religion became another easy way to justify his actions. Look everyone is smart enough to realize that religion is easy to abuse when the right person is in charge. And the larger issue is not atheism or religion. It's when someone uses atheism or religion in revolutionary terms when it tends to go badly. So no, atheism has never caused anything. Crazy people are ultimately the reason for these types of massacres and violence. But the point is that like religion, atheism is a tool to justify the ends. And in an environment like Stalin, Hitler or Pol Pot when people are being driven into a revolutionary frenzy, oppositional politics that challenges any existing institutions (like religion) becomes an effective and easy sell.
If you really want "free will" then I'd imagine it's something you have to fight for. You have to maintain constant vigilance over your reactions to things - ask yourself "Is this me? Is this really me making this decision? Is this me who is reacting this way?" With technological determinism, linguistic determinism, biological determinism, internalized political/cultural discourses that are so prevalent and ingrained that they seem 'natural', and so on - - ultimately all the things that make up the entirety of our social field and shape us in ways we can't quantify - who's to say that we're really as individual as we believe? Who's to say that the part of you that you recognize as "I" has any real influence at all? As I asked earlier: If you didn't have free will .... how would you know?
Not sure why this is even a focal point of this thread but again you're arguing semantics. Of course they were anti-theistic but that's not the point. The point is that regimes that officially declared themselves as atheists used that as a method to create a climate of distrust and anger towards religion that culminated in state sponsored violence. Atheism was in most cases a justification for anti-theistic violence. Obviously atheism is a personal choice and it has the benefit of not having religious scripture that doesn't mandate how people should and should not act. My argument is that atheism was co-opted by the state just like Islam has been co-opted by terrorists and radical Islamic leaders. Again, if you're going to make semantic distinctions like that then you have to give the same distinctions between say a person peacefully practicing Islam and the Taliban. Conflation works both ways.
The difference between atheism and anti-theism is similar to the difference between someone who simply doesn't believe in leprechauns and someone who actively dislikes the concept of leprechauns and/or those who might believe in them. You don't simply progress from one to the other, even if the former is more or less a prerequisite for the latter. If a regime used the lack of belief in god(s) to unite their people against religion, it was only made possible due to injection of bigotry and hate, and at that point we're talking about anti-theism, anti-religion, or something else entirely. To say that atheism was their tool is much like saying that someone used a magnifying glass to torch an anthill. In reality, it was the sun that provided the deadly ingredient. Much like that magnifying glass, atheism - in and of itself - is innocuous. Anti-theism is not. You can dismiss that as a matter of semantics if you want, but I would obviously disagree. Anyway, it seems as though others would like to circle back to the original thread topic, so I'll vow to make this my last post on the matter. You can have the last word, and if you would like, I'd be more than willing to continue our discussion through e-mail.
