Can Atheists Be Trusted To Positions of Moral Authority?

[DavidSupreme]

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A) --- if god doesn't dictate morality to us, how would belief in god constrain anyone from going to war, and...

B) --- "Thus saith the LORD of hosts ... go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." -- 1 Samuel 15:2-3

OH GOD WITH US, SIEG HEIL, SIEG HEIL, SIEG HEIL....

uh.. oh? Oh, sorry, I got all passionate there, its easy when strong nationalistical views are given its chances to come out, especially through Christianity.....




Joking aside, I think Meleageris simple ignorant of what "atheism" is and have little to no understanding of world history and especially not Christianities history.

Meleager, I put it in simple terms for you: Atheism can not be behind any evil as atheism only means the lack of belief in god or gods, thats it.

Anything "Evil" done by an atheist has nothing to do with atheism, hell, he can scream outloud it is "in the name of atheism" when he murders a innocent squirrel, it still does not make it so because atheism cant be responsible for anything.

Christianity, on the other hand, tells you to kill and rape and destroy, that is why you get so much flack, you stand behind a doctrine supporting and promoting murder and destruction, this makes you Evil.



If you are so willing to make this silly association, why not Color of hair? Or Mustaches? Hitler had a moustache, so did Stalin but George Bush did not, so you could get a problem there.... But consistency may not be of relevance?

[Sonart]

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Joking aside, I think Meleageris simple ignorant of what "atheism" is and have little to no understanding of world history and especially not Christianities history.

Meleagar is completely ignorant of a lot of things. Only today, he's started two new threads here...

First, there's this one, based on a false assumption that atheists have no basis for morality, but then states that god does not dictate morality to us either, so apparently believers have no more basis for morality than atheists.

Second, he's completely forgotten that one of the most respected moral leaders on the planet, the Dalai Lama, is, in fact, an atheist... a Buddhist who does not believe in a theist god as an intelligent creator.

... and then...

What's The Point of Believing in Determinism?, in which he declares that free will somehow leads us not to subjective ideas about morality - which seems like it would be the definition of free will - but, somehow, to an objective sense of right and wrong - which seems more like something that would originate from an innate, instinctive, evolutionary 'conscience' - and that either way, god, according to Meleagar, does not inform us of objective morality, but free will somehow leads us to it.

That is one confused young man.

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[Ken Carman]

So are you suggesting that the only reason you don't murder, rape and steal is because of a god?

I would love to see any proof that where there are larger numbers of atheists there is less morality, less ethical behavior. The stats on atheists in prison is pretty close to 0%. Of course evangelism and the concept that if you convert you will become a better person. Cons do know how to play the system. (Hence: "con.")

[Ken Carman]

What precisely is your point? If we were to discuss the slaughters carried out under theistic regimes, such as the aforementioned crusades, the War on Terror, World War II, World War I, the American Civil War, the French Revolution, and the Hundred Years War, and begin delving into atrocities such as the Spanish Inquisition, I daresay it would vastly exceed any 'atheistic' regime.

Can an atheist be trusted? Maybe. Maybe not. Each person is to decide for themselves where their morality lies.

I think the larger point here is that murdering in the name of atheism pretty much does not happen. Do regimes that proclaim themselves atheists commit mass murder? Sure. So do regimes that proclaim Christianity, Islam...

When it comes to those kinds of activities I think it has less to do with religion and more to do with the nature of those who lead and how much power they are allowed/given. Being considered "God," or a direct conduit to God, doesn't help either.

As I think I have stated before, religion, or lack of it, will never stand in the way of those who wish to commit such crimes. They'll either just do it, or reinterpret holy books, whatever excuse they wish to use.

[Jack]

Each person is to decide for themselves where their morality lies.

Precisely why determining a person's qualification for a position of power or influence shouldn't be based on such broad and nebulous concepts as their adherence to a particular faith or their lack of belief. We should judge each individual by their character.

[Sonart]

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Afghanistan1978–199 21,750,000
Albania 1944–1985 100,000
Angola 1975–2002 125,000
Bulgaria 1944–1989 222,000
China/PRC 1923–2007 76,702,000
Cuba 1959–1992 73,000
Czechoslovakia 1948–1968 65,000
Ethiopia 1974–1991 1,343,610
France 1793–1794 40,000
Greece 1946–1949 20,000
Hungary 1948–1989 27,000
Kampuchea/Cambodia 1973–1991 2,627,000
Laos 1975–2007 93,000
Mongolia 1926–2007 100,000
Mozambique 1975–1990 118,000
North Korea 1948–2007 3,163,000
Poland 1945–1948 1,607,000
Romania 1948–1987 438,000
Spain (Republic) 1936–1939 102,000
U.S.S.R. 1917–1987 61,911,000
Vietnam 1945–2007 1,670,000
Yugoslavia 1944–1980 1,072,000

By comparison, the total deaths attributed to the Crusades by most historians is 1.5 million.

Can you believe how disingenuous this little twerp is??? The entire 20th century versus the Crusades???

In 1100 AD there were maybe 300 million people in the entire world. Yet in the 20th century young Meleagar completely forgets the 11 million direct victims of the Holocaust by an officially Catholic regime.

200,000 Croatian and Boznia Muslims killed by Serbian Greek Orthodox Christians
800,000 killed in Rwanda by Christian Hutu tribesmen
2 million Cambodians killed by Pol Pot, a Theravada Buddhist.
1.5 million Christian Armenians killed by Turkish muslims.
Not to mention who knows how many Muslims & Hindus killed in the ongoing religious unrest between India and Pakistan,
1 million muslim dead in the Iran/Iraq war

Combined with the outright lies in his own list...

Afghanistan... 21,750,000 dead???? from the Soviet occupation?? I don't think so. Try about 1,100,000
Angola - a civil war in a country that was 45% Catholic, 15% Protestant and 40% indigenous tribal religions. Meleagar simply assumes the Marxist regime was atheist.
Mozambique was much the same.
France of the French Revolution featured a protestant rebellion against what was considered a royalist Catholic Church. Robespierre himself, who led the reign of terror, was a Deist.
Cambodia was the victim of Pol Pot, a Buddhist.

Then there was the Catholic Inquisition in France and Spain during the 13th century.

The Protestant/Catholic 13 Years War in the 17th century that marked the Reformation and ravaged the Holy Roman Empire in Europe, killing around 15% to 30% of the populations among the German states.

In fact, Meleagar ignores the single most significant reason so many more victims died in the 20th Century than in other religious conflicts.

There were exponentially many more people...

[Ken Carman]

Interesting. As population zooms so does our homicidal nature. So much for our faith, or even lack of it, having any effect.

[FriedrichSeneca]

Crusades are one thing, but you guys should also try the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) which began as a religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics. Estimates range between 3,000,000,000 and 11,500,000 casualties. That's quite a feat considering the weapons they had...

[Ken Carman]

Frankly I'd include all the individual murders that have happened over faith. When's the last time you heard of an individual atheist flying planes into buildings, or driving truck to Oklahoma City, or attempting to slit a throat of a cabbie who is a believer in a competing religion? Killing a doc who won't commit an abortion? (Note: if abortion were an atheist's act then we truly would have very, very, VERY few abortions considering the # of actual atheists nationally, so don't even try countering with that.)

[Sonart]

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Interesting. As population zooms so does our homicidal nature.

I don't think our 'homicidal nature' has changed all that much... just the sheer numbers of people to murder, not to mention our technological capacity to murder them.

In 1462 Vlad the Impaler repulsed the Ottomans and impaled 20,000 Turks and killed maybe 100,000 soldiers and civilians over the course of a couple of years. In 1450 the entire world population was maybe 500 million people, versus about 2 billion around WWII.

The Old Testament chronicles the conquest of Canaan by Joshua's Isrealites returning from Egypt, including the utter annihilation of an endless list of tribes in 1300 BC. World population? Maybe 25 million total.

In 450, Attila the Hun, "The Scourge of God" rampaged through France and Italy, razing and slaughtering entire cities, which in turn contributed to massive famines throughout the region. The entire world's populations were maybe 300 million people.

In 1200, Ghengis Khan was also renowned as a brutal mass murderer during his Mongol invasions of Asia and Eastern Europe, often resulting in the "large-scale slaughter of the local populations". He was devout in the shamanist Tengriism religion of his people. World population, maybe 400 million world wide.

Not to mention the sheer technological capacity to kill. The American Civil War in 1864 - with God firmly on each side - was the first modern, industrial age war and slaughtered people at a rate unheard of, the biggest blood bath in the history of the world... 600,000 dead, out of a total U.S. population of 30 million people.

Yet only 50 years later, that number would pale in comparison to a war the covered about the same equivalent area... World War I. The advances in industrial warfare would claim 8 million lives.

And 20 years after that, WWII would claim 24 million military deaths, and something like 60 million total dead worldwide.

Claiming this had anything whatsoever to do with religion is naive in the extreme.

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[Meleagar]

Yeah, this is infinitely preferable to the atheistic view on morals.

"In total God kills 371,186 people directly and orders another 1,862,265 people murdered."

Still preferable to Stalin's gulags or Mao's "cultural revolution".

[Sonart]

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Still preferable to Stalin's gulags or Mao's "cultural revolution".

Or Hitler's Christian holocaust?

You're trying really, really hard to make a case that just isn't there. Not to mention that most of their victims were incidental... victims of the famines that resulted from forced collectivization of already marginal... and massive... rural peasant populations. China suffered up to 45 million deaths to famine between 1958 and '62.

"Until the early 1980s, the Chinese government's stance, reflected by the name "Three Years of Natural Disasters", was that the famine was largely a result of a series of natural disasters compounded by some planning errors. Researchers outside China, however, generally agree that massive institutional and policy changes which accompanied the Great Leap Forward were the key factors in the famine. Since the 1980s there has been greater official Chinese recognition of the importance of policy mistakes in causing the disaster, claiming that the disaster was 30% due to natural causes and 70% by mismanagement." - Great Chinese Famine

It was a failure of policy, not religion.

You're trying waaaaaaaay too hard to condemn atheism. And us.

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