To the Non Believers.

[LuisDantas]

But, he already did that...(or claims to have).

Who? Atheism?

He keeps refusing to invite us loyal followers. What a prick.

Apparently, because Stalin was a virulent atheist, and soviet communism was anti-religion, and Marx (or was it Lenin) said, 'religion is the opiate of the masses' the purge carried out in soviet russia by Stalin was an atrocity due to lack of belief in god.

What? So you think that Atheism was a significant factor in the Stalinist purges?

That I have a very hard time taking seriously.

I mean, wasn't every bullet used inscribed with 'we don't believe in god, so there' in Cyrillic?

I never heard of that, myself. It's a ridiculous thing for one to do, either way.

He could totally prove it, if we unbelievers weren't so busy attacking him.

Even granting that Stalin killed due to Atheism (which I definitely will not without some major evidence), that is unlikely in the extreme.

For all his mistakes, Stalin can't begin to compare with the massacres of the Crusades and so many other Holy Wars. To say nothing of lesser scale things such as psychopaths who believe themselves to be god-inspired and non-fatal forms of religious abuse that continue even now.

When the tire meets the tarmac, the fact remains that belief in God often leads people to do silly and even destructive things, while disbelief... well, it doesn't.

 

[Autodidact]

More like this: BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | China's Christians suffer for their faith any other questions? I could dig but this was the first hit I got. You people try to convert by the sword just as every other faith yet you claim you are better.

I don't know about anyone else here, but I'm not a Chinese communist.

 

[ImmortalFlame]

HUMPH. It damn sure did not prevent it.

But it didn't cause it.

On the other hand, religion has caused and justified civil war, slavery, terrorism, etc.

TBH the people caused it regardless of faith but I will carry this line until Atheists stop saying that all of this killing goes on in the name of God because it does not. It is in the name of Man using God as a cover.

Nobody here claimed that all killings are done in the name of God, but to deny that there were any killings in the name of God as you are doing is ludicrous. How could anybody of justified, for example, the Salem witch trials or the Spanish inquisition without the use of religion?

 

[Duck]

That's just it. I haven't made any claim. You have.

You stated that "Atheism has caused more deaths than religion." You need two numbers-- the number that atheism has killed and the number that religion has killed-- in order to substantiate that claim.

Furthermore, if you are only talking about this century, then you would need to further modify your claim to state "Atheism has caused more deaths than religion in this century", otherwise, it looks like you are making an statement about all time.

He WAS talking about all time. His quoted source added up 20th century deaths, threw in "a billion for abortion" and quoted some scripture and presto! more deaths caused by atheists/atheism than in all of recorded history.

Edit: post number 161:
I disagree but I guess it is all about how you see it. I see many Atheists with an agenda. They have groups and want God removed from everything. Sounds like religion to me.

BTW what is this?: http://www.meetup.com/

@Auto the numbers of 3 dictators add up to over 50,000,000 a lot more than that. Now take central and south america as well as SE Asia into consideration. I dont here them saying they did it for God. You do the math.

Christians don't just do these things. Don't get me wrong there have been many murders in the name of Man because he said God led him but get with it don't you think these people had a pretty good idea what they were doing was wrong?

By the way the definition of attack: transitive verb
1 : to set upon or work against forcefully
2 : to assail with unfriendly or bitter words
3 : to begin to affect or to act on injuriously <plants attacked by aphids>
4 : to set to work on <attack a problem>
5 : to threaten (a piece in chess) with immediate capture

These numbers could be off but it is something.

Quote:
The second point to make is that, yes, people who claim to love God do kill, but nowhere
near to the extent that the lack of religion does. According to University of Hawaii
political scientist Rudolph J. Rummel,1 the total number killed in all of human history is
estimated to be about 284,638,000. Of that number, 151,491,000 were killed during the
past 100 years. The single largest killer in all of human history is, by far, atheistic
Communism with a total of 110,000,000 &#8230; over 1/3 of all people ever killed! If we add
to that number just two other regimes where religion of any sort was strongly
discouraged, Nazi Germany and Nationalist China, the number rises to 141,160,000.
Almost 50% of all the killings in human history were committed in the past 100 years by
regimes that either actively promoted atheism or strongly discouraged religion. We have
not considered the over one billion abortions, where Christianity seems to be particularly
unwelcome. When the murders of history are tallied up, it is very clear that atheism is the
most dangerous philosophy ever embraced by humanity. The most effective restraint on
mankind's inherently evil tendencies is faith in God through Jesus Christ, a faith that
actually follows the teachings and commands of Jesus Christ as a daily way of life.
This is where the numbers come from: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM

This is the link to the article: http://www.newscholars.com/papers/Ki...%20Atheism.pdf __________________

 

[Archer]

So Archer, after making all this noise about these horrible attack threads, you know, what you made this thread about, you don't have a single example of one? Not one? If I criticize you for starting a thread based on nothing, would you call it an attack?

Answer my post mam. Where the hell do atheists get off making unsubstantiated claims? You want to put a believer on the rack but when the tables are turned you present nothing.

It is an attack on faith when you say that there is all the killing in the name of God when the fact is God has not got much to do with it. People do. People are sadistic and murderous. We all have it in us God or not.

 

[tumbleweed41]

• -- The First Crusade was launched in 1095 with the battle cry "Deus Vult" (God wills it), a mandate to destroy infidels in the Holy Land. Gathering crusaders in Germany first fell upon "the infidel among us," Jews in the Rhine valley, thousands of whom were dragged from their homes or hiding places and hacked to death or burned alive. Then the religious legions plundered their way 2,000 miles to Jerusalem, where they killed virtually every inhabitant, "purifying" the symbolic city. Cleric Raymond of Aguilers wrote: "In the temple of Solomon, one rode in blood up to the knees and even to the horses' bridles, by the just and marvelous judgment of God."
• -- Human sacrifice blossomed in the Mayan theocracy of Central America between the 11th and 16th centuries. To appease a feathered-serpent god, maidens were drowned in sacred wells and other victims either had their hearts cut out, were shot with arrows, or were beheaded. Elsewhere, sacrifice was sporadic. In Peru, pre-Inca tribes killed children in temples called "houses of the moon." In Tibet, Bon shamans performed ritual killings. In Borneo builders of pile houses drove the first pile through the body of a maiden to pacify the earth goddess. In India, Dravidian people offered lives to village goddesses, and followers of Kali sacrificed a male child every Friday evening.
• -- In the Third Crusade, after Richard the Lion-Hearted captured Acre in 1191, he ordered 3,000 captives -- many of them women and children -- taken outside the city and slaughtered. Some were disemboweled in a search for swallowed gems. Bishops intoned blessings. Infidel lives were of no consequence. As Saint Bernard of Clairvaux declared in launching the Second Crusade: "The Christian glories in the death of a pagan, because thereby Christ himself is glorified."
• -- The Assassins were a sect of Ismaili Shi'ite Muslims whose faith required the stealthy murder of religious opponents. From the 11th to 13th centuries, they killed numerous leaders in modern-day Iran, Iraq and Syria. They finally were wiped out by conquering Mongols -- but their vile name survives.
• -- Throughout Europe, beginning in the 1100s, tales spread that Jews were abducting Christian children, sacrificing them, and using their blood in rituals. Hundreds of massacres stemmed from this "blood libel." Some of the supposed sacrifice victims -- Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, the holy child of LaGuardia, Simon of Trent -- were beatified or commemorated with shrines that became sites of pilgrimages and miracles.
• -- In 1209, Pope Innocent III launched an armed crusade against Albigenses Christians in southern France. When the besieged city of Beziers fell, soldiers reportedly asked their papal adviser how to distinguish the faithful from the infidel among the captives. He commanded: "Kill them all. God will know his own." Nearly 20,000 were slaughtered -- many first blinded, mutilated, dragged behind horses, or used for target practice.
• -- The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 proclaimed the doctrine of transubstantiation: that the host wafer miraculously turns into the body of Jesus during the mass. Soon rumors spread that Jews were stealing the sacred wafers and stabbing or driving nails through them to crucify Jesus again. Reports said that the pierced host bled, cried out, or emitted spirits. On this charge, Jews were burned at the stake in 1243 in Belitz, Germany -- the first of many killings that continued into the 1800s. To avenge the tortured host, the German knight Rindfliesch led a brigade in 1298 that exterminated 146 defenseless Jewish communities in six months.

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]James A. Haught: Holy Horrors (1990) [/FONT][/FONT]

 

[tumbleweed41]

• -- In the 1200s the Incas built their empire in Peru, a society dominated by priests reading daily magical signs and offering sacrifices to appease many gods. At major ceremonies up to 200 children were burned as offerings. Special "chosen women" -- comely virgins without blemish -- were strangled.
• -- Also during the 1200s, the hunt for Albigensian heretics led to establishment of the Inquisition, which spread over Europe. Pope Innocent IV authorized torture. Under interrogation by Dominican priests, screaming victims were stretched, burned, pierced and broken on fiendish pain machines to make them confess to disbelief and to identify fellow transgressors. Inquisitor Robert le Bourge sent 183 people to the stake in a single week.
• -- In Spain, where many Jews and Moors had converted to escape persecution, inquisitors sought those harboring their old faith. At least 2,000 Spanish backsliders were burned. Executions in other countries included the burning of scientists such as mathematician-philosopher Giordano Bruno, who espoused Copernicus's theory that the planets orbit the sun.

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]
[/FONT][/FONT]

• -- When the Black Death swept Europe in 1348-1349, rumors alleged that it was caused by Jews poisoning wells. Hysterical mobs slaughtered thousands of Jews in several countries. In Speyer, Germany, the burned bodies were piled into giant wine casks and sent floating down the Rhine. In northern Germany Jews were walled up alive in their homes to suffocate or starve. The Flagellants, an army of penitents who whipped themselves bloody, stormed the Jewish quarter of Frankfurt in a gruesome massacre. The prince of Thuringia announced that he had burned his Jews for the honor of God.
• -- The Aztecs began their elaborate theocracy in the 1300s and brought human sacrifice to a golden era. About 20,000 people were killed yearly to appease gods -- especially the sun god, who needed daily "nourishment" of blood. Hearts of sacrifice victims were cut out, and some bodies were eaten ceremoniously. Other victims were drowned, beheaded, burned or dropped from heights. In a rite to the rain god, shrieking children were killed at several sites so that their tears might induce rain. In a rite to the maize goddess, a virgin danced for 24 hours, then was killed and skinned; her skin was worn by a priest in further dancing. One account says that at King Ahuitzotl's coronation, 80,000 prisoners were butchered to please the gods.

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]James A. Haught: Holy Horrors (1990) [/FONT][/FONT]

 

[tumbleweed41]

• -- In the 1400s, the Inquisition shifted its focus to witchcraft. Priests tortured untold thousands of women into confessing that they were witches who flew through the sky and engaged in sex with the devil -- then they were burned or hanged for their confessions. Witch hysteria raged for three centuries in a dozen nations. Estimates of the number executed vary from 100,000 to 2 million. Whole villages were exterminated. In the first half of the 17th century, about 5,000 "witches" were put to death in the French province of Alsace, and 900 were burned in the Bavarian city of Bamberg. The witch craze was religious madness at its worst.
• -- The "Protestant Inquisition" is a term applied to the severities of John Calvin in Geneva and Queen Elizabeth I in England during the 1500s. Calvin's followers burned 58 "heretics," including theologian Michael Servetus, who doubted the Trinity. Elizabeth I outlawed Catholicism and executed about 200 Catholics.
• -- Protestant Huguenots grew into an aggressive minority in France in the 15OOs -- until repeated Catholic reprisals smashed them. On Saint Bartholomew's Day in 1572, Catherine de Medicis secretly authorized Catholic dukes to send their soldiers into Huguenot neighborhoods and slaughter families. This massacre touched off a six-week bloodbath in which Catholics murdered about 10,000 Huguenots. Other persecutions continued for two centuries, until the French Revolution. One group of Huguenots escaped to Florida; in 1565 a Spanish brigade discovered their colony, denounced their heresy, and killed them all.
• -- Members of lndia's Thuggee sect strangled people as sacrifices to appease the bloodthirsty goddess Kali, a practice beginning in the 1500s. The number of victims has been estimated to be as high as 2 million. Thugs were claiming about 20,000 lives a year in the 1800s until British rulers stamped them out. At a trial in 1840, one Thug was accused of killing 931 people. Today, some Hindu priests still sacrifice goats to Kali.
• -- The Anabaptists, communal "rebaptizers," were slaughtered by both Catholic and Protestant authorities. In Munster, Germany, Anabaptists took control of the city, drove out the clergymen, and proclaimed a New Zion. The bishop of Munster began an armed siege. While the townspeople starved, the Anabaptist leader proclaimed himself king and executed dissenters. When Munster finally fell, the chief Anabaptists were tortured to death with red-hot pincers and their bodies hung in iron cages from a church steeple.
• -- Oliver Cromwell was deemed a moderate because he massacred only Catholics and Anglicans, not other Protestants. This Puritan general commanded Bible-carrying soldiers, whom he roused to religious fervor. After decimating an Anglican army, Cromwell said, "God made them as stubble to our swords." He demanded the beheading of the defeated King Charles I, and made himself the holy dictator of England during the 1650s. When his army crushed the hated Irish Catholics, he ordered the execution of the surrendered defenders of Drogheda and their priests, calling it "a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches."

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]James A. Haught: Holy Horrors (1990) [/FONT][/FONT]

 

[Archer]

He WAS talking about all time. His quoted source added up 20th century deaths, threw in "a billion for abortion" and quoted some scripture and presto! more deaths caused by atheists/atheism than in all of recorded history.

Have you seen the total numbers for the Crusades? Nothing compared to 20th century.

HMMMM? Atheists discount the Bible so the 30+ million God killed don't count because it never happened. So let us say in the last 2000 years of an established faith or two. I guess you are correct and this is an imaginary conversation. By my math the Christians and Muslims would have ran out of prople to kill and then killed themselves off.

Damn brilliant.

 

[LuisDantas]

HUMPH. It damn sure did not prevent it.

Maybe because it is not its role to attempt to?

After all, atheism is simply a disbelief. It has little, if any, motivational role. It is not a therapeutic measure or anything of the sort. Much less a religion.

Are you really willing to speak ill of a (lack of) belief due to what is doesn't do, doesn't even claim to want to do?

It would be a gross tactic if we used it to attack religion, you know. It doesn't look any better when used to attack Atheism, much on the contrary even.

TBH the people caused it regardless of faith but I will carry this line until Atheists stop saying that all of this killing goes on in the name of God because it does not.

Except that it does. You may easily claim that it is not proper understanding of God, but that changes little.

It is in the name of Man using God as a cover.

I wish.

 

[Archer]

• -- In the 1400s, the Inquisition shifted its focus to witchcraft. Priests tortured untold thousands of women into confessing that they were witches who flew through the sky and engaged in sex with the devil -- then they were burned or hanged for their confessions. Witch hysteria raged for three centuries in a dozen nations. Estimates of the number executed vary from 100,000 to 2 million. Whole villages were exterminated. In the first half of the 17th century, about 5,000 "witches" were put to death in the French province of Alsace, and 900 were burned in the Bavarian city of Bamberg. The witch craze was religious madness at its worst.
• -- The "Protestant Inquisition" is a term applied to the severities of John Calvin in Geneva and Queen Elizabeth I in England during the 1500s. Calvin's followers burned 58 "heretics," including theologian Michael Servetus, who doubted the Trinity. Elizabeth I outlawed Catholicism and executed about 200 Catholics.
• -- Protestant Huguenots grew into an aggressive minority in France in the 15OOs -- until repeated Catholic reprisals smashed them. On Saint Bartholomew's Day in 1572, Catherine de Medicis secretly authorized Catholic dukes to send their soldiers into Huguenot neighborhoods and slaughter families. This massacre touched off a six-week bloodbath in which Catholics murdered about 10,000 Huguenots. Other persecutions continued for two centuries, until the French Revolution. One group of Huguenots escaped to Florida; in 1565 a Spanish brigade discovered their colony, denounced their heresy, and killed them all.
• -- Members of lndia's Thuggee sect strangled people as sacrifices to appease the bloodthirsty goddess Kali, a practice beginning in the 1500s. The number of victims has been estimated to be as high as 2 million. Thugs were claiming about 20,000 lives a year in the 1800s until British rulers stamped them out. At a trial in 1840, one Thug was accused of killing 931 people. Today, some Hindu priests still sacrifice goats to Kali.
• -- The Anabaptists, communal "rebaptizers," were slaughtered by both Catholic and Protestant authorities. In Munster, Germany, Anabaptists took control of the city, drove out the clergymen, and proclaimed a New Zion. The bishop of Munster began an armed siege. While the townspeople starved, the Anabaptist leader proclaimed himself king and executed dissenters. When Munster finally fell, the chief Anabaptists were tortured to death with red-hot pincers and their bodies hung in iron cages from a church steeple.
• -- Oliver Cromwell was deemed a moderate because he massacred only Catholics and Anglicans, not other Protestants. This Puritan general commanded Bible-carrying soldiers, whom he roused to religious fervor. After decimating an Anglican army, Cromwell said, "God made them as stubble to our swords." He demanded the beheading of the defeated King Charles I, and made himself the holy dictator of England during the 1650s. When his army crushed the hated Irish Catholics, he ordered the execution of the surrendered defenders of Drogheda and their priests, calling it "a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches."

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]James A. Haught: Holy Horrors (1990) [/FONT][/FONT]

I have no doubt and perhaps more but it is still nothing compared to any one of the big 3 in the 20th century alone.

 

[tumbleweed41]

• -- Ukrainian Bogdan Chmielnicki was a Cossack Cromwell. He wore the banner of Eastern Orthodoxy in a holy war against Jews and Polish Catholics. More than 100,000 were killed in this 17th-century bloodbath, and the Ukraine was split away from Poland to become part of the Orthodox Russian empire.
• -- The Thirty Years' War produced the largest religious death toll of all time. It began in 1618 when Protestant leaders threw two Catholic emissaries out of a Prague window into a dung heap. War flared between Catholic and Protestant princedoms, drawing in supportive religious armies from Germany, Spain, England, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, France and Italy. Sweden's Protestant soldiers sang Martin Luther's "Ein 'Feste Burg" in battle. Three decades of combat turned central Europe into a wasteland of misery. One estimate states that Germany's population dropped from 18 million to 4 million. In the end nothing was settled, and too few people remained to rebuild cities, plant fields, or conduct education.
• -- When Puritans settled in Massachusetts in the 1600s, they created a religious police state where doctrinal deviation could lead to flogging, pillorying, hanging, cutting off ears, or boring through the tongue with a hot iron. Preaching Quaker beliefs was a capital offense. Four stubborn Quakers defied this law and were hanged. In the 1690s fear of witches seized the colony. Twenty alleged witches were killed and 150 others imprisoned.
• -- In 1723 the bishop of Gdansk, Poland, demanded that all Jews be expelled from the city. The town council declined, but the bishop's exhortations roused a mob that invaded the ghetto and beat the residents to death.
• -- Islamic jihads (holy wars), mandated by the Koran, killed millions over 12 centuries. In early years, Muslim armies spread the faith rapidly: east to India and west to Morocco. Then splintering sects branded other Muslims as infidels and declared jihads against them. The Kharijis battled Sunni rulers. The Azariqis decreed death to all "sinners" and their families. In 1804 a Sudanese holy man, Usman dan Fodio, waged a bloody jihad that broke the religious sway of the Sultan of Gobir. In the 1850s another Sudanese mystic, 'Umar al-Hajj, led a barbaric jihad to convert pagan African tribes -- with massacres, beheadings and a mass execution of 300 hostages. In the 1880s a third Sudanese holy man, Muhammad Ahmed, commanded a jihad that destroyed a 10,000-man Egyptian army and wiped out defenders of Khartoum led by British general Charles "Chinese" Gordon.
• -- In 1801 Orthodox priests in Bucharest, Romania, revived the story that Jews sacrificed Christians and drank their blood. Enraged parishioners stormed the ghetto and cut the throats of 128 Jews.
• -- When the Baha'i faith began in Persia in 1844, the Islamic regime sought to exterminate it. The Baha'i founder was imprisoned and executed in 1850. Two years later, the religious government massacred 20,000 Baha'is. Streets of Tehran were soaked with blood. The new Baha'i leader, Baha'ullah, was tortured and exiled in foreign Muslim prisons for the rest of his life.
• -- Human sacrifices were still occurring in Buddhist Burma in the 1850s. When the capital was moved to Mandalay, 56 "spotless" men were buried beneath the new city walls to sanctify and protect the city. When two of the burial spots were later found empty, royal astrologers decreed that 500 men, women, boys, and girls must be killed and buried at once, or the capital must be abandoned. About 100 were actually buried before British governors stopped the ceremonies.
• -- In 1857 both Muslim and Hindu taboos triggered the Sepoy Mutiny in India. British rulers had given their native soldiers new paper cartridges that had to be bitten open. The cartridges were greased with animal tallow. This enraged Muslims, to whom pigs are unclean, and Hindus, to whom cows are sacred. Troops of both faiths went into a crazed mutiny, killing Europeans wantonly. At Kanpur, hundreds of European women and children were massacred after being promised safe passage.
• -- Late in the 19th century, with rebellion stirring in Russia, the czars attempted to divert public attention by helping anti-Semitic groups rouse Orthodox Christian hatred for Jews. Three waves of pogroms ensued -- in the 1880s, from 1903 to 1906, and during the Russian Revolution. Each wave was increasingly murderous. During the final period, 530 communities were attacked and 60,000 Jews were killed.

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]James A. Haught: Holy Horrors (1990) [/FONT][/FONT]

 

[Archer]

Add them all up.

BTW thanks for presenting something tumbleweed I hate having to debate myself.

frubals.

 

[tumbleweed41]

• -- In the early 1900s, Muslim Turks waged genocide against Christian Armenians, and Christian Greeks and Balkans warred against the Islamic Ottoman Empire.
• -- When India finally won independence from Britain in 1947, the "great soul" of Mahatma Gandhi wasn't able to prevent Hindus and Muslims from turning on one another in a killing frenzy that took perhaps 1 million lives. Even Gandhi was killed by a Hindu who thought him too pro-Muslim.
• -- In the 1950s and 1960s, combat between Christians, animists and Muslims in Sudan killed more than 500,000.
• -- In Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978, followers of the Rev. Jim Jones killed a visiting congressman and three newsmen, then administered cyanide to themselves and their children in a 900-person suicide that shocked the world.
• -- Islamic religious law decrees that thieves shall have their hands or feet chopped off, and unmarried lovers shall be killed. In the Sudan in 1983 and 1984, 66 thieves were axed in public. A moderate Muslim leader, Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, was hanged for heresy in 1985 because he opposed these amputations. In Saudi Arabia a teen-age princess and her lover were executed in public in 1977. In Pakistan in 1987, a 25-year-old carpenter's daughter was sentenced to be stoned to death for engaging in unmarried sex. In the United Arab Emirates in 1984, a cook and a maid were sentenced to stoning for adultery -- but, as a show of mercy, the execution was postponed until after the maid's baby was born.
• -- In 1983 in Darkley, Northern Ireland, Catholic terrorists with automatic weapons burst into a Protestant church on a Sunday morning and opened fire, killing three worshipers and wounding seven. It was just one of hundreds of Catholic-Protestant ambushes that have taken 2,600 lives in Ulster since age-old religious hostility turned violent again in 1969.
• -- Hindu-Muslim bloodshed erupts randomly throughout India. More than 3,000 were killed in Assam province in 1983. In May 1984 Muslims hung dirty sandals on a Hindu leader's portrait as a religious insult. This act triggered a week of arson riots that left 216 dead, 756 wounded, 13,000 homeless, and 4,100 in jail.
• -- Religious tribalism -- segregation of sects into hostile camps -- has ravaged Lebanon continuously since 1975. News reports of the civil war tell of "Maronite Christian snipers," "Sunni Muslim suicide bombers," "Druze machine gunners," "Shi'ite Muslim mortar fire," and "Alawite Muslim shootings." Today 130,000 people are dead and a once-lovely nation is laid waste.
• -- In Nigeria in 1982, religious fanatic followers of Mallam Marwa killed and mutilated several hundred people as heretics and infidels. They drank the blood of some of the victims. When the militia arrived to quell the violence, the cultists sprinkled themselves with blessed powder that they thought would make them impervious to police bullets. It didn't.
• -- Today's Shi'ite theocracy in Iran -- "the government of God on earth" -- decreed that Baha'i believers who won't convert shall be killed. About 200 stubborn Baha'is were executed in the early 1980s, including women and teenagers. Up to 40,000 Baha'is fled the country. Sex taboos in Iran are so severe that: (1) any woman who shows a lock of hair is jailed; (2) Western magazines being shipped into the country first go to censors who laboriously black out all women's photos except for faces; (3) women aren't allowed to ski with men, but have a separate slope where they may ski in shrouds.

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]James A. Haught: Holy Horrors (1990) [/FONT][/FONT]

 

[Duck]

Who? Atheism?

He keeps refusing to invite us loyal followers. What a prick.



What? So you think that Atheism was a significant factor in the Stalinist purges?

That I have a very hard time taking seriously.



I never heard of that, myself. It's a ridiculous thing for one to do, either way.



Even granting that Stalin killed due to Atheism (which I definitely will not without some major evidence), that is unlikely in the extreme.

For all his mistakes, Stalin can't begin to compare with the massacres of the Crusades and so many other Holy Wars. To say nothing of lesser scale things such as psychopaths who believe themselves to be god-inspired and non-fatal forms of religious abuse that continue even now.

When the tire meets the tarmac, the fact remains that belief in God often leads people to do silly and even destructive things, while disbelief... well, it doesn't.

Sorry, I forgot to include the /sarcasm tag when I posted what you responded to.

And I totally agree with what you have posted.

 

[tumbleweed41]

• -- The lovely island nation of Sri Lanka has been turned hellish by ambushes and massacres between Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamils.
• -- In 1983 a revered Muslim leader, Mufti Sheikh Sa'ad e-Din el'Alami of Jerusalem, issued a fatwa (an order of divine deliverance) promising an eternal place in paradise to any Muslim assassin who would kill President Hafiz al-Assad of Syria.
• -- Sikhs want to create a separate theocracy, Khalistan (Land of the Pure), in the Punjab region of India. Many heed the late extremist preacher Jarnail Bhindranwale, who taught his followers that they have a "religious duty to send opponents to hell." Throughout the 1980s they sporadically murdered Hindus to accomplish this goal. In 1984, after Sikh guards riddled prime minister Indira Gandhi with 50 bullets, Hindus went on a rampage that killed 5,000 Sikhs in three days. Mobs dragged Sikhs from homes, stores, buses and trains, chopping and pounding them to death. Some were burned alive; boys were castrated.
• -- In 1984 Shi'ite fanatics who killed and tortured Americans on a hijacked Kuwaiti airliner at Tehran Airport said they did it "for the pleasure of God."

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]James A. Haught: Holy Horrors (1990) [/FONT][/FONT]

 

[LuisDantas]

Have you seen the total numbers for the Crusades? Nothing compared to 20th century.

And the 20th century is not really known for its widespread submission to Atheism (which never stopped being a minority belief, mind you), so I fail to see your point here.

And that is assuming that you are right in your claim to begin with.

HMMMM? Atheists discount the Bible so the 30+ million God killed don't count because it never happened.

What? So now we are supposed to just disregard the genocidal instructions of the Sacred Books of the Faithful? To disbelieve the homicidal intent and fact, because we disbelieve the God that inspired them?

Really? I mean... really?

Would YOU disbelieve, say, a Hindu sect that claimed to have killed their enemies in the past just because you disregard their own scriptures?

 

[tumbleweed41]

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]
"Obviously, people who think religion is a force for good are looking only at Dr. Jekyll and ignoring Mr. Hyde. They don't see the superstitious savagery pervading both history and current events.
During the past three centuries, religion gradually lost its power over life in Europe and America, and church horrors ended in the West. But the poison lingered. The Nazi Holocaust was rooted in centuries of religious hate. Historian Dagobert Runes said the long era of church persecution killed three and a half million Jews -- and Hitler's Final Solution was a secular continuation. Meanwhile, faith remains potent in the Third World, where it still produces familiar results."
[/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]James A. Haught[/FONT][/FONT]
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[Archer]

More People Have Been Killed in the Name of Atheism & Secularism than Religion?

 

[Archer]

And the 20th century is not really known for its widespread submission to Atheism (which never stopped being a minority belief, mind you), so I fail to see your point here.

And that is assuming that you are right in your claim to begin with.



What? So now we are supposed to just disregard the genocidal instructions of the Sacred Books of the Faithful? To disbelieve the homicidal intent and fact, because we disbelieve the God that inspired them?

Really? I mean... really?

Would YOU disbelieve, say, a Hindu sect that claimed to have killed their enemies in the past just because you disregard their own scriptures?

Put it in context __ you ___ go ____ off _ _____. Get my drift?