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Einstein was an atheist... and so was Isaac Asimov
On Mon, 11 Dec 2006 01:03:54 +0100, "Starman"
wrotF: Go back to school boy ! (not sunday bible school) REAL school and learn something for god (he dosn't exist) sake Man you are so ignorant that it hurts ! Religion is the main course regarding mass killing through history ! Jeez! Calm down. Switch to decaf and let's ponder this issue like intelligent people. I am quite educated, BTW. Your reaction leads me to believe that you think religions which claim to preach morality, peace and hope, in fact bring intolerance, violence and destruction. I say, that by far the biggest examples of intolerance, violence and destruction in human history are those wrought by militant atheism, underpinned by bogus (I'll get to that shortly) science. Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot come to mind. Religions might not bring perfection, but Atheisms have 100 times worse track record. At an empirical level, these 4 regimes must represent a good 85% of the atheist regimes (weighted by number of citizens) in recorded history (the atheist phase of the French Revolution may well account for another 2-3% which was about as bloodthirsty). Atheist regimes are actually quite rare, representing say 20% of the regimes (weighted by citizens) in recorded history. The only theist regime I can think of which practised/allowed mass murder of its citizens on a comparable relative scale was in Rwanda (representing say 0.1% of regimes). So at an empirical level, the association between atheist regimes and mass murder is very strong - far worse than smoking and cancer. What is the mechanism? Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot all claimed to be Marxists and Marxism "the science of history" was the essential underpinning ideology that allowed them to perpetrate their massive crimes. The essence of Marxism is dialectical materialism and a denial of the existence of God - indeed Marxism was specifically developed as an anti-Christian philosophy. Hitler's Nazi-ism was admittedly far more confused than Marxism, a sort of anti-Marxism which was based on the popularised Darwinism of Haekel (the Dawkins of his day) and picked up the widely-held German view that "survival of the fittest" was a scientific and moral principle (and that, of course, the Germans were the fittest!). But more fundamentally, if you don't believe in God it is very hard to believe in a morality that will constrain you when you have an enormous amount of power. Christian leaders, however powerful, know that they are "under God" and that they do not have ultimate power, but are themselves under judgement. Atheists, manifestly, do not. An absence of constraints on the abuse of power leads, understandably, to an abuse of power. Incidentally, these 'darwinian' views were very common in German intellectual an military circles in the early 1900s, and very widely held by the German General Staff. It was this that shocked Vernon Kellogg, a Stanford professor who was posted to the headquarters of the German general staff during the period of American neutrality in World War I and was shocked to find German military leaders, sometimes with the Kaiser present, supporting the war with an "evolutionary rationale." They did so with "a particularly crude form of natural selection, defined as inexorable, bloody battle." His subsequent book "Headquarters Nights" helped bring the US into the war. I obviously don't suggest that all atheists are immoral - many smokers do not die of cancer. But atheism and power is an exceptionally dangerous mixture. I wonder if you consider humans to be animals - most atheists do. And that view does lead to the rivers of blood of the 20th C - not in all cases, but in enough to cause massive concern, and over 100M deaths. Of course there are ethical atheists. I certainly respect them. However, false ideologies do not only correspond to erroneous beliefs. They can also lead to terrible actions. The Church has not been free from this kind of error (crusades, inquisition), but the twentieth century atheist regimes are truly frightful examples. I really get tired of the bull**** criticisms of Christianity as a carniverous beast on society. An unbiased examination of history proves otherwise, as well as demonstrates how atheists "conveniently" forget Stalinism et al from their diagnoses of society's ills. |
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