The Root of all Evil : The God Delusion
POSTED BY: Calhoun
UPDATED: Thursday, December 17, 2015 06:12
VIEWED: 49488
PAGE 10 of 32
Not to be too tangential, but this discussion does not take into account how many lives and and how much suffering people with religious motivations have saved/improved. Compassion International, the Salvation Army, and numerous other religious organizations have made a positive impact on many lives. I was just at a disaster preparedness seminar and was surprised to hear just how important religious organizations are to coping with disasters (like feeding and sheltering victims and rebuilding their communities).
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I think the assertion that life is "just" a chemical reaction tends to gloss over the complexity of it all. We humans still have not invented anything that approaches the complexity of a single cell. And we still (with all of our technology and scientific knowledge) cannot create a cell from scratch, let alone offer a viable explanation on how it could have occured. If the creation of life happened naturally (without divine intervention), it defied the odds.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Malachite:
We humans still have not invented anything that approaches the complexity of a single cell.
Modern cells are going to be MUCH more complex then the earliest self-replicators, we have made things more complex then the earliest self-replicators needed to be.
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And we still (with all of our technology and scientific knowledge) cannot create a cell from scratch, let alone offer a viable explanation on how it could have occured.
There are viable explanations as we have done experiments that caused the creation of amino acids ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_experiment), done in conditions that matched conditions that likely existed on pre-biotic earth. Biochemistry shows that the development of life through natural processes is quite possible.
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If the creation of life happened naturally (without divine intervention), it defied the odds.
In RWED there's a thread title "is TIME a problem? Or is this guy retarded?" where kaneman asked about the probability of life, this is the link I posted there.
http://talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB010.html
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Quote:Josef Stalin had millions of people killed because they were not perceived to believe or support Stalin’s brand of atheist communism. How is that any different then bin Laden having people killed for not supporting his brand of Islam? If we are going to use this kind of language then we should endeavor to apply it fairly. Stalin had millions killed in an effort to export his brand of atheist communism. If bin Laden murdered in the name of theism, then Stalin murdered in the name of atheism.
Originally posted by fredgiblet:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Finn's point anyhow was that many, many people have died for secular causes, which is undeniable truth
Right...but those causes weren't driven by atheism. Most of the people Stalin killed were killed because of political reasons so the fact that Stalin was an atheist doesn't matter. In the meantime there has been a large number of people who have been killed specifically because of their religious beliefs.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:Yes and in an Atheist family the parents would let their children stay out all night having sex and taking drugs.
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
Josef Stalin had millions of people killed because they were not perceived to believe or support Stalin’s brand of atheist communism. How is that any different then bin Laden having people killed for not supporting his brand of Islam? If we are going to use this kind of language then we should endeavor to apply it fairly. Stalin had millions killed in an effort to export his brand of atheist communism. If bin Laden murdered in the name of theism, then Stalin murdered in the name of atheism.
If Stalin's purges were Atheist, then Iraq is a Christian Crusade, after all George Bush is a Christain, and God did tell him to do it.
Actually, all though I don't think Iraq is a Christian Crusade, such a position would be much stronger than saying Stalin was killing for Atheism.
You trying to portray Stalin's purges as an Atheistic version of the obviously theistic terrorism of Al Qaeda is little more than word play, it's intellectually dishonest, frankly.
Religion is square centre in Bin Landen's thinking, belief in the non-existence of god wasn't even a side issue to the purges. The fact that you construct a sentence in such away as to shoe horn Atheism in, then throw away the communism aspect in order to put Atheism front, and centre changes that, not at all.
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Quote:Because that is a different issue entirely. There are many non-thesist organisations. I suspect that at the end of the day, they at least 'cancel out', making the point moot.
Originally posted by Malachite:
this discussion does not take into account how many lives and and how much suffering people with religious motivations have saved/improved.
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
No one can see their reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can see.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
Josef Stalin had millions of people killed because they were not perceived to believe or support Stalin’s brand of atheist communism.
I just read the entire wiki entry on the Great Purge ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge) nowhere is religion mentioned. You are saying that because Stalin was an atheist that the deaths that he caused were caused by atheism, can you back up the claim that atheism was a driving force behind his purges? Or is it more likely that the fact that he was an atheist had no bearing whatsoever on his decision to execute people who he felt were disloyal or dangerous to the power he held?
Quote:
Stalin had millions killed in an effort to export his brand of atheist communism. If bin Laden murdered in the name of theism, then Stalin murdered in the name of atheism.
If you can back up the assertion that Stalin killed those because of atheism then I'll accept that assertion, but nothing I've seen indicates that atheism had a significant bearing on the purges. I'll freely admit that there was probably some religious leaders executed during the purges that would not have been if Stalin was a theist, but they are most likely in the vast minority.
EDIT: P.S. what Cit said
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Quote:Atheism was the official doctrine of the Soviet Union. Josef Stalin killed hundreds of thousand of people specifically for not be atheistic. He nearly destroyed the Russian Orthodox Church and he is responsible for the largest Jewish purge since Hitler. And he was no better to Moslems. How is that not killing in the name of atheism?
Originally posted by citizen:
Religion is square centre in Bin Landen's thinking, belief in the non-existence of god wasn't even a side issue to the purges. The fact that you construct a sentence in such away as to shoe horn Atheism in, then throw away the communism aspect in order to put Atheism front, and centre changes that, not at all.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
I just read the entire wiki entry on the Great Purge ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge) nowhere is religion mentioned.
Quote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Religion
Stalin's role in the fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church is complex. Continuous persecution in the 1930s resulted in its near-extinction: by 1939, active parishes numbered in the low hundreds (down from 54,000 in 1917), many churches had been leveled, and tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns were persecuted and killed. Over 100,000 were shot during the purges of 1937-38.[25][26] During World War II, however, the Church was allowed a revival as a patriotic organization, after the NKVD had recruited the new metropolitan, the first after the revolution, as a secret agent. Thousands of parishes were reactivated, until a further round of suppression in Khrushchev's time.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Here's a couple things I found when I Googled "Stalin atheist"
http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/hitlerstalin.html
http://www.atheistalliance.org/library/nelson-atheism_communism.php
Despite the valid arguments made on both those sites I'm willing to admit that atheism played a small part in Stalin's purges, but the vast majority of the dead were killed for purely political reasons.
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