Quote:
Originally Posted by streetwaves
You silly boy. Athiests have never killed in the name of atheism or because they are atheists. Why would they? As for Hitler being an atheist, that's often disputed. Don't just call him an athiest to try to make some point (as invalid as it is), he contradicts himself too much for almost anyone to say.
There's a quote that I think sums up this sort of thing perfectly:
"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things it takes religion."
|
Ooooh
To be honest, I didn’t really get his point.
Hitler does in fact contradict himself, though the fact that he created a church where in place of the traditional iconography he had pictures of himself hung, I think it’s a fair bet to say he’s an atheist. But who knows, I’m just silly and using facts.
As for your quote, It’s nice to hide behind well placed platitudes but good people have done evil for many a reason.
Before I go on, I feel as if the resentment toward my statements is because we have many a pronounced “atheist” here and I’m guessing its never been proposed that they were in anyway reprehensible. If not all, certainly some, and I’d ask that before you knee-jerk defend the position to look at my point. Atheists aren’t, as a group unassailable and one of the more dangerous traps people can fall into intellectually is to believe any one group is without flaws; or merit.
We’ve dodged my Bill Mahr comment even in the face of statements like (in regard to Ted Haggard, a decidedly reprehensible figure) “he couldn’t even conjure up a stupid old fairy tale in order to steal peoples money.” Look guys, I’m no friend of what we know as “religion” but I didn’t just look at the crusades or the middle east and say “to hell with it all.”
We’re now dancing around the real issue saying what atheists ought to be, not what they are. We’re putting in a glass case, ideas that we find value in, and like communism we know that in practice, thee ideas are horribly warped.
To the person who asked earlier why we should be civil to a
(paraphrase) “group of people who’ve slaughtered millions” I say two things:
1. It’s a good bet that persons actually killed no one
2. That we should never sink to a level we ourselves don’t find
admirable.
Why civility needs an explanation I’ll never understand, but if we take nothing else from my argument here, its that we grasp firmly the differences of proposition and practice and that we only serve to further corrupt that which we refuse to acknowledge