armenia2012 wrote:not funny at all! I just saw on Facebook a picture of a family who was murdered for being Christian!! These radicals need to be stopped!! This is a human rights violation and should never be taken as a joke!!

I agree!

and so do I !!

Murmur wrote:

DWill wrote:Is it possible to establish a causal connection between atheism and the killing done by regimes such as Stalin's and Mao's?

In my opinion, no.

In my opinion, yes.
Atheism originated in the reaction of the modern scientific enlightenment of the eighteenth century against the obscurantist traditions of religious faith. The enlightenment produced the governing atheist idea of the French Revolution that society should be ruled by reason. Through the nineteenth century, this theory of a rational society confronted the power of the old ruling class.

The Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Engels in the revolutionary year of 1848 presented the materialist theory of history, whereby class struggle involves the ruling class using religion as a weapon of oppression. This Manifesto, which was to become enormously influential, said for the proletariat “law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.”
In seeking the overthrow of feudal aristocracy and bourgeois capitalism, communism is opposed to religion, and is the main historical form of political atheism. As the ideas of Marx were used by Lenin to establish the Soviet Union under the claimed dictatorship of the proletariat, this communist opposition to religion led to the formation of the League of the Militant Godless, which organized the tyrannical murder of thousands of priests and bishops, the banning of Christmas, conversion of cathedrals into stables, and numerous other acts of evil insanity as part of systemic effort to eliminate religion in the name of reason. This policy was only partially relaxed when Stalin discovered that the church was a valuable ally in the Great Patriotic War, due to the emotional comfort of religious ritual and the respect the masses still had for the church.

Modern liberal atheism, led by Richard Dawkins, is quite different, given that Dawkins’ main myth of the selfish gene is compatible with capitalist individualism, and does not endorse the old core atheist ideas of implementing a collectivist atheist state through revolution, totalitarian centralism and terror.

I would still say, Robert, that it's the intent of the state that matters most, and not this particular ism. With 1780s France, the Soviet Union, Mao's china, we have true examples of a militant atheism, a term that is thrown around today but is an exaggeration. The majority of atheists today don't believe in gods but aren't intending to smash any vestiges of religion. So, again, it's not something inherent in atheism that made the killing regimes what they were, but their totalism. Totalism can arise from from different ideological bases.