Quote:
Originally Posted by radix
Conveniently, you left out the single biggest mass murderer in history, who happened to be Atheist.
You were saying? You could say that he did it for the "state" instead of atheism. However, considering the state adopted stance on religion was atheism/secularism, his views and the views of the state were one and the same. That is, the religion wasn't to be tolerated. He waffled on those views a few times however.
If you view Muslims killing for a Muslim state as killing in the name of God, then Stalin killing theists as a means to an atheist state is surely killing in the name of atheism.
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False. No one has ever killed in the name of atheism.
"Even if some people were killed simply because they followed a religion, it does not follow that they were killed in the name of atheism. Why? Because atheism is not inherently opposed to religion: it is possible to be both an atheist and religious and some religions are themselves atheistic. Atheism also isn’t a belief system or ideology which can, by itself, inspire people to do things — good or bad.
To understand this better, consider times in the past when religion has been involved with violence — the Inquisition would be good. How many people were killed during the Inquisition in the name of theism? None. Those doing the killing acted not because of theism, but rather because of Christian doctrines. The belief system is what inspired people to act (sometimes for good, sometimes for ill). The single belief of theism, however, did not.
Similarly, communism certainly inspired people to act and gave them motivations to do certain things, but atheism — which is the absence of a belief and not even a belief itself — did not. The assumption that people in Russia and China were killed merely on account of atheism is based upon two other myths: first, that atheism is itself some sort of philosophy or belief system which can motivate people, and second that atheism is somehow interchangeable with the actual belief system of communism. It also pretends that all the various elements of communist totalitarianism were irrelevant to what happened — which is utter nonsense. "