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Originally posted by mijoon
While it seems to be the fad to blame most of the worlds woes on religion,lets not forget the FACT that over the last 100 years ,several hundreds of millions of people were ruthlessly murdered by Hitler,Lenin,Stalin,Mao tse tung,Pol Pot,etc ,and their followers.All these "men" were in fact atheists.
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It also seems to be a fad to label Hitler an atheist. What evidence do you have that he was? The other four I wil grant.
Atheism does not necessarily entail any particular system of ethics. Atheism can be part of some ethical systems or political philosophies, such as Humanism, some schools of Buddhism, Jainism, consequentialism, objectivism, or Communism, but the fact that it does not entail any specific theory of conduct makes it rather ridiculous to blame atheism itself for anything.
We might blame something that atheism was a part of, like Communism, Stalin's personality, or whatever, but faulting atheism is about as rational as blaming Stalin's belief in Lysenkoism (a long discredited biological theory) for his massacres.
The two religions that are causing the problems today, conservative forms of xtianity and Islam, do entail a moral philosophy. It is a moral philosophy based upon an exclusivistic, us vs. them seige mentality.. the saved vs. the lost.. and is frequently apocalyptic in nature. Unlike atheism, these systems of thought are absolutely guaranteed to breed hatred, fear, delusion, superstition and persecution.
20th century dictators sit atop the body count list because moder, efficient means of genocide were not avalible when oppressive christian theocracies controlled Europe. The only exception I can think of is when a few christians decided they had a divine right to the land the US now occupies and embarked upone a wholesale slaughter of native americans.
Anyway, I believe people should be allowed to worship as they choose. The problem isn't religion or irreligion, its the penchant a frightening propotion of homo sapiens has for thinking that its fleeting opinions represent absolute truth. And worse, that the end of enforcing that "truth" upon everyone else justifies virtually any means.