shtreimel wrote:Machinesworking wrote: Caligula is a non religious guy huh?
Yes, and quite depraved as well.
that's simply not true, he believed in Zeus, and proclaimed himself to be a god. It's not your brand of religion, but definitely not atheistic.
Machinesworking wrote: Huh? It's only been in the last 100 years that non religious political movements have made any amount of impact on the death count. Religious people have murdered in the name of god, or with god on their side, for thousands of years. The numbers are definitely skewed towards religious people as far as death count.
Source please?
Here's mine:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1121/p09s01-coop.html
"...the indisputable fact is that all the religions of the world put together have in 2,000 years not managed to kill as many people as have been killed in the name of atheism in the past few decades."
Got plenty more where that came from. Your turn.
You know, actually the Christian Science monitor can be a great paper if you read it for facts about US policies etc. fairly unbiased, but let's face a simple fact here, they really can't be reliably sourced for information pertaining to whether religion is used as a tool to divide people and therfore is a source of conflicts in history. We are talking about people that believe that prayer will cure cancer, and if you don't get cured, god wanted you in heaven, therefore doctors are bad.
Your last statement, well if in the last 20 years there have been more people killed in the name of atheism than heave died in all the conflicts mankind has had in the last 2000 years, then yeah, you're right!
You have only two real sources, Stalin and Mao, but how many deaths were because of the atheist nature of their militarism? Politics it seems played a bigger role in their tyranny.
Let's face a simple fact here, atheism is a relatively new concept, people have been worshipping something, praying to something, and generally believing that outside forces were controlling destiny forever. whether or not you like to admit it, Zeus and Yahweh are the same dammed thing to an atheist. Your god is just the latest in a long run of ideological concepts that man has had of an afterlife.
I don't think it's necessary to site any facts on that, it's self evident.
Now what roll religion played in war is negligible, I agree with you there, just as atheism had little to do with the devastation caused by the political militarism of Stalin.
Like I said already though, Hitler used religion, and religious hatred of jews, ( by religious people BTW), to demonize and eventually murder millions. That simply is not an atheist exercise in the least. That is a product of religious hatred, period. WWII is definitely not an atheistic death toll.
Same could be said about the Irish conflict, religion was the dividing force between people that developed after there should have been enough generations passed to allow the scotts to integrate, but religion kept that from happening.
Israel and Palestine would be an easier issue without religion playing such a divisive role in the people.
In fact every source CSM sites is full of holes. The Balkins ethnic differences are a direct product of the religious differences, and the wars that they've had that fueled that hatred. In that case a commie kept the peace by outlawing hate crimes. Unfortunately it takes 800 years they say for the wounds to heal, so when Tito died.....
Atheism itself has rarely been used as an excuse to kill people. Never heard of any atheist uprising where people of a particular religion were whipped out because they were of that religion. I guess it's possible that you could say Stalin did some of that, but it was less about whether or not a person was an atheist than whether Stalin felt threatened by them.
Anyway, back to the original point; religion has been used historically to divide and kill, but in the end it's always politics, and whatever method some asshole can use to rally people to gut each other, that asshole will use it. I think we can both agree on that.
... and it annoys me that so many religious people presume I am a drug taking, drunken, selfish, cynical womaniser with no morals or values.