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Obviously. You've got to believe it to be Christian

In a way I agree, there are a huge number of wars that would never have been fought if it hadnt been for religion. I see religion as being one of the biggest obstacles to true social development

It is actually possible to believe in God while retaining your rational mind.

But religion can also inspire people to behave more ethically and more responsibly.

If religious or non-religious systems of beliefs make people kill other people, destroy their acknowledgement of human dignity and compassion, throw out rational and critical forms of thinking, refuse to give people or certain groups of people basic human rights, and forment hatred, prejudice, discord, and violence, I think we can readily judge that form of religious belief or non-religious belief and life is toxic and nihilistic.

It is actually possible to believe in God while retaining your rational mind.

Finally, the was the "sacrifice" of captured p.o.w.s, a fate the according to native Celto-Germanic values was by far preferable to being sold into slavery amongst a foreign folk whose customs you did not understand and whose language you cannot speak.

As Tactitus writes, even in times of war not even the Warlord could have a man flogged, imprisoned or executed without the express permission of the High Priest, who was himself required to render judgement in accordance with the will of the God of Glory.

Forgive me but I don't give the Germanic/Celtic tribes credit for being nice enough to kill their prisoners rather than sell them.

You're basically taking the statement 'the warlord had the final word in everything' and replacing warlord with high priest. So there you are, immorality in those religions.

Immorality? I don't follow your logic at all.

Does it thus stand to reason that you also believe that if a secular judge can issue a term of imprisonment or a death sentence (which they can and do) that this automatically makes the secular state immoral in your view???

I'm sorry, but you really seem to be grasping at straws now.

How ever real christainity is not a religion. it is real people filled with the in dwelling of Jesus Christ

half the confusion today is a few big religious organizations call them selves CHRISTIAN when in fact they are NOT.

Posted by ravenstar66

There is no evidence that atheist societies have gone to greater lengths in what are considered immoral acts than any theistic society. The USSR was no more cruel than (and probably far less so) than Inquisitional Spain..and do I even need to mention Guatanamo Bay? Hitler's Germany was NOT an atheistic society...

It is important to note that all of these societies prefer governance by consensus, most people in authority act in a group (committee, consensus, elder groups, community at large) They have languages that promote humility, cooperation, non- competitivemess, kindness, and humour, They are almost all very indulgent and non-violent with their children.. they are almost all societies where men and women are valued equally. They all consider non-violence to be a vital condition to being considered "human". Strangely..in most, divorce is common.. or at least not looked down upon. In most their conception of peace and morality is directly related to their conception of the good of the community... and not to please the "gods". They highly value individualism, and put the responsibility for correct conduct on each person.

Most are shamanistic, or animists. Most are hunter/gatherers (cooperation is vital to their survival)

None of them belong to large organized religions, even the christian and muslims.. their faith is more of a community thing.

Forgive me for working backwards on this one but like yourself I tended to agree with the last author. I provided the additional links to include a variety of different views on the subject from different takes/views on atheism...I'll address your points now from the beginning.

If Christians or other religious groups have been killed as a group by a state power that maintains as part of their ideology official atheism - and if you are talking about mass killings - then it would be because they are viewed as a threat to the state - not simply because the state is a group of atheists overall and that this above all is their prime driving force. There has yet to be such a group in history.

Although the Soviet Union was officially secular, it supported atheist ideology and suppressed religion, though according to various Soviet and Western sources, over one-third of the people in the Soviet Union professed religious belief. Christianity and Islam had the most believers. The state was separated from church by the Decree of Council of People's Comissars on January 23, 1918. Two-thirds of the Soviet population, however, had no religious beliefs. About half the people, including members of the CPSU and high-level government officials, professed atheism. Official figures on the number of religious believers in the Soviet Union were not available in 1989.

Christians belonged to various churches: Orthodox, which had the largest number of followers; Catholic; and Baptist and various other Protestant denominations.

Government persecution of Christianity continued unabated until the fall of the Communist government, with Stalin's reign the most repressive. Stalin is quoted as saying that "The Party cannot be neutral towards religion. It conducts an anti-religious struggle against any and all religious prejudices." In World War II, however, the repression against the Russian Orthodox Church temporarily ceased as it was perceived as "instrument of patriotic unity" in the war against "the western Teutonics". Repression against Russian Orthodox restarted from ca. 1946 onwards and more forcibly under Nikita Khrushchev. In 1914, before the revolution, there were over 54,000 churches, while during the early years of Stalin's reign that number was counted in the hundreds. By 1988, the number had decreased to roughly 7,000. Immediately following the fall of the Soviet government, churches were re-opening at a recorded rate of over thirty a week. Today, there are nearly 20,000.

I think the distinction is important because if the matter reason was merely intolerance but the justification was atheism, we would have seen someone killing in the name of atheism. This, as far as I have seen has not been done.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

I think what all of the referenced articles make clear is the point I was trying to get across in my first point. There is no example historically of any state or power executing specifically in the name of atheism.

In the classic rebuttal to the argument of "religion causing more deaths", theists attempt to leave Hitler on the doorstep of the atheists along with Pol Pot and Stalin but fail to realise he was one of their own, as were the sentiments he believed regarding Jews, most of which reflected long held beliefs for the last two millenia in Europe. Usually at this point in the discussion there is a great deal of backpedalling followed by the "No True Scotsman argument" ad nauseum.

Argument: "No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."
Reply: "But my uncle Angus, who is a Scotsman, likes sugar with his porridge."
Rebuttal: "Aye, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."

Indeed. No one ever said the propaganda of the NSDAP had to make sense. The claim however is levelled routinely at people who are atheists and humanists that Hitler is one of theirs when in fact Hitler was a self-described Christian. Despite attempts by spook-book writers to tie him into Himmler's Occultism, the documentary evidence is extensive that he was a Christian until his death, if not a conventional one and his ideology reflected much of that of European Christendom especially as it regarded Jew-hatred and the vile diatribes of Martin Luther and his anti-semitic rants in "On The Jews And Their Lies" where Luther suggests locking the Jews and their rabbis into their synagogues and burning them up with their books...a horror he made into reality into the extermination camps.

Have you ever read The G-d Delusion? How about The Selfish Gene? I included the quotes for reference, but I recommend reading the material and doing the research regarding these claims about his ideas.

It is not a feature of classic Marxism to kill those who disagree with you. Whether or not that is a feature of Communist revolution in practice is an unfortunate feature of human nature. But that is also not an issue of atheism which is not by definition in any way a violent philosophy in any way shape or form, or religious, or associated historically with violence and I have yet to see any example of it that is not misattributed.

Marxism is both the political philosophy and political practice (that is, the praxis) derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Any political practice or theory that is based on an interpretation of the works of Marx and Engels may be called Marxism; this includes different forms of politics and thought such as those of Communist Parties and Communist states, as well as academic research across many fields. And while there are many theoretical and practical differences among the various forms of Marxism, most forms of Marxism share:

* an attention to the material conditions of people's lives, and social relations among people
* a belief that people's consciousness of the conditions of their lives reflects these material conditions and relations
* an understanding of class in terms of differing relations of production, and as a particular position within such relations
* an understanding of material conditions and social relations as historically malleable
* a view of history according to which class struggle, the evolving conflict between classes with opposing interests, structures each historical period and drives historical change
* a sympathy for the working class or proletariat
* and a belief that the ultimate interests of workers best match those of humanity in general.

The main points of contention among Marxists are the degree to which they are committed to a workers' revolution as the means of achieving human emancipation and enlightenment, and the actual mechanism through which such a revolution might occur and succeed. Marxism is correctly but not exhaustively described as a variety of Socialism being by far the variety for which there is the most historical experience[citation needed] both as a revolutionary movement and as the basis of actual governments. Some Marxists, however, such as Trotskyists, argue that no actual state has ever fully realized Marxist principles; other Marxists, such as Autonomists claim Marxist principles cannot be realized in any state construct seen through the 20th Century, and would necessitate a reconceptualization of the notion of state itself.

If we make a list of all of the nations inhabiting the Promised Land or those who opposed Israel and were ordered by G-d to be killed to the last man I wager it would be substantial. I know that it is no longer practiced. That is part of the evolution of religion and Judaism has fortunately grown and evolved over time. Christianity and Islam are still undergoing growing pains to that effect.

I can think of no occasion in history, not one, where someone was killed because they were a theist or because an atheist movement, specifically atheist, killed in the name of atheism. This is an important distinction and is not just semantics because the accusation hurled at atheists is an attempt to counter the argument that "more people have been killed in the name of religion than anything else."

People have specifically been killed in the name of religion. That much is historic certainty. IF it was in name only, and not a matter of what some may consider "true" religion is leaning into the territory of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, but the simple fact remains that they were indeed killed in the name of that religion.

That a government power happened to maintain a policy of atheism and may have persecuted people because of being of a religious faith may in that specific case constitute a case of persecution due to theism. You cannot however do as most in that argument do, and make a sum total of all of the victims of the killings of a Communist regime and lay it at the feet of atheism simply because the regime maintained an ideology of state atheism because in NO WAY can you ascribe the deaths of ALL of those people to atheism. It does not follow. Period.

Hitlers Germany may not have been atheist,but he and his top brass certainly were according to a number of reliable historians. There were in fact statements made by various nazi war criminals that there were plans in force to rid the country of religious bodies because they were not seen as being compatible with social darwinism.

People often make the claim that Adolph Hitler adhered to Atheism, Humanism or some ancient Nordic pagan mythology. None of these fanciful and wrong ideas hold. Although one of Hitler's henchmen, Alfred Rosenberg, did undertake a campaign of Nordic mythological propaganda, Hitler and most of his henchmen did not believe in it .

Many American books, television documentaries, and Sunday sermons that preach of Hitler's "evil" have eliminated Hitler's god for their Christian audiences, but one only has to read from his own writings to appreciate that Hitler's God equals the same God of the Christian Bible. Hitler held many hysterical beliefs which not only include, God and Providence but also Fate, Social Darwinism, and ideological politics. He spoke, unashamedly, about God, fanaticism, idealism, dogma, and the power of propaganda. Hitler held strong faith in all his convictions. He justified his fight for the German people and against Jews by using Godly and Biblical reasoning. Indeed, one of his most revealing statements makes this quite clear:

"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."

Although Hitler did not practice religion in a churchly sense, he certainly believed in the Bible's God. Raised as Catholic he went to a monastery school and, interestingly, walked everyday past a stone arch which was carved the monastery's coat of arms which included a swastika. As a young boy, Hitler's most ardent goal was to become a priest. Much of his philosophy came from the Bible, and more influentially, from the Christian Social movement. (The German Christian Social movement, remarkably, resembles the Christian Right movement in America today.) Many have questioned Hitler's stand on Christianity. Although he fought against certain Catholic priests who opposed him for political reasons, his belief in God and country never left him. Many Christians throughout history have opposed Christian priests for various reasons; this does not necessarily make one against one's own Christian beliefs. Nor did the Vatican's Pope & bishops ever disown him; in fact they blessed him! As evidence to his claimed Christianity, he said:

"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.

-Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)

Hitler's anti-Semitism grew out of his Christian education. Christian Austria and Germany in his time took for granted the belief that Jews held an inferior status to Aryan Christians. Jewish hatred did not spring from Hitler, it came from the preaching of Catholic priests and Protestant ministers throughout Germany for hundreds of years. The Protestant leader, Martin Luther, himself, held a livid hatred for Jews and their Jewish religion. In his book, "On the Jews and their Lies," Luther set the standard for Jewish hatred in Protestant Germany up until World War II. Hitler expressed a great admiration for Martin Luther.

Hitler did not have to parade his belief in God, as so many American Christians do now. Nor did he have to justify his Godly belief against an Atheist movement. He took his beliefs for granted just as most Germans did at that time. His thrust aimed at politics, not religion. But through his political and religious reasoning he established in 1933, a German Reich Christian Church, uniting the Protestant churches to instill faith in a national German Christianity.

Future generations should remember that Adolph Hitler could not have come into power without the support of the Protestant and Catholic churches and the German Christian populace.

From: "Positive Atheism Magazine"
To: "Stevo Frenko"
Subject: Re: A Question
Date: Friday, March 30, 2001 9:25 PM

Okay, let's see what we can do to keep from falling for this line again, because it's a tricky one that involves several omissions of fact. Despite the patent dishonesty behind this argument, it is quite popular among those who wish to slander atheists and atheism.

Before I start, though, we must remember not to confuse the question of atheism versus Christianity with that of ancient versus modern war machines: Stalin and Hitler killed more people than the Popes did simply because they had better technology with which to commit genocide. Also, the population was high enough in the 20th century to account for these numbers. The popes took over after the bubonic plague had taken out roughly 100 million Europeans: there were relatively few people left for the Popes to kill.


Your opponent misrepresents atheism as being both a positive claim and a comprehensive philosophy. Theists often find this false report very useful in their denunciations of atheism (actually, their attempts to paint theism as superior to atheism).

First, the truth is that atheism is (philosophically) negative in the sense that atheism is the absence of theism; atheism is not a collection of claims or credos but is simply the absence of a religious creed. In other words, atheism is not a "strong" assertion. Atheism is "weak" (philosophically) in that atheism rejects a claim or falls short of granting assent to a claim. Theists say "A God exists," and an atheist says, "I don't think so." The atheist is not saying anything about what does exist, but is simply either denying the theist's claim that a god exists or refusing to assent to that claim for whatever reason.

Secondly, atheism is not a comprehensive outlook but is merely one small part of any atheist's entire world view. Naturally most theists take on much more than a simple god belief when they convert to theism. The same does not hold for atheism, the lack of theistic belief. But this can be deceiving because theism has in it very little that is unique to theism. Most of it is about party loyalty.


Communism proved to the world that killing people over ideology is not the exclusive domain of religion. Previously, the Freethinkers could say this; now, we cannot. For the first time, atheism became popular enough within a culture to be exploited as a tool to bolster a sense of nationalism. Until then, only religion has been used in this way.

True, all loyal Communists were atheists, but they were atheists because of their Communism -- not Communists because of their atheism. In fact, Communism dictated that Soviet citizens (subjects) become atheists, which went much further than the role Christianity then played in America, when our currency did not say, "In God We Trust" and our Pledge of Allegiance did not say, "under God." This situation is rapidly changing in America today, partly as a reaction to Communism: before, Christianity was simply a choice that America offered her citizens; since the Cold War, Christianity has been exploited to bolster an American sense of nationalism.

The role that atheism played in Communism was as that of State Dogma (I will fall short of saying State Religion). This is most easily seen in the pronouncements of the Soviet Cosmonauts. Yuri Gagarin, the first man in orbit (preceding John Glenn by a few weeks), announced from his capsule: "I don't see any god up here" -- as if that has anything even remotely to do with what the Christians claim; this is, rather, a show of nationalistic contempt toward the United States. Gherman Titov, the first man to spend any significant amount of time in orbit, is quoted as saying, "I am high in the sky, and still I do not see the face of god" -- again showing contempt for the claims of Christianity, as a way to bolster Soviet nationalism against the United States.

Granted, at an appearance in San Francisco, Titov later expressed a balanced understanding of why he was not a theist: "I don't believe in God. I believe in man -- in his strength, his possibilities, and his reason." I am still not convinced that Titov had, at this point as a young man, sat down and thought out the reasons why he was an atheist. It is possible (and even likely) that he was never exposed to a fair presentation of theism until much later (if at all).

Thus, if anybody killed for Communism, they killed for Communism or for the Soviet Union, they did not kill for atheism. In fact, many atheistic Anarchists were killed by the Communists. But during the Inquisition and during the Witch Hunts, people killed for Christ and for no other reason. They burned our forebears in direct obedience to the command in John 15:6: "If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned." Atheism has no such commandment and needs the help of no State to make its case before humans.

Atheism can be exploited to foster party loyalty (although Christianity and Islam have proven much more effective at doing this), but there is nothing in atheism itself that would encourage even the notion of party loyalty. Both parties of opposition to Czarist Russia rebelled against the State Religion, and Marx's Communism happened to prevail. Had Bakunin's anarchism prevailed, I doubt we'd have seen the bloodshed we saw. And certainly had Representative Democracy prevailed, any murderous leaders would have been voted out without hesitation.


The bloodshed in the Soviet Union is everything about Communism and says nothing at all about atheism, because the cultural atheism of the Soviet Union, like the atheism of an individual human, was merely incidental to a much bigger scheme of things. Atheism is atheism; as such, atheism is nothing more than the absence of theism. Atheism is not a complete world view but simply one small component of any world view. Ideally, atheism plays an active role in one's thinking only in the face of theistic claims. For Christians to portray atheism as anything more than this is patently dishonest.

In fact, had the Soviet Union's Communism been based in religion (and several national Communist regimes have been thoroughly based in Christianity -- see Acts 4:32-5:11), I could show that there might have been even more bloodshed, because the Christian religion, being viciously intolerant of differing or opposing viewpoints, has historically been seen as either justifying or commanding the death of any dissenters.

Most modern "warm-and-fuzzy" Christians will call this an abuse of the Christian religion (and I tend to agree that modern Christianity ought to recognize people's right to hold other views). However, Christianity contains within it some extremely powerful methods for subjugating the masses. Christianity also happens to feature some very barbaric policies when it comes to dealing with dissenters. So Christianity has shown itself to be the favorite among would-be political power-mongers.


Nevertheless, there are atheists (individuals and entire cultures) whose theism has never been replaced by any Reason-based comprehensive system of outlook, such as liberal scientific method or Humanism. I know several people whose atheism is indistinguishable from fundamentalism. In fact, my exposure to such individuals led to my current focus of activism in that I stump for a particular form of atheism rather than for atheism itself.

Much of my activism involves an attempt to popularize the more accurate definition for the word atheism as the lack of a god belief rather than what the theists allege, a positive claim as well as a comprehensive world view. In light of this, our atheism is mainly a response to theism, and is not itself a topic of evangelism on our part. In this sense, we learn how to detect the wiles of the theists and to respond appropriately. But most of us leave theists to believe what they think is the truth.

However, I go further than this in my own studies, in that I try to think about my position (any position), thoroughly testing it against other options. But this is where we leave the realm of strict atheism and start to address other areas of our lives, areas to which atheism is only a secondary element. Relegating atheism to its proper secondary role is important to a balanced outlook that includes mention of atheism. But it is crucial that we keep atheism's secondary role in mind whenever we're being interrogated by a theist. The theist will inevitably try to paint atheism as something more than it really is, and then try to refute their portrayal rather than atheism itself.

Atheist philosopher George H. Smith, in his most recent book (Why Atheism?), promotes two "sideline" notions -- aspects of atheism that are in addition to atheism itself.

First, Smith encourages us to study our cultural roots as atheists. Two key chapters of this work consist of an overview of the history of the trends in thinking that eventually led to modern atheism (culminating in that "intellectually fulfilled" atheism which Richard Dawkins suggests is the result of Charles Darwin's work). The rest of Smith's book keeps this history in the forefront as it deals with other issues. I have previously studied the history of the rise of Rationalism and the demise of Christianity's prominence, and I have often called the Inquisition's martyrs "my forebears." But Smith's book has given to me a keen sense that the history of Rationalism is my cultural history.

Secondly, Smith shows that philosophy is not a cumulative science (in that when Einstein discovers something, we all benefit thereafter from Einstein's discovery) but is, rather, a personal science (wherein each individual student of philosophy must start afresh, mulling over the collected musings of the great thinkers of history and coming to individual conclusions). In other words, each student of philosophy must use her or his own powers of reason to scrutinize the the arguments and pronouncements of all of history's philosophers.

The result of this is that the student of philosophy not only holds various positions (or suspends judgment on some positions) but can state how he or she came to hold that position, and can defend it ably or revise it upon discovery of new evidence or a superior argument. Anybody can hold an opinion, but the philosopher will explain why she or he holds a given opinion.

So, it's one thing for Comrade Titov to say, "I don't believe in God" -- because any atheist can say this. But it's another thing altogether for the cosmonaut to have been able to hold his own in a discussion with, say, a Jesuit priest (on one end of the spectrum) or with a biblical creationist (on the other end of the spectrum).Only a student of philosophy (either formal or lay) will be able to tell you not only what her or his positions are on a subject, but also how he or she came to hold this position and what it would take to overthrow this position -- having weighed the various arguments surrounding this issue and, hopefully, even done some original thinking on the subject.

I will admit that I was unaware of this aspect of philosophy. With my new perspective on the study of philosophy, I have purchased the Columbia History of Western Philosophy, edited by Richard Popkin (published since Smith completed his book), and am about one-fifth of the way through this monumental work. Before Columbia was published, only two works dealing with the history of Western thought existed, and neither could be considered a comprehensive overview.


So, in light of all this, I might recommend two exercises: First, state my position as it relates to the claim of your opponent. Secondly, formulate your own response to your opponent that is not necessarily my position (that is, scrutinize my views as well as those of your opponent -- and, most importantly, scrutinize your own views, both before and after encountering your opponent's claim and my response).

Cliff Walker
"Positive Atheism" Magazine
Five years of service to
people with no reason to believe

It goes something like this: a tribe of religious people who perform animal and human sacrifices and are led by a head priest who says he knows what god wants is bad.

I am against the death penalty, and I think it is very unwise to compare todays secular judges to corrupt priests of centuries past.

Why is it bad? Other than because your presumption about religion requires it to be.

So then, I presume you are all for depriving a person of their freedom and placing them within an anti-social environment for the rest of their life, all at vast expense to the tax-payer?

And what specifically do you base you presumption of corruption upon?

If you had read my post clearly, or perhaps if I had of been clearer myself, the implication of Tacitus' writings were that these *criminals* had already been found guilty according to the customs of Germanic law... which invariably involved *juries*.

Such criminals had been found guilty, but *even under martial law*, the sentences of imprisonment, flogging or death could not be pronounced or carried out by the will of the Warlord. It had to be pronounced by the High Priest... who might also veto the ruling of the community.

God does not leave us without any empirical evidence as to his existence.