But that is another discussion which you are shoehorning in to distract from the fact that neither you nor Fau can win this one. I haven't seen you argue at all with the facts of the cases I presented, so I am going to assume you agree that there have been atheistic governments that have caused suffering.
You are equating theocratic governments following
religious law to persecute non-believers with atheistic governments persecuting people for reasons that have nothing to do with religion.
Like I already said, when atheist Chinese are killing other atheist Chinese, the argument for religion-or-lack-thereof as a motivating factor is eliminated. You might as well be arguing that black on black crime is racist.
Now, that atheism has no dogma specifically detailing how non-nonbelievers must be treated does not mean that atheism doesn't have a fairly strong history of, when it comes to power, treating certain people very, very badly, which is all I was trying to prove to Fau.
No,
atheism does not, any more than heterosexuality has a "strong history" of killing millions. While there are atheist governments that have persecuted some believers, the numbers you are citing are not even imagined to represent that total; you simply ascribe every state-caused death to atheism, in an effort to even the score with all of the killings that are
explicitly motivated by religion.
Here's the thing: if your unethical desires, whatever they may be, override your reason as to ethics, I think there's a valid case to be made that you have a looser grip on reality than the average person.
Now you're simply trying to attack the terms "fantasy" and "reality" (used in the study) by expanding their application to whatever you want. According to this line of thinking, believing that the tooth fairy is real and stealing a candy bar from the gas station are both just cases of
an inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality.You actually need sincerity there, as I had previously stated. Similar to Jim Jones, another serial killer (arguably a stretch, but given his power over the jonestown folks, not much of one) atheist, you can use religion as a lure or a ruse without every being sincere. Those atheist communists? Pretty sincere atheism.
So finally, we have arrived at the standard defense of religion: you arbitrarily declare who is
sincerely religious and who is not. And by sheer coincidence, you arrive at the conclusion that the people who publicly and repeatedly state their religious devotion on their way to committing heinous atrocities are Clearly Not Sincere.
In contrast, if you made any sort of public statement professing atheism, then not only are you unquestionably sincere, but every single wrong you commit must be directly attributed to said atheism. A level playing field, indeed.
As for Hitler, I have no interest in dissecting third-hand quotes from secret diaries. In
public, he frequently and repeatedly advocated for and defended Christianity, and had he done exactly the same thing for atheism instead, you would categorically reject any sort of claim that he was not really atheist. At some point, you need to exhibit a minimal level of consistency in your classification of governments.
What the China example shows is that you can stay atheist outside of being a Marxist. YES. I agree with that here, and elsewhere. But what you'd have to show is that you can separate a Marxist style economy from atheism.
To put it another way, so that it is perfectly, perfectly clear. An atheistic country need not be marxist. But there is no marxist country that has not simultaneously be atheistic. Those two, as I said, cannot be separated.
That would be an outstanding and piercing counterpoint if I were defending Marxism. I am not.
You want to attribute 65 million deaths to Marxism? I don't particularly care. You claimed that atheism is responsible for the deaths because it cannot be separated from the ideology behind the government that caused those deaths. I just proved that it can.
So, when a government has atheist members who want to have a policy of state atheism, and the government does have said policy, and does enforce it, and said enforcement includes harming religious citizens, exiling them, and so forth, you don't count that as proof of acting on the basis of their atheism?
Are you claiming that Mao killed 65 million
religious Chinese citizens? Please clarify.
Let's look at what started the Crusades. As I said, they were a defensive reaction to the mistreatment of pilgrims. Did I say the term human rights? No. I said they were about the mistreatment of Pilgrims.
No, you didn't use the
term "human rights"; you cited "mistreatment of pilgrims" (i.e.
human rights violations) as the reason why the Crusades should not be categorized as a religious war. Which is even sillier after reading this:
Now, if you want to say this was an issue of religious differences, sure, it's there, I'll grant you that.
So what, exactly, is your point?
The Crusades were a holy war.
Without religion, religious pilgrims don't exist, the Holy Land doesn't exist, and the holy war to reclaim the Holy Land so that worshipers may have unfettered access to the Holy Land doesn't exist.
If you cannot accept
the Crusades as a religious war, this is a waste of time.
Yep, saying that. Like you love to point out, religion has creeds and ethical points to it. If two countries go to war over oil or territory, even if they are both muslim or christian, unless said oil or land has some religious significance, then... yeah, that's not a religious war.
...but if one of them is atheist, then apparently every death in that war is due to atheism? That is the standard you have applied so far when tallying up your deaths attributed to atheism.
Nope. Didn't say that. Said marxist/communism and atheism are inseparable. I would assume you could have an atheistic government that doesn't commit atrocities. But, communist atheist ones - yeah, they've done them, and since the atheism is inseparable form the communism, yes, those deaths in part fall on atheism's shoulders.
No, they would fall on
communism's shoulders. Communism is not a necessary component of atheism, and you have already stated that an atheistic, non-communist government exists (modern-day China). Therefore, the actions you are attributing to atheism should be attributed to communism instead (if we are to attribute broad government actions to economic ideologies at all).
"Now, all these guys were (or are) atheists. Every single last one. Atheism and Communism have always gone hand in hand, and intentionally so. Now, despite these folks being atheists, they seemed to have a pretty skewed sense of reality, what with all the gulags and death and beatings and show trials and paranoia and death and (did I mention gulags?) blockades of people's movement to the west..."
Like I said, atheism and communism go hand-in-hand.
And once again, you are wrong. According to your own statements, atheist China is no longer communist, therefore atheism and communism obviously do not go hand-in-hand.
Do capitalism and chattel slavery also go "hand-in-hand"? I mean, you cannot have chattel slavery without the ability to own personal property.
Jihad is, as far as I know, a religiously motivated war, based on the house of islam/house of war duality. Nope, the palestinian issue is definitely religious. Not denying that. You're just hyperventilating.
I was giving you an opportunity to be consistent in your apologist interpretation of religious hostilities, but it appears unnecessary. You seem to have no qualms immediately categorizing Muslim religious violence as such; it is apparently only the Christian examples that you feel the need to defend.
I thought you were defending religion against non-religion, but I guess it turned out that this is just another game of Team Jesus vs. The World.
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