I rarely if ever see atheists disclaim Stalin as a "false" atheist, why is Hitler's faith....

[Cleobulus]

questioned? Stalin was also a pathological liar, why can't atheists claim that he was a secret Christian? It would be easy enough to do, the guy did have religious training after all.

Stalin was an atheist, that's a fact, as much of a fact that Hitler was a Christian. They both actually had a lot of things in common, both were paranoid, particularly later in life, both power hungry, both ideological, etc. Being an armchair historical psychologist I would also say both suffered from inadequacy as well. Being that both came from countries that set them apart from the majority in the nations they led and they both also killed millions.

It seems to me, when confronted with these facts, that whether one becomes a genocidal maniac isn't informed by their religion or lack there of alone. It can be a mitigating factor, however, the question is how. Looking at Stalin, and it doesn't seem like the factor is there, his callous disregard for millions starving in the rush to industrialize the USSR was considered by him to be a suitable sacrifice, however, unless there is some tenet of Atheism that allows for this(there is none, obviously), I don't see how it can be considered a factor.

Hitler, in contrast, decided to persecute Jews for several reasons, the most obvious being that they were historically persecuted in Europe for over a thousand years at that point in time, and labeled as Christ killers. His anti-Semitic beliefs were partially formed from his Christianity. His other significant influence was cultural, in the belief in the ideal Nordic human, eugenics and the Master Race, an idea that actually has its roots in about 500 years of colonialism of the world by European powers and the United States. These beliefs lead to his government's persecution and attempted elimination of Jews, Roma, and Homosexuals in addition to the handicapped. His fascism lead him to persecute Communists, Socialists, and Democrats of all stripes.

Christians can be just as bad as anyone else, why are they all of the sudden kicked out of the club when they do bad things?

[Vincardog]

1. When is the last time you saw a taliBORNagain Christian kicked out of the club?

[Igel]

22. 1991.

That's the last year I went to church. I've heard of perhaps a dozen other instances since then, but wasn't present for the actual speech act barring them from "communion" with the congregation.

Most churches have a way of chucking out people that don't belong: Perhaps they ignore the doctrines, perhaps they're a bad influence on others, perhaps they disrupt things too much, perhaps they don't pay their dues or they wear the wrong color ties.

Conservative churches tend to police their ranks more than liberal or mainline churches. The first line of defense is simple disaffection: People tend not to hang around if they disagree with the church. Larger, more liberal churches may have the pastor simply talk quietly to the person at issue and disinvite them.

As for the church called "Xianity," it has no hierarchy or structure and therefore no one in authority to kick somebody out. It's not a church. You're excommunicated from the Catholic Church, join the Episcopalians; they finally tire of you and turn you out, off to the Lutherans or Methodists or someplace else.

There's a cultural constraint in many quarters against saying somebody's not a Xian if they say they are. Goes against the spirit of Xian unity and ecumenism. After all, who are we to judge? A lot of small groups do this, however; they're typically considered to be intolerant and unworthy of consideration by mainline or liberal churches. In other words, those who are most likely to say somebody's not a Xian (as opposed to simply no longer a member of My Local Neighborhood Baptist Church) are those most likely to be ignored precisely because they say people aren't Xians.

[RandomThoughts]

2. The point is people do not kick people out of a religion.

That would be for someone else to judge. However in some cases, it seems pretty obvious who follows the teachings and better spirit of love of Christianity.

Some think religions are factions made to fight each other like some video game, some think the same thing about races.

It is so people fight with deception, hate, fear, and violence, mostly for nothing, since if they fight to try and win something based on delusions like he had, they join the religion of violence and hate, and are deceived.


Or that is my view on it.

:shrug:

If people think and feel what is best, they are less likely to follow terrible ideas like that thing had.

[Cleobulus]

3. Race isn't an ideology, or even a collection of ideas...

its something we are born with. Religions, particularly the big 3 monotheistic ones, are rather exclusionary, and subject to interpretation. Love thy neighbor? Sure, as long as their Christian. Same for other teachings of Jesus or those of the old testament. They can be used to justify and excuse any action, no matter how horrific in this humanist's eyes, or they can be used to act merciful and kind.

[RandomThoughts]

6. Thinking that somones race makes a difference is a choice of belief.

I am not talking about someones race, I was saying that people that think someones race defines some attribute or value to them, or some side in some bigger conflict, those thoughts are a belief system.

racism is a belief system.


Jesus Taught Love your enemy.

He also taught the story of the Good Samaritan, where a person helped someone of a different culture in need.

Your issues are not with those teachings of his, but with some interpretations of them. As was my comment on some that believe region or race is suppose to be fought over. Instead differences should be shared with love in my view, then the better truths will be spread between peoples.

[struggle4progress]

10. Actually, there's no such thing as race, in any scientific sense:

an idea is to be judged by the uses to which it can be put, and the popular notion of race has primarily been used to obscure systems that exploit people and steal from them

[wookie72]

20. Actually, "love thy neighbour" goes farther than that.

That was the whole point of the Good Samaritan.

[wookie72]

19. People do not kick people out of a religion?

Are you kidding me?

[stray cat]

4. Maybe if you went to free republic instead - the two group dislike different masses of people

selective pets and enemies

[Cleobulus]

5. I have yet to see you post one progressive, or even centrist position in all your posts on DU...

why don't you go to free republic? Oh, and what the fuck does this comment have to do with my thread?

[BrklynLiberal]

7. Guess guilt only exists among those who would deny Hitler's Catholicism...

No guilt here about Stalin being an "atheist".

[Cleobulus]

8. Where does guilt enter into it? Its called facing reality...

and what's with the quotes around atheist? Stalin was an atheist, he said he was, so he was, just as Hitler was a Christian, there is no objective way to test either asshole's faith or lack thereof, so we can only go by what they said they believed.

Why should anyone feel guilty about either of them? Collective and ancestral guilt are as silly as collective and ancestral pride.

[BrklynLiberal]

21. Guess I forgot the "sarcasm" smiley...

[skepticscott]

9. If you look at any scholarly biography of Stalin

you will find atheism mentioned very little or not at all as an important motivating force in his life.

[EmilyKent]

11. It wasn't. Stalin opposed churches,

not God, as churches were a power structure. The churches in the USSR supported the Czars, so they were a problem. Philosophy or belief in the supernatural didn't come into it.

[Igel]

23. This was revised in 1940 ff.

Suddenly Mother Russia and Russian Orthodoxy were invoked to incite popular support and solidarity against the fascist hordes. Churches were reopened, seminaries reestablished, and formal relations between the church and Stalin weren't bad.

They collapsed again after Stalin's death.

The Soviet leaders went hot and cold on religion. They used schismatics and entirely non-Orthodox Xian groups to smuggle in subversive literature under the tsars and Kerensky, since they had established routes for smuggling in non-Orthodox materials printed abroad. In return for having the "heretics" be their mules, the Bolshevik leaders promised them equal rights and freedom from discrimination, the ability to be free of Orthodox hegemony and worship in peace. Read Lunacharsky; Lenin spoke on the "schismatic issue" as well. The schismatics were useful idiots.

[The Magistrate]

12. The Reason Is Fairly Simple, Sir

Religiousity is generally conflated with the idea of moral, good and decent behavior; it certainly is among religious people. Christians tend to use the name of their religion as a sort of synonym for being a good person behaving well. People who are invested in this equation of Christian with good and decent and moral will obviously have difficulty accepting that an evident moral monster, an obvious paragon of evil, was in fact a product of Christianity.

Very few atheists make any claim atheism is a synonym for all good things. Atheists may commonly make claims atheism reflects a superior intelligence, or strength of mind, or a lack of hypocrisy, relative to people adhering to religion, but this is hardly the same thing, and certainly intelligent people with great strength of mind can be quite evil, and without a trace of hypocrisy about their actions as they do evil. Thus an evident moral monster and paragon of evil who does not evidence any belief in a deity does not place any particular stress on an atheist's self-image, or sense of the propriety of his or her personal conclusion no deity exists.

[MineralMan]

13. I'm an atheist, and I disclaim Stalin.

You know, I hope, that there is not central atheist organization. We don't belong to any organization. It's just a matter of not believing that supernatural entities exist. There's no dogma, no organization, no nothing. Atheists are individuals. Some are nice folks. Some are assholes. Stalin was the latter. He'd have been an asshole no matter what he thought about supernatural entities.

What would we do? Excommunicate him from nothing? There are no tenets of atheism. We don't believe any of that shit. If Stalin was an atheist, he was all alone with it. We all are.

[Cleobulus]

15. You still say he's an atheist though, as do I...

its not like its an exclusive club that only has certain members, and membership lists, that's for political parties and churches, not for us.

[MineralMan]

16. I don't say it. He said it and wrote it. If someone speaks or writes about

his or her beliefs, I accept that they believe or disbelieve what they say they believe or disbelieve. It's of no concern to me. It is their behavior on which I judge them, and only that. If I do not know their behavior, I don't know them well enough to give a shit about them, frankly.

Stalin was before my time, pretty much. He's irrelevant in my life. Atheism is meaningless, as is religion, to predicting how one will live one's life. Irrelevant.

[rrneck]

14. Both Hitler and Stalin believed primarily in themselves. nt

[Cleobulus]

17. That's a meaningless statement, hell that's considered a virtue by most people....

not a vice, why would we have movies like Rocky being made, to give an example?

Indeed, you could claim that all people who end up in power are like this, its a fine line between that and being an egotistical dictator.

[rrneck]

18. True. It is a fine line.

A good leader believes in the people s/he leads. It seems to me the less one regards others and the more they regard themselves the more like a dictator they become. I can't think of a dictator that didn't seem to believe he could do no wrong. One might say you would almost have to believe you were omniscient. They certainly strive for omnipotence. Both of which are qualities we associate with a deity.

[evirus]

24. because we're above no true scottsman fallacies

we don't deal with guilt by association by disassociating somebody with accusations of only "passing" for an atheist.

[Deep13]

25. I think this line of discussion focuses too much on the men at the top...

...and not enough on the millions who believed them and did what Stalin and Hitler told them to do.

[ironbark]

26. And ignores what all the communist “men at the top” and below steadfastly believed-

"Atheism is the natural and inseparable part of Communism."
-Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)

"Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism."
- Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)

It wasn’t one, two or three individual despot tyrant nutters who would have been Aholes with or without their individual beliefs....It was a thought out and dedicated programme of Communism >of which< atheism was central and essential and >tens of thousands< of people across eighty years and several countries dedicated themselves to that programme.
That programme advocated and necessitated State imposed atheism and the eradication of religion...all efforts to implement such programmes have been abhorrent dismal and deadly failures.

And all folk wanna do is argue about Stalin’s or Pol Pots >individual< atheist/theist beliefs?

Dam...If they >weren’t< atheists and didn’t believe in State imposed atheism they sure wangled and fooled their way to the top of massive State machines of tyranny DEDICATED TO THOSE ENDS.

[rrneck]

27. Mind if I play with your text?

It wasn’t one, two or three individual despot tyrant nutters who would have been Aholes with or without their individual beliefs....It was a thought out and dedicated programme of Star Trek >of which< Vulcanism was central and essential and >tens of thousands< of people across eighty years and several countries dedicated themselves to that programme.
That programme advocated and necessitated State imposed Star Trek fandom and the eradication of Lost in Space...all efforts to implement such programmes have been abhorrent dismal and deadly failures.

[Deep13]

28. I was talking about the ordinary people who fell for Lenin's bullshit.

They were all programmed by hundreds of years of church-supported tyrrany to obey their leaders. The revolutionary reaction to all the suffering they had endured at the hands of the church and the Czar was to turn against all religion violently.

Anyway, we both know that the dogmatic, state enforced atheism of communism is not the same as the skeptical atheism of the people we are talking about. Stalin is a red herring and you know it. I don't know enough about Pol Pot to comment, except that he was a monster. The whole back-to-simplicity-rejection-of-modernity is usually traditionalist and religious in nature. It really has nothing to do with Marxism.

I don't think it is all that essential for communists to be atheists. Stalin was not above using the church when it suited him and he learned how to be a tyrant from his days studying to be a priest. Chinese communism like all Chinese governments depends on the concept of a mandate of heaven for legitimacy. Whatever that is, it is not atheistic. And even if it were, it is not free-thinking or skeptical. North Korean "communism" is based on the worship of Kim Jung Ill's dead father.

Anyway, what does all this prove? What is the point of bringing up Stalin or the rest of them? Is it to prove that atheism leads people to be evil? Well, as it turns out the evidence does not support that claim. While there are quite a few atheists in foxholes, there are hardly any in prison. And since religious people can clearly do evil things, the best you can claim is that atheism is no worse than religion. That's a pretty low bar you are setting. And even if your observation is right, religion is still based on lies. Whether belief or nonbelief makes a person good or bad has no bearing at all on whether or not god is real or if Jesus bought our way into heaven. Basic honesty makes us believe what we actually think is true, not what we want to be true.

[The Magistrate]

29. Your Argument, Mr. Ironbark, Boils Down To 'Only Atheists Kill', Which Is Arrant Nonesense

[ironbark]

30. "Arrant Nonesense" it is.....but it's your's and all yours.

I never said anything remotely like it.


(And so begins the Standard Operating Proceedure of disingenuous extrapolation and fabrication/falsification of the others pov.... yawn, boring, rather go fishing..........disappointing really....the advertising said ‘scholar’....perhaps they meant scallop?)

[The Magistrate]

31. You Can Deny It If You Wish, Sir, But Will Convince No One In The Attempt

[ironbark]

32. I can deny it because it is your baseless fabrication… patently false.

Convincing others/anyone would require >you< providing >any< evidence, justification or explanation for your claim that my pov “Boils Down To 'Only Atheists Kill'…”

It’s not for me to prove I didn’t say or suggest anything like 'Only Atheists Kill'…”…….that would be an impossible and stupid expectation.

So your credibility rests on the provision of some justification for your falsification…
but we both/all know you aint ever going to provide anything of the kind.

[The Magistrate]

33. It Is Simply The Product, Sir, Of Being Fluent In English

If that is the language you use, you will have this problem of people here understanding the gist of what you say, and expressing it with stark clarity.