Special Investigation: 20th Century Killers, Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler.

You've got to watch the video below until the end. Brilliant!

8 comments:

Allie said...

Yes, that is clever, correct, timely, and helpful to the debate, and Christians need to learn to be a bit more thoughtful in their responses to atheism. I find it ironic, however, that in your review on 29 Nov of the movie "Religulous", as in other posts, you seem to think it's a completely plausible argument to pull the reverse on Christians. 11 September 2001 apparently makes Christianity and other religions ridiculous.

Please note that I KNOW you are not saying that 11 September alone is grounds enough to refute Christianity once and for all. That would be an over-simplification of your argument. I just think that this video is over-simplifying the justified response of thoughtful Christians: Don't tar us all with the fundamentalist/suicide bomber brush, just as it is completely unfair to tar all atheists with the Stalin/Hitler/Pol Pot brush.

Sabio Lantz said...

Boy, it was getting painfully long. But indeed, as always, it WAS worth waiting for -- funny. Thanx

Doug said...

And your point in comparing 20th century political/religious leaders with those two to three thousand years earlier is... ?

(Forgive me in assuming that politics and religion may have changed over the millenia.)

Anonymous said...

Well Doug, I think it's very clear; the old testament warriors were trying to develop agrarian societies (gleaning) with no class distinction. They used well reasoned and logical anthropological data to prove that the Hittites, etc., were not really human, so would make perfect guinea pigs for medical experimentation because they shared most of the genetic material of humans, but resembled apes more closely. We can blame that on God because he made sure the bible says he made a common ancestor between ape and man...oh, wait...

Sincerely, I think you make a very valid point! I find it ironic that the same man who said this:

"Each man is good in the sight of the Great Spirit."

also said:

"When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them?....What law have I broken? Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am a Sioux; because I was born where my father lived; because I would die for my people and my country?"

~Sitting Bull

Who cares about religion, let's focus on what makes people think it's their right to own and control other people.

Matt K said...

This video is very funny, but the issue it points to is one that makes me very nervous. When atheists and Christians start trying to point to atrocities to claim that it the other side is somehow more inherently violent I cringe. I think it is incredibly foolish and dangerous to think that eliminating religion will bring an end to violence, just as it is foolish to think that ending unbelief would bring about more peace. Clearly, it is possible to accommodate violence and hatred within atheistic and religious worldviews, which should be a very humbling and sobering realization.

On a related note, it’s annoying when Christians and atheists point to violence done in the name of God or by officially atheistic regimes take their rhetoric at face value when clearly often times rhetoric is employed as a cover for other motives, whether the rhetoric be socialist, communist, religious or humanist, to try to rally people around a cause that may be motivated by something very different.

Are the Crusades an example of how Christianity somehow leads to violence? Do we take the religious rhetoric at face value, or do we look at economic motivations, internal military struggles within Europe, social tensions, etc.? Depending on what features you want to emphasize, one can make a cogent argument that commerce foments violence far more than religion. This just shows that labeling violence as "atheistic" or "religious" is almost certainly going to be simplistic and a distortion of the complicated factors and motivations that are at play.

There are atheists who are very much committed to peace and an end to violence, just as there are Christians who hold to the same (and I would put myself in that latter group), but clearly there are people who in some way have associated themselves with religions and unbelief who have done horrible things. To think that getting rid of one or the other is a solution ignores the tremendous potential for violence and evil that we all possess, and it strikes me as very naive and dangerous to hear believers and unbelievers alike acting like peace would reign on earth if the other group would only just go away.

ismellarat said...

Matt K has saved me from the headache of having to write out some of the same points. But we do have some differences:

"Part ludicrous, part indispensable," describes the uneasy tension I always feel when thinking about both Christianity and (secular) humanism.

It's frustrating that there's no holy book that teaches the best of both worlds.

I don't think anyone says atheism prescribes mass murder - as this video's straw men seem to have it - and it's also unfortunate that the Bible doesn't explicitly say it's wrong, no matter what the circumstances. (Sure, murder is a sin, but there are so many exceptions apparently made possible by Romans 13:1-7 [governments are right in all that they do - except where the Bible contradicts this, although it really has no contradictions, or whatever]). Totalitarians have always loved those verses. The Divine Right of Kings was (wrongly, it might be argued) based on them.

No, atheism doesn't prescribe mass murder. In fact, atheists take great pains to point out that it doesn't prescribe anything at all - not even anything good - which is precisely my problem with it. Even if it does, it hardly has any teeth behind it. Not if you can beat the system.

Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot comfortably lived out their lives, secure in the knowledge that at least they would go down in history as having been *somebody*, as opposed to the millions of nobodies that died at their hands.
Hitler certainly didn't seem to have any regrets, either. He probably didn't even feel the bullet.

Hermann Goering even said after his capture that he at least had lived in style for 12 years.
So he was sentenced to death (but was able to beat the executioner with a cyanide capsule he had hidden).

So what? How many scumbags wouldn't trade their empty lives for a few years of glory? This is the mindset of so many common criminals, who figure that they're just too good to have to scratch out an honest living like everyone else. This even better describes the politicians we stupidly keep entrusting with our livelihoods, come to think of it - with the backing of both the Christian and the atheist communities. Is it any surprise that we keep getting the same results? Genocide is just a more extreme outcome on a continuous scale. It's nothing out of the ordinary, really.

ismellarat said...

Atheism suggests these people will get away with what they did. They were the rock stars of their time, and understandably had and still have many admirers, even if this is done in secret. A Jewish lady I knew was sheepishly told by people in the European high society circles she used to find herself in that sure, what the Nazis did was wrong - but imagine what it must have been like, to have it all like they did. Hey, you only live once. Make it count!

Christianity teaches that they will indeed be punished - but so will the vast majority of their victims. And punished way beyond anything they could ever have done wrong. They so richly deserve it, too, we're taught. Damn Jews.

See what I wrote about the Rev. William Hull (Adolf Eichmann's would-be spiritual advisor, who just couldn't comprehend why this mass murderer found the faith he was trying to convert him to too abhorrent to believe!), who explicitly said that the Jews were even worse than their murderers, since they rejected Jesus (search for Struggle for a Soul):

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2009/06/my-comment-on-blackwell-companion-to.html

I don't really know what's more screwed up than these alternatives, but hope for something that, when all is said and done, we will all agree will be perfectly just, making right all the wrongs we've seen in this life.

And that would require something beyond what we have now.

A combination of "love your neighbor" Christian Universalism, with expected proportional rewards and punishments, minus the massacres supposedly authorized by God, etc., would probably do it for me.

Of course I can't prove it, but I'm happy to see that this is roughly what Christians are slowly being shamed into believing anyway.

The theologians also seem to be rationalizing their way into this kind of thinking, since "hack a child for Jesus" just doesn't bring in the donations like it used to.

Maybe that will make it so.

ismellarat said...

"I don't think anyone says atheism *prescribes* mass murder" mischaracterizes the cartoon characters. My apologies to them. They seem to have enough problems as it is. But the rest of what I said still stands.

If someone wishes to do something wrong, and can get away with it in this life, there's nothing stopping them, unless it's the fear of something that may happen to them after they die.

If only we had better choices than
1. nothing, and
2. eternal negative consequences for them, and for just about everyone else, too.