Why Would Any Logical Person Be An Atheist?

Why would anyone be an atheist when forty million were killed in the former atheist Soviet Union and Sixty Million in atheist Red China. Also why would anyone want an ungodly political system where human life had no value, and which was a prison for everyone?

 

Although ideologies and political systems can use religion or atheism as a tool that really has nothing to do with the individual who still has to decide what's best for him or her on a private basis. Between your ears is where no government -- so far -- can peer with any particular success.

 

First of all.... WTF Comic Sans? Have you lost your mind?

So, should people not be Christian because of the Crusades, Muslim because of terrorist attacks? This hardly seems like a justification for being theist or not. Certainly not a logical argument.

A person can be atheist and still be moral, you're creating a false dichotomy.

 

It is the human condition. Killing, imprisoning, that which is different from us has been used by pagan, Jew, Muslim, Christian, atheist and agnostic since the existence of man.

 

You can't judge atheist by the actions of extremists. They have their reasons for being atheist and even if it doesn't make sense to you it does to them. Their's no reason to disrespect them for it.

 

There are millions of people world wide who have never heard of your god. There are millions of people world wide who don't have a grip on history.

Why not ask them?

 

Wait a second, we are talking about different things. This has no relationship to the crusades. The crusades came about because the Byzantine Emperor asked the Pope for help in freeing his lands and his people from the Muslims. When I mentioned atheism as an imposed political system, I am talking about something which has proven itself more deadly and destructive than anything else that has ever existed in the world.

How can you be an atheist and still be moral, wouldn't that be an oxymoron since our morals were established by the same God you do not believe exists? I mean you either accept God and the moral boundaries He gave us or you don't...make up your mind?

 

Fact: some of the worst episodes of mass-murder have been committed in the name of God.

 

You asked why anyone would be an atheist when people who are killed people. I was just juxtaposing your argument, I really could have applied it to any group. The point being it was an irrational statement.

Morality preceded religion. Long before there were established religions, there were still moral people. Theism is neither a prerequisite nor a requirement for morality.

 

Do forgive me for editing out that ghastly font.

I know that I'm making the same point as others already have, but would you please describe the entire logic? The logic you have explained so far is that a person who held a certain view performed atrocities, and therefore you find it illogical to hold that view. However, I don't believe that that truly is the logic you are using, for if it was so, you'd find it equally illogical to hold beliefs that you do not think are illogical (I'm assuming Christianity) based on atrocities performed by others with that belief (Crusades and so on, I'm sure others will argue the finer details).

Clearly, you are not using the same line of logic to evaluate the two different ideas. This is a problem I run into often on this forum. People are willing to describe a false kind of logic rather than the logic they are actually using. That makes me fear how flawed those ideas must be, that people would rather write down something hastily put together than truthfully display their reasoning.

 

The Christian's slant on Chinese modern history.

Most people died in China due to very bad economic policies originated out of the 'Great Leap Forward'. The peasant was taken out of the field and put to work in heavy industry and infrastructure projects. Peasants were also not allowed to grow their own food. Not enough people to grow food for the nation. The result, famine. Tens of millions starved to death.

Nothing to do with Atheisim.

 

I refuse to believe in something that I cannot observe or measure.

To do so would be illogical and irrational.

 

How true.

However I think you will find very few people who are religious that will understand this concept.

I am an Agnostic as I follow the Scientific Method to determine reality religiously.

But even though I know that we can neither prove or disprove the existence of a GOD....I am very certain that is such a GOD exists...it will not be anything like what any organized religion has stated it is.

Organized Religion bases it's Dogma and Carrot/Stick Reward/Punishment concepts upon A LIVING HUMAN BODY AND MINDS PLEASURES AND NEEDS.

Most likely if there does exist some form of life after death it will not be life in any manner close to what we would have experienced as an Organic Life Form....as anything Spiritual would probably exist as a Multiple Quantum Specific Wave Length that would exist upon many Space-Time or Multiversal inherent Dimensional realities.

AboveAlpha

 

Myanmar is in the main Buddhist and they committed many human rights violations as a modern example, I would say more religious persecution happened over Atheist ones. In general the more religious a society the worse it seems to be over those where religion is not a major player for example Norway.

 

What are you talking about? Respect who? Over two hundred million people suffered and died because of them. I say two hundred million because if it wasn't for the diabolical ideology of the Bolsheviks with their atheist internationalism, Germany would not have combatted it with its own pagan nationalism.

But look, we are falling into the same pit hole today. Islam has reared its ugly head to combat the secularism which has lost all its moral boundaries. In the last century it was the evil of pagan nationalism versus the evil of atheist internationalism, and in this century it is the evil of Islam and all its constraints, against the evil of secularism with no constraints. I believe it was Aristotle who said, 'everything within moderation is best'.

 

My morals do not come from a god. My morals come from society and from my own set of values. I find I am more moral than some of my religious peers.

There are moral societies that have never heard of the Judeo/Christian god, how do explain their morals?

 

There is not a single concept or idea specific to teaching right from wrong that exists within any religious text on Earth that any Human did not already relate to and understand previous to reading or being taught such religious texts.

Morality is SELF EVIDENT...unless you are born with Genetic Mental Instabilities.

AboveAlpha

 

Did every atheist commit those murders? If not then you're generalization is pretty pointless.

 

Yes morality did exist, but what were those morals? To some it was perfectly moral to kill ones neighbors and take their goods, and to others it was perfectly moral to eat other humans. What I'm saying is that you are basing your concepts of morality on Moses and the teachings of Christ. You are following them without even realizing it, and yet you are denying Moses and Christ as having the authority to give you those morals.

 

the God of the Bible requires one to disregard logic.

why should we believe in such an entity?

 

Questioning God's existence is a natural intellectual position. In of itself, I don't think that's inherently a wrong. A lot of philosophers have hit the wall that rationalism leads to given that faith requires belief absent of direct evidence, as Kierkegaard calls it, you need to take a leap of faith .

"Thinking can turn toward itself in order to think about itself and skepticism can emerge. But this thinking about itself never accomplishes anything."

One must take a leap into sin or into faith.

Having lived a life, in no short measure absent of faith...as an agnostic thinking this is indeed all there is...the leap into faith was the better alternative. Sin just wasn't working out for me. You thirst and never feel satiated, is about the only analogy I can think of. I had accomplished much of what I set out to do, but there is still a vacuous feeling. Is this all there is?

Can reason alone lead one to God?
I don't believe so....but reason alone is not what it is to be fully human...we are as much heart as reason...and my heart was yearning for faith.

If I'm a fool, so be it...I'll die a happy fool...full of the Holy Spirit and not empty from the false promises offered by the pursuit of material desires.

 

For some people Religion and perhaps Faith can be GOOD things.

For others it is not needed or required.

The only time issues come up is when some groups that are of Religion and Faith try to force their ideology upon others.

AboveAlpha

 

Yet God says He can't reveal Himself unless a person accepts Him first. It's all in one's attitude, it's all in one's attitude.

 

Twenty million were killed during the Taiping Rebellion, a civil war against the Qing dynasty led by a man claiming to be the brother of Jesus.

The Catholic Germans killed 6 million Jews and 5 million others.

I could name others if you'd like. However, here's my main counter-point against your "logic" that you presented:

Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao may have been atheists, but they were also authoritarians. Nothing about atheism logically leads to murdering others, and the vast majority of the victims from the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia died due to poor agrarian policies, not systematic murder carried out by the regimes like we saw in Christian theocracies during the Middle Ages and in Nazi Germany.

 

I was completely unaware that atheism was a complex political system that reached out further than simply a disbelief in a theistic deity.

Where is the Atheist Doctrine that demands the deaths of forty million people? Refrain from posting on the subject until you provide it.

Are you also opposed to mustaches? Stalin had a mustache too.