The God Fuse

[Superboy]

David Wong recently wrote an interesting article called The God Fuse. It talks about the problems with any debate about the existence of God.

He's also the guy who made the Christian Faq, and his religious slant does show through a little, but he tries his best to be un-biased. He kind of misses the point in some sections, but it's still a good read.

What do you guys think?

[Kojiro]

From what I was able to read through he seems to be doing nothing more than saying 'the issue isn't black and white'. He seems to want us to be tolerant of each other's beliefs, which of course is a wonderful sentiment, but far more difficult in practice. It also assumes all beliefs are benevolent, which of course they are not. Some are downright divisive and harmful or promote harmful ideas. These should absolutely be stamped out. The problem is that those who buy into them aren't interested in finding out they're wrong, and can rationalise away pretty much anything you can throw at them.

[Darth Wong]

That article is full of shit. It's nothing more than a long-winded Golden Mean Fallacy, relying on the fact that modern heavily secularized Christianity tends to turn out people who are mostly not too bad. It characterizes Stalinism as a "perversion" of the atheist "belief system", which is totally retarded (atheists have no belief system, so Stalin's belief system was communism, not atheism), and Phelps as a "perversion" of the Christian belief system, even though they have legitimate Scriptural basis for what they do and their behaviour would have been quite normal just a few hundred years ago.

Worse yet, there are huge groups of people who exist totally outside his generalizations, like violent Hindu and Muslim groups that routinely do horrible things in the name of their beliefs. We're talking about hundreds of millions of people here, routinely doing horrible things to each other.

The way he tries to equate the Phelps' funeral picketing to a guy on a webboard saying he's glad Falwell is dead is the most sickening example of his brain-damaged knee-jerk "Golden Mean" mentality. As if the two are REMOTELY comparable. One of them is deliberate emotional cruelty inflicted on the deceased's family, while the other one is nothing more than expression of an opinion in a venue where the family doesn't have to see it.

Basically, if you read it through, he is distorting and altering the facts in order to try and juggle everything into a "look, see, it's the same on both sides" conclusion. The real facts don't suit that conclusion, so he cherry-picks and distorts the facts for his convenience. The mere fact that he tries to use Stalin against atheism shows you that if anyone's being a dick here, it's him.

[Napoleon the Clown]

One thing that I feel needs to be brought up is that Falwell was a horrible person by almost everyone in the industrialized world's standards. He was a hate-mongering asshole. His impact on the world was negative, not positive. Feeling joy over that insult to the species is different than feeling joy over someone you disagree with dying.


I couldn't really manage to read through his article. It was too much "just play nice, please?" for my tastes.

[Dominus Atheos]

*Cracks fingers*

...the Stalins and Maos of the world do the same because they see their people as nothing more than meaty fuel to be ground up to feed the machinery of The State.

Non sequitur/Misrepresentation of facts. Just because Stalin and Mao didn't believe in god doesn't mean that anything they did was because of that lack of belief.

Yeah, yeah, I know the Christians are saying that the guy who fights an unjust or needless war is violating God's law, and thus isn't a good Christian.

Any Christian who says that is lying. Convert by the sword is written very deeply into the Bible.

Meanwhile, the atheists are saying that Stalin was merely bloodthirsty, separate and apart from his disbelief in a higher power. Both believe, then, that it is a corruption of their belief system that allows unjust slaughter to happen.

Non-sequitur. Atheists don't have a belief system. And nothing he said before that had anything to do with atheists saying Stalin's evil was "a corruption of our belief system"

But for this project, All we need to agree on is this: it happens in both cases. And if the opposing belief system vanished tomorrow, war and bloodshed and terror would still take place.

I don't agree with that. If tomorrow religion disappear, maybe not all war, bloodshed and terror would disappear with it, but a lot, probably most, of it would.

And can we further admit it's actually physically impossible to calculate whether, if your side had its way, the volume of terrible things happening would go up, or down, or stay the same? I know you have an opinion on that, and I can guess what it is. But we don't know, and can't state it like it's fact. Right?

I don't admit that. The simplest way to calculate it would be to go take polls of every one engaged in killing other people, and ask them "if tomorrow you woke up and found that the people you are trying to kill have all converted to the same religion as your's, would you still try to kill them?"

Now obviously not every murder is killing because of religion, but some are. And he might be right that I can't "know" that there would be less killing in the world if everyone was atheist, but I can't "know" that there isn't a god either, but he seems to accept that belief.

But atheists do something very similar, particularly when a Christian says:

"Only the saved go to Heaven!"

...and what the atheist hears is:

"I want everyone else to go to Hell!"

A lot of them do.

It's the same thing, thinking that deep down Christians don't really believe this is the law handed down by a creator, and therefore Christianity is just a petty, intentional rebellion against the non-Christians of the world. In other words, that Christians don't honestly believe what they say, and just say it because they're jerks.

How the fuck do you draw that conclusion? Even ignoring the flawed premise, I don't know of a single atheist that thinks that Christians are lying about their beliefs. We all know that self-professed Christians are actually so deluded that they really believe all that shit.

Atheists, even if you reject the idea of God completely and claim to live according only to the cold logic of the physical sciences, you all still live as if the absolute morality of some magical lawgiver were true.

Yeah, because we choose to. That's what makes us better people then Christians, we act decently towards other people because we honestly believe that all human beings deserve to be treated that way. Christians only act decently towards other people because they are afraid their god will smite them if they don't, as evidenced by all the Christians saying that atheists can't be moral because they don't believe in a higher power that will punish them for immorality.

Who's a better person, the guy who doesn't murder someone because he feels it's wrong to kill someone, or the guy who doesn't murder someone because he doesn't want to go to jail?

When that "boob at the Super Bowl" incident happened a while back, I constantly heard atheists making fun of Christians and their puritan silliness over sex. "Come on! It's just meat! We're all just mammals! Sex is natural! What are you afraid of?!?!?"

Yet, the moment you find out that while you were on vacation, your girl got drunk and slept with the entire Chicago Bears...



...Suddenly sex is something to get upset about. Suddenly it's not just meat slapping against meat. Suddenly the exclusive sexual bond between you and your girl was important, was to be protected, was almost... sacred.

Did I give my girl permission to sleep with the entire Chicago Bears? (presumably in return for permission to sleep with all of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders)



Because if I did, I wouldn't be mad. It's all about trust. I wouldn't be mad at her because she had sex, I'd be mad at her for violating my trust.

There Are Good People on Both Sides

Atheists don't dispute that, only Christians. Remember my last example? Plenty of Christians believe you can't be moral without god.

Your Point of View is Legitimately Offensive to Them

Now, this says nothing about whether or not it's true. For this, I only ask that you understand why they get offended.

Everybody is aware that something can be both true and offensive, right?

You see a friend holding a newborn baby and you say, "You know, there's a chance he'll die tomorrow." Or you stand over the casket at your uncle's funeral and say, "He'll definitely be consuming fewer of the world's natural resources now." Both statements completely, 100% factually correct, and can be defended to the end of time by cold, undeniable logic. And both are incredibly offensive.

Is either statement likely to change that world for the better? Because I'm willing to offend some people if it will sway them away from religion, which I honestly believe harms the world.

Yes, evolution did that. He's warm, right? He lives in Antarctica, and he's warm. He has nothing to complain about.

So please, please, please, when we get into these atheist vs. Christian arguments, can the atheists stop acting like Christians want to abolish all science and live in grass huts? Just because some Christians reject the science on evolution, doesn't mean they reject all science.

Strawman. On this very site we just had a discussion on what the world would be like if the fundies took over, and this atheist webboard reached the conclusion that only Biology would be completely abolished, and all the other ones would only be limited so they could oly make any conclusions based on a 6000 year old earth. But he fails to understand just how important evolution and an old earth are to all the sciences.

And please don't come at me with the, "Christians hate Phelps because they know he's saying out loud what they're secretly thinking! They secretly hate homosexuals just as much!"

Please. The White House and Congress and the Supreme Court are full of Christians, always have been. If all Christians thought like Phelps, American gays would be in concentration camps. There'd be nobody to stop it.

Define "Christians" please. Because I define it as a follower of Christ and his teachings, and if the county was really run by only people who followed Christ's teachings, gays wouldn't be in concentration camps, they'd be dead.

Evidence to back up my claim

Atheists. You hate wars. You hate genocide, you hate iron-fisted dictators who line up peasants and jump over them with monster trucks. You hate it when corporations steal your money, and when fat suburbanites will let a million Africans starve before they'll donate. You hate guys who treat women like lifeless sex dolls, guys who lie and leave.

...

Okay...

You hate all of that, because you know that the ability to have empathy for other humans (even those who don't benefit us) is the only thing that separates us from the cockroaches. And when that fails, it's terrifying and awful in countless ways.

Which has what to do with Christianity?

In the middle of a religious debate, you may say that religion and superstition are the prime evil in human society. But you look behind it, and you'll find that other monster is bigger. Humans doing the opposite, acting like animals. Treating other humans as nothing but engines for their own pleasure.

Oh for the love of god.

That's the biggest non-sequitur yet.

Religion - whether it was handed down by God or just invented by a bunch of guys- serves mainly to fight that. It makes humanity sacred, and the moral law moreso. You can hate the methods it uses, you can say that there are other ways, you can say that it only replaces one cancer with another. But most of what it's trying to get you to do - treat other humans as sacred and put morality above your own impulses - you already do. And you criticize religion mainly for not doing it.

Which would be great if religious people only followed the good parts of their respective belief system and all collectively threw out the bad. Hell, if they did that, I would even change my opinions on religion. But they don't so it does more harm then good, and needs to go.

You're going to come back here and say that you're not criticizing that part of religion, the concept of things being sacred, or morality, or any of that flowery stuff. It's the intolerance and manipulation and superstition and ignorance you hate, the zealots demanding evolution be stripped from the textbooks.

But from the Christian's point of view, when you attack one, you attack the other. The story of Christianity (or mythology, if you prefer) is bound to the morality. Humanity is sacred because were were planted here in a six-day act of divine intervention. Lying is wrong because God said so. You should work to preserve a marriage because God made that bond sacred with Adam and Eve.

So when you attack that mythology, Christians hear you attacking the morality along with it. And that is why they fight so hard for it.

Seriously, what did you think the creationism thing was about? It's about keeping humanity sacred. They think that once you dash the idea of a created humanity, then there'll be nothing to stop strong humans from treating weak ones as cannon fodder.

And logically, there won't be anything. You can't defend morality with logic. Once you explain it away as an artifact of the genetic herd instinct, well, hey, we've got the genome mapped out, right? Couldn't we just cut that morality gene right out of there?

If you're saying, "But that would be retarded! The world would go down the toilet if we did that!" Guess what, that's just your morality gene talking. Your objection is merely based on a genetic disposition toward social behavior, and can be ignored with the proper genetic changes.



Do you see how weird this gets? There's no logical conclusion to it, it just gets more and more strange. So what's their motivation to go that way?

After all, you know as well as I do that there are two kinds of people who attack Christianity: those who love rationalism, and those who just have a knee-jerk reaction to being told what to do. You've got people who are right for the wrong reasons, and others who are wrong for the right reasons, and some who are right for the right reasons and others who are wrong for the wrong reasons.

It's like all my friends are with me on the beach, looking out at the ocean. Half of them look at the water and say:

"This is Oceanis, the living Blue God! He is sacred!"

While the other half say,

"Here is a convenient place to dump our sewage."

The truth has to be somewhere in between.

Right?

I'm not even going to dignify all that Golden Mean Bullshit with a response.

You'll Never Harass the Other Side Out of Existence

No, but I can sure as hell try. For every one person I convince to drop their godawful religion, the world becomes a little brighter place.

*Snip bullshit "lead by example" instructions*

And don't think of it as a tactic to win converts. Think of it as common courtesy.

But then I'm never going to win any converts. Then how the hell am I supposed to stop people from following their destructive and violent religions, and make the world a better place?

[wolveraptor]

Man, how full of shit is this guy? He flits around on random feel-good points without saying anything that's not obvious or false. It's the mother of all golden-mean fallacies.

[Battlehymn Republic]

*Snip bullshit "lead by example" instructions*

And don't think of it as a tactic to win converts. Think of it as common courtesy.

But then I'm never going to win any converts. Then how the hell am I supposed to stop people from following their destructive and violent religions, and make the world a better place?

There are many ways to win converts. Are you suggesting that not acting like a dick is more effective than leading by example? If not, then what exactly are you suggesting?

There are indeed many fallacies you can point out from the article, but I find it hard to believe that anyone can't accept the ultimate point-

[Darth Wong]

There are indeed many fallacies you can point out from the article, but I find it hard to believe that anyone can't accept the ultimate point-

Except that in his mind, "acting like dicks" means "not occupying the Holy Middle Ground, like me". That's the great irony of his article; he employs the same fallacy he accuses everyone else of employing: assuming that anyone different from him is immoral simply by virtue of having a different opinion than him. He makes no attempt to discuss objective harm, or make a logical case; he only appeals to the Holy Middle Ground and says that anyone who doesn't occupy it is a dick.

[Cao Cao]

What? Huh? A species in a cold enviroment develops fur to keep warm? This is an argument against evolution how??
Is it because it's cute and fluffy? I mean, we all know evolution could never produce a species that another sentient species could regard as cute, right?

[Battlehymn Republic]

I think that might be a potential strawman here. Yes, he's criticizing both sides for certain things, and he does have the golden mean fallacy several times.

But ultimately, his point seems to be less what the two sides are about, but how they act. That's the first point he makes- you may not agree that celebrating Falwell's death is akin to the Westboro church's activities, but that point, like the article, isnt' a critique of what either side is saying, but how they're saying it.

Hence,

Remember when I said that, when somebody comes on too strong, no matter what they're selling, we tend to run the other way? I mean, sure, the "God Hates Fags" guy has changed tens of thousands of minds. But not in the direction he intended.

People are not convinced that way. The sarcasm, the disdain, the laughter. It makes you feel better, and rallies your friends, but it does exactly nothing to change minds on the other side. Conservatives may like to read Ann Coulter, but nobody else does.

As for the Penguin image- it's an exact spoof on the numerous 4chan image macros. It's satire.

(NOTE: Per international regulations governing all online religious debate, we are required to insert on each page humorous and inflammatory image macros such as the one below. To prove my objectivity, these have been carefully chosen as to be equally offensive to all belief systems. -MGMT )

[Medic]

He sounds very much like Bill O'Reilly from what I've seen of him recently on the subject of religion.

Anyway, whenever someone drags Stalin and Mao into these types of debates, it's obvious they're working under the often unstated (if strongly implied) premise that goodness and our sense of morality are derived from on-high and somehow manifest themselves in our ... soul I'd image, I was about to say brains but that's looking at it from the atheist POV I suppose. The incessant focus on Stalin's and Mao's disbelief is a product of that logic, it's the perfect example of what should be predicted in an absence of belief in God, wickedness and immorality.

Atheists. You hate wars. You hate genocide, you hate iron-fisted dictators who line up peasants and jump over them with monster trucks. You hate it when corporations steal your money, and when fat suburbanites will let a million Africans starve before they'll donate. You hate guys who treat women like lifeless sex dolls, guys who lie and leave.

... Okay ... // I can't help but think he's going a half-step further and conflating his political beliefs with God and every other facet of this debate

You hate all of that, because you know that the ability to have empathy for other humans (even those who don't benefit us) is the only thing that separates us from the cockroaches. And when that fails, it's terrifying and awful in countless ways.

Which has what to do with Christianity?

And that is another.

Define "Christians" please. Because I define it as a follower of Christ and his teachings, and if the county was really run by only people who followed Christ's teachings, gays wouldn't be in concentration camps, they'd be dead.

That's probably the most correct way to go about things. As for me, I'd only define Christians as people that identify themselves with the religion (regardless of their knowledge of it) and draw some sort of emotional inspiration from the teachings or life of Jesus. Utterly vague and wishy-washy? Absolutely, but it's a more accurate description of reality as-is.

*snip rambling*
So when you attack that mythology, Christians hear you attacking the morality along with it. And that is why they fight so hard for it.

And he all but stated it: morality is a product of God because in the scriptures God did X, said Y and created Z where X, Y and Z happen to be tenets of 21st century morality. Lying's bad, marriage is good, do unto others as you'd like them to do unto you, whatever. It is these "legitimately offended" people that won't even cede the golden mean of this argument "there are good people on both sides."

He is also of course assuming God's existence, every debater such as this couldn't ever be arsed to honestly consider a world without God, since their conception of his absence is Stalin and Mao communism.

So I'll consider the opposite, I'll suppose God is real. My disbelief in him is one thing but if I happen to be a good person all the same it's because my soul and conscience were tugged, pulled, pushed and prodded by some supernatural mechanism which I accept on faith. At the end of the day, I remain a heathen but don't unnecessarily cause harm and live a good, honest life.
The problem with all that is that what am I to make of people that believe in God (or don't) but act with ill-will to their brethren anyway? Did God not see fit to endow them with a conscience? Is he actively playing them as pawns and will later send them to hell because of decisions he made to orchestrate world-events as he saw fit? Some God.

I suppose if I want to be really, I simply assume everything bad that happens is the work of the devil Isn't that too easy though? In all that conjecture, I introduced only articles of faith successively stacked on one another till I reached some tortured logical conclusion that is the concept of "absolute morality." The explanatory power of that ultimate house-of-cards is something any honest human being should be at least slightly embarrassed to admit believing.


Onto the more tangential territory:

*snip, pulling the "moral gene" out of the genome*
If you're saying, "But that would be retarded! The world would go down the toilet if we did that!" Guess what, that's just your morality gene talking. Your objection is merely based on a genetic disposition toward social behavior, and can be ignored with the proper genetic changes.

Do you see how weird this gets? There's no logical conclusion to it, it just gets more and more strange. So what's their motivation to go that way?

So let me get that argument straight
1) we're either good because God said so or because our genes said so (but never mind the implications of that!)
2) insert *the specter of gene manipulation to destroy morality!*
He never really finished that thought but I suppose it goes along the lines "God's absolute morality is invincible, whereas evolutionary-derived morality is frail so... yeah! Go God!"

So in this guy's attempt to go beyond preaching to the choir and convince atheists, who for example don't respect the threat of eternal hellfire he resorts to --!

Fearmongering.

Color me unimpressed. Dawkins put it best in his speech at Lynchburg, PA when asked "why are we good?" He admitted it was a very complex question but summed it up as "it's genuinely difficult to decide why we are (good), thank goodness we are." That sentiment simply isn't good enough. Then again, the distinction between naturalist and religious worldviews always has been "evidence with uncertainty and certainty without evidence." (or however the saying went, there's nothing my memory can't butcher)

[Dominus Atheos]

*Snip bullshit "lead by example" instructions*

And don't think of it as a tactic to win converts. Think of it as common courtesy.

But then I'm never going to win any converts. Then how the hell am I supposed to stop people from following their destructive and violent religions, and make the world a better place?

There are many ways to win converts. Are you suggesting that not (//I'm going to assume this was a typo) acting like a dick is more effective than leading by example?

Yes, that's exactly what I'm suggesting. In my opinion, the best way to sway people away from religion is to tear asunder their illusions and send the sanctuary of their own ignorance crashing down around them, which is a pretty dickish thing to do. "Leading by example" doesn't work. I am a virtuous atheist (or at least I like to think so), but so far that hasn't changed anyones mind. On the other hand, pointing out what horrible shit all of the major religions are has yielded more then one person who doesn't feel as strongly about their religion as they did before.

As for the Penguin image- it's an exact spoof on the numerous 4chan image macros. It's satire.

(NOTE: Per international regulations governing all online religious debate, we are required to insert on each page humorous and inflammatory image macros such as the one below. To prove my objectivity, these have been carefully chosen as to be equally offensive to all belief systems. -MGMT )

I fail to see how it's offensive to Christians, AND it betrays his own ignorance of what evolution is and how it works.

[Darth Wong]

I think that might be a potential strawman here. Yes, he's criticizing both sides for certain things, and he does have the golden mean fallacy several times.

But ultimately, his point seems to be less what the two sides are about, but how they act. That's the first point he makes- you may not agree that celebrating Falwell's death is akin to the Westboro church's activities, but that point, like the article, isnt' a critique of what either side is saying, but how they're saying it.

And what kind of fucking retard actually thinks that deliberately inflicting emotional trauma upon the grieving family at the funeral of the deceased is in any way comparable behaviour to posting on a webboard, far from the funeral and with zero attempt made to force the family to see it? Fine, you say he's talking about behaviour rather than opinions (although that's also bullshit, as his idiotic argument about Janet Jackson proves), but his screed on behaviour is just as much of an idiotic golden mean fallacy as anything else he says.

[Battlehymn Republic]

I fail to see how it's offensive to Christians, AND it betrays his own ignorance of what evolution is and how it works.

Again, satire. It's supposed to be an imaginary pro-Christian anti-atheist/anti-evolution macro.

It's irony.

[wolveraptor]

I fail to see how it's offensive to Christians, AND it betrays his own ignorance of what evolution is and how it works.

Again, satire. It's supposed to be an imaginary pro-Christian anti-atheist/anti-evolution macro.
It's irony.

Yeah, just because it's completely unfunny doesn't mean it's not satire. That wasn't a sardonic comment, by the way.

[TheKwas]

As a general side-note going back to people claiming atheism leds to people like Mao. These people probablely should check out their history books, because China has been more or less 'atheistic' throughout its entire history, so it is no real surprise that their most brutal leader also happened to be an atheist. Maybe what people should look at when trying to figure out what caused Mao to be different than other leaders are the beliefs and characteristics that were actually different: he was a communist, tried a massive restructuring of society all at once, and simply wasn't that smart in terms of economics.

[wolveraptor]

As a general side-note going back to people claiming atheism leds to people like Mao. These people probablely should check out their history books, because China has been more or less 'atheistic' throughout its entire history, so it is no real surprise that their most brutal leader also happened to be an atheist. Maybe what people should look at when trying to figure out what caused Mao to be different than other leaders are the beliefs and characteristics that were actually different: he was a communist, tried a massive restructuring of society all at once, and simply wasn't that smart in terms of economics.

Whaddya mean? Much of China has been Buddhist, Confucianist, and even Muslim at times.

[Battlehymn Republic]

I fail to see how it's offensive to Christians, AND it betrays his own ignorance of what evolution is and how it works.

Again, satire. It's supposed to be an imaginary pro-Christian anti-atheist/anti-evolution macro.
It's irony.

Yeah, just because it's completely unfunny doesn't mean it's not satire. That wasn't a sardonic comment, by the way.

Tee hee.

[Eris]

As a general side-note going back to people claiming atheism leds to people like Mao. These people probablely should check out their history books, because China has been more or less 'atheistic' throughout its entire history, so it is no real surprise that their most brutal leader also happened to be an atheist. Maybe what people should look at when trying to figure out what caused Mao to be different than other leaders are the beliefs and characteristics that were actually different: he was a communist, tried a massive restructuring of society all at once, and simply wasn't that smart in terms of economics.

Whaddya mean? Much of China has been Buddhist, Confucianist, and even Muslim at times.

I think what is meant is that, with the exception of some minority Christian and Moslem movements, China has not had much of a monotheistic religious presence. Neither Buddhism nor Confucianism (which I never thought really as much of a religion anyhow but there you have it) revere a deity in the way the Abrahamic religions do. The notion is that China doesn't have the same God's Command influence to provide a basis for morality is the important bit, I think.

[wolveraptor]

I don't know why they consider Confucianism a religion either, but almost every source I've seen calls it one. Maybe it makes some references to the kingdom of the gods and such. Chinese Buddhism sometimes makes references to one's reincarnation as a god (just once step below exiting the circle of life) in the kingdom of the deities. Apparently, China's deities had their own government and society. Since Buddhism didn't originally have this characteristic, it may be something that the Chinese grafted on from Confucianism. It does seem to fit with Confucius's ordered view of the universe.

[Eris]

I don't know why they consider Confucianism a religion either, but almost every source I've seen calls it one. Maybe it makes some references to the kingdom of the gods and such. Chinese Buddhism sometimes makes references to one's reincarnation as a god (just once step below exiting the circle of life) in the kingdom of the deities. Apparently, China's deities had their own government and society. Since Buddhism didn't originally have this characteristic, it may be something that the Chinese grafted on from Confucianism. It does seem to fit with Confucius's ordered view of the universe.

Well, to be fair I suppose he does talk about heaven a bit in the parts of the Analects I've read. It always came off to me, though, as mostly a metaphor, a poetic way of saying something's good - "When good government prevails in the empire, ceremonies, music, and punitive military expeditions proceed from the son of Heaven" and such. Or maybe as a couching to the superstitious locals. But with all his focus on humanity, he always struck me as a pretty early secular philosopher.

He may have had some weird metaphysics tacked on as well, but you can preserve all of what I think are the important points without any relligious baggage at all. I wouldn't be surprised if the man himself were religious given the time he lived in (although a few relative contemporaries were full out atheists so you never know), but all his good ideas didn't rely on his religious beliefs.

Buddhism I'm not so familiar with, so I'll refrain from speculating too much. I'm certain they don't have a personal god, though. That makes them at least not mono-theistic.

All of which is slightly off-topic, except of course possibly supporting the case that Mao is a bad example of an atheist who made a conscious choice to be one like Stalin might have coming from an Eastern Orthodox region. Not that many would actually have time for acknowledging the distinction there, but there you have it.

[K. A. Pital]

You can't defend morality with logic.

You can skip reading everything after this. Why oh why are there so many retards in the world? Only for religious people morality is illogical, because it's tied up with an illogical belief.

For a rationalist-materialist, morality is logical and is derived from the logic of human relations. But I guess that's too much for some morons to understand in their anti-atheist rants.

Someone who hasn't a grasp of logic doesn't have any right to deride logic itself. It looks laughable.

[Sarevok]

Civilisation is based on morality. If we were all immoral we would be solitary creatures like tigers and likely be extinct by now. Helping fellow humans is benificial for everyone in long term. So morality is not some magic thing religon invented. It has logical, benificial purposes.

[Darth Wong]

Civilisation is based on morality. If we were all immoral we would be solitary creatures like tigers and likely be extinct by now. Helping fellow humans is benificial for everyone in long term. So morality is not some magic thing religon invented. It has logical, benificial purposes.

I remember I once spent a long time explaining in detail how tribal societies would require a code of conduct with pretty much all of the "universal" concepts we now associate with morality, if they wanted to survive in a harsh prehistoric world. I did this on the twcenter forums, which I occasionally use as a scouting ground because I want to learn more about how its core group of posturing faux-macho teenagers and Bill O'Reilly followers thinks (let's face it, any Rome-related website is bound to have a pretty high population of that sort of person, because they have an unhealthy fascination with extreme militarism).

Anyway, it literally just washed off the backs of people who would read the whole thing and then turn around and ask "yes, but where does morality come from without religion"? This kind of person is not just immune to reason, he doesn't even bother reading at all. That forum is actually a pretty good reflection of Middle American culture. The people who actually do their reading can be fairly intelligent, but they are in constant struggle against people who have no idea what the fuck they're talking about and yet still insist they're experts. One guy even admitted he had no scientific knowledge, and then proceeded to write long diatribes about how global warming science is bullshit. This is how America has gotten itself into such a sorry state, folks.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The best thing about those people who call Stalin an atheist is that he's actually revered as a saint by some Orthodox whackjobs in Russia who assert that he was a Secret Monk (he went to a seminary before dropping out and joining the communist party) who actually worked to restore the Orthodox Church by restoring the position of the Patriarch of Moscow (the head of Russian Orthodoxy), which had been abolished by the Tsars and replaced with a council when the Patriarch opposed their interests.