Atheists are the kings of genocide!

56 posts / 0 new
Last post
Henry Plantagenet's picture
Atheists are the kings of genocide!

Not long ago, a denizen of one of these internet sites wheeled out the old conservative canard, to the effect that the worst mass murders and crimes in human history were the work of atheists: Hitler, Mao, blah blah blah. The more atheists come out of the shadows, the more we are going to have this flung in our faces. I have heard this nonsense a number of times, so I decided it was time to stomp this fallacy dead. This is a lengthy piece, because there are six different ways that these arguments are just plain stupid. Here’s the short version first.

First, although Christians claim that Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao were atheist mass murderers, three of the four actually had firm roots in traditional religion, and all four of them committed mass murder for political and economic reasons, not religious reasons – because religion was never a serious threat to any of them. And all four of them killed a lot of atheists – Hitler bragged about crushing the atheists. So the phrase “atheist genocide” is a load of hogwash.

Second, the big mass murders were committed over and over in history by religious people, both in massive genocides such as the hundred million killed during the Christian conquest of the Americas, and in religious wars such as the Crusades, and all the killing over the fate of Israel. And in decades of terrorism. And inevitably the arch-criminals who committed these acts specified that they were fulfilling God’s will. Atheists are not inclined to such nonsense.

Third, religious people commit mass murder because their holy books tell them to. There is no such atheist book telling atheists to kill in the millions. And atheists will never follow a book, an author, or a doctrine so blindly that they will kill for them.

Fourth, religious people also have a long history of persecuting people short of murder, a tradition that continues in America today, to include their jihad against the rights of women and gays. The “militant atheists” preach scary stuff like tolerance and minding your own business and using your brain.

Fifth, morality doesn’t come from religion: morality was defined by early human communities which the monotheistic God People later bragged about exterminating.

Sixth, religious people have worked tirelessly to retard the forward march of humanity and oppress anyone who disagrees with them; nonbelievers have been at the forefront of the march of mankind, in science and philosophy and art and economics.

So let’s start with Hitler’s “atheist genocide”.

Hitler was actually quite religious. He went to a monastery school, sang in the choir, and as a child pretended to be a priest, even conducting mock ceremonies and making religious sermons. For quite some time he gave serious thought to becoming a priest. Although he attacked Christian churches for being insufficiently anti-Semitic and for interfering with his work, he remained a Catholic all his life. Hitler believed in God, and specifically he believed in a God active in men’s lives. He compared the rise of Nazism to the rise of Christianity as a state religion in ancient Rome. He wanted to unite Germany’s Protestants under a religious banner that rejected the Jewish roots of Christianity, calling it “positive Christianity”. As he was collecting is thoughts for the mass of ideological precepts that would become his core philosophical work, Mein Kampf, he gave a speech expressing his reverence for Jesus as a man who rejected the “Jewish poison” – “My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and savior as a fighter.”

Direct quotes from the Fuehrer:

“I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”Christian churches are "essential elements for safeguarding the soul of the German people." “We hold the spiritual forces of Christianity to be indispensable elements in the moral uplift of most of the German people.""I believe in God, and I am convinced that He will not desert 67 million Germans who have worked so hard to regain their rightful position in the world."“We have undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."“I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.”“We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith.”

And anyone who argues the “Hitler = atheist” line, is ignoring the fact that Hitler repeatedly refuted charges that Nazism was anti-Christian; he lumped in the atheists with communists and criminals, and rejected nonreligious schooling for children. When some Nazi members began quitting the church, Hitler ordered his top lieutenants to remain in the church.

When Hitler killed people off, it was because he saw them as enemies of the state, not because of religion. He killed the Jews because he thought they were a political and economic threat to Germany, and Jews were only a portion of his target list. He also killed others who were seen as political and social threats, not religious enemies: other non-German ethnic groups, gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally handicapped, political opponents. Hitler’s siege of Leningrad, just by itself, killed almost as many people as the Jewish Holocaust did, and religion had nothing to do with it. In fact a lot of the people he killed all along the Russian front – twenty million of them -- were atheists. And incidentally, anyone who argues that Hitler was a liberal should look at the millions of liberals, socialists and communists he also killed.

Mao paid lip service to the Leninist attitude toward religion, but betrayed his true beliefs in his written works, which were loaded with Confucianist and Taoist ideas. Mao made little effort to persecute religious believers because religion was not a big deal in 20th-century China, the way it was in the Christian and Muslim worlds. There was virtually no religious fervor in China, and Mao didn’t care about religion. Mao’s great massacres happened in the 1950s and 1960s for political and economic reasons, not religious reasons – he wanted to exterminate political threats, and he had no clue how to run an economy. The puny crackdowns on religion in China only came after the Chinese government had abandoned Mao’s hardcore Leninist stance, in the last decade or two, and the government has pursued these crackdowns not for philosophical reasons, but because the groups involves pose political threats: the Muslims in restless Xinjiang, the monks in Tibet, the Catholics who answer to a foreign head of state, and Falun Gong because it got to be too big, too powerful, and too independent of the state.

Stalin’s position on religion was entirely dependent on political expediency. He originally persecuted the Christian churches, but later allowed the church to be revived as a political organization so as to help with the war effort, and he also supported Muslim separatists so they could cause trouble for the Chinese government, which had not yet been taken over by the Communists. Like Mao, Stalin killed millions for reasons having nothing to do with religion, mostly because he was wiping out enemies – kulaks, non-Russian minorities, real or imagined traitors – or because his ignorance of economic reality caused catastrophic famines.

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were actually steeped in Buddhist tradition. Pol Pot’s outrages also had nothing to do with religion: he went after ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese, and anyone with an education, and anyone who thought Pol Pot’s ideas were crazy – a long list. And, as was the case in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China, a lot of the damage in Cambodia stemmed from the fact that Pol Pot was clueless no how to run an economy: he wanted to destroy urban Cambodia and drag the country back to its agrarian roots. And succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings.

Now, let’s look at all of the killing done by religious people, in God’s name, allegedly in fulfillment of God’s will. Christians did by far the most damage, killing 100 million during the colonization of the Americas, to include God-driven “Manifest Destiny” as Uncle Sam exterminated the Native Americans. Plus two million dead during the enslavement of Africans by Bible-wielding Europeans. Almost a million in Rwanda. Thousands in the Phillippines, by the U.S. military. Thousands of Bosnians and Croats. Thousands in the inquisitions. And so on and so on.

On the Muslim side, uncounted victims killed in the Islamic invasions following the rise of Muhammad, spreading from Spain to the Phillippines and from the Balkans to deepest Africa. One million for the Hazaras, Shia Muslims, in Afghanistan. A million Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians, killed by the Ottomans. A million in Bangladesh. A million in Sudan. A hundred thousand Kurds. Religion also played a part in the Nigerian civil war which killed two million. And of course the endless waves of Muslim terrorism.

Much of history’s bloodshed occurred when one side in a conflict clearly had the upper hand against the other, but plenty of people also died in the more evenly-matched conflicts. A million in the Crusades. Five million in the Thirty Years’ War which was driven by religion. Three million in the French religious wars. Two hundred thousand in the religious wars in Lebanon. Pakistan versus India. Israel versus the Muslims. The Irish Catholics and Protestants. Sunni versus Shia.

The key difference here, is that the mass murders in the name of religion, really were in the name of religion: there were no murders in the name of atheism. This is what happens, when you assume that the sins of one alleged atheist can be imputed to all atheists everywhere, that the crimes of an insane Russian ruler eighty years ago can be flung in the face of the local atheist kid who drives the glee club to the old folks’ home. You play that game, and nonbelievers can do the same thing -- hold your local Baptists and Lutherans responsible for everything from the Inquisition to Vlad the Impaler. Lumping all adherents of a belief system into one lump and holding everyone responsible for the offense of the individuals, has a handy name: bigotry. Dishonest bigotry to boot.

All of this murder by religious people is unsurprising, given the frankly genocidal nature of the Bible and the Qur’an. The Qur’an explicitly orders Muslims to declare war on non-Muslims until they submit to Allah, or die. The Bible states that as soon as the Israelites freed themselves from enslavement in Egypt and arrive in the Holy Land, they exterminated all non-Jews through the end of the Torah and into the Book of Joshua, all with God’s explicit approval. And the sad part is that historically, it never happened: the Jewish priests who wrote those texts knew the Israelites hadn’t committed genocide, but they wanted everybody to think they had. In the eyes of religious people, genocide against unbelievers is totally okay. All to glorify God.

Needless to say, there is no atheist book of that kind, telling atheists to take up the sword and kill all the Christians. If any atheist were to write such a volume, the other atheists would condemn the book and write off its author as insane.

And no, Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto don’t count. They had almost nothing to say about religion, other than to point out religion as a mere symptom of an oppressed people, and a form of protest by the poor. Marx, in his writings, did not call on atheists to kill in the thousands: again, you’re thinking of the Bible and the Qur’an.

And by the way, religious communist groups have existed for the entire history of communism, in part because the way Jesus lived his life, and advised others to live, was quite close to the communist ideal, the rejection of possessions and wealth. This wouldn’t be the case if the world’s Marxists were hell-bent on exterminating religion. Even in the bad old days of the Soviet Union, one third of the Soviet people believed in God.

When religious people aren’t abrogating the rights of people they disagree with by killing them, then they resort to other methods for inflicting upon innocent bystanders their own quaint views on freedom, oppression, rights, injustice. The religious people have been working to shove religious views into politics and law and science and medicine, to take away the rights of women, gays and lesbians, to chase nonconformists out of our high schools, to ram their views down everyone else’s throats in the form of legislation. Throwing bricks at women’s clinics, screaming “God hates fags” at military funerals, phoning in death threats against liberal legislators, driving atheist politicians out of the political arena, declaring war on the Boy Scouts for being insufficiently hateful, peddling fear and hate and intolerance. They are also working hand in hand with the conservative zealots who have been working to destroy our economy just to make Obama look bad, take away union rights, take away voting rights, wreck the workings of Congress, keep Hispanics as second-class citizens. Around the globe they are killing atheists across the Muslim world, trying to force European and Latin American governments to turn Catholic doctrine into law, taking over family law not only in Muslim countries but even in Israel, and launching riots when some Danish guy draws a picture of Muhammad. And screaming that anyone who disagrees with them is declaring war on them.

This of course is not new. Religion has been a key tool for oppressive rulers over the centuries. Arguably the most oppressive political system in human civilization, European feudalism, attacked the most advanced society on earth, Roman Europe, and threw a blanket of ignorance and armed oppression over it for a thousand years. And the knights and barons who inflicted this misery upon Europe worked hand in glove with Christianity. Priests told their flocks that the ruling knights had every right to oppress them and steal everything that wasn’t nailed down and rape their daughters, and in return the knights made the priests very rich as they abjectly betrayed their flocks to glorified slavery. Be good slaves in this life and sit at the feet of Jesus in the next.

That is the religious track record on oppression. Atheists? The Jesus people have been trying to portray atheists as scary militants, which is almost as silly as their other parallel effort, trying to persuade America that gays are scary sociopaths hell-bent on raping your son and marrying your dog (or, worse, redecorating your house – window treatments!). But atheists preach love and tolerance and reason and logic. They do good charitable work in the world, contrary to what cheap-shot artist Joe Klein believes, and they don’t hurt anybody or anything. Oppression is not their thing and never will be.

Christians have also been arguing that morality only comes from religion and that atheists have no moral compass. Um, wrong. Human moral values pre-date not only the Christians but also the Jews. Moral values were developed by the Bronze Age and Iron Age tribesmen who came before the Jews. The guys who came up with the moral compass of western civilization, are actually the tribes that the forefathers of the three monotheistic religions -- Moses and Joshua – were trying to kill off: if they had succeeded in exterminating not only those tribal peoples but also their ideas, all of the underpinnings of moral belief in western civilization could have been wiped out. Therefore, the biggest potential threat to morality was actually….the people who founded our Abrahamic religions.

Also, as I’ve noted earlier, the argument that religion is the source and fount of all morality starts to wobble a bit, when you actually read the Bible. The early books establishing Biblical morality are wildly uneven, going on and on for pages about all the animals you can’t eat, and the specifications for the gorgeous temple and the rich offerings Jews must give to the priests, but saying nothing – nothing! – about marriage between one and one woman, possibly because the great men of that day all had multiple wives. And then the book goes on to condone genocide, and ethnic cleansing, and selling your daughter into slavery, and rape as a war tactic, and beating uppity women and children to death. Lots of “crimes” calling for a brutal death by stoning. And then proceeds to describe Biblical patriarchs who tried to kill their children, repeatedly handed their female relatives over to others to be raped, and and killed, stole, and cheated, and committed incest. All with God’s approval. That’s Biblical morality.

So while the Jesus people have given us centuries of oppression and resisted the forward march of civilization, what have the nonbelievers given us?

Western civilization, that’s what. Science, technology, the arts, philosophy, modern economics. People who don’t buy the God stuff include Zuckerberg and Gates and Buffett. Confucius, Laozi and Kant. The more intelligent of the Greek philosophers. Clarence Darrow. People who fought for your rights like Elizabeth Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Betty Friedan, Andrei Sakharov, and the founder of Planned Parenthood.

People who don’t buy the Jesus stuff made the original discoveries for DNA, hydrogen, the Big Bang, the first television tube, the telephone, the transistor, Boolean algebra, nylon, evolution, subatomic particles, radioactivity, quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, holograms, surgical sterilization and anesthetics, free-market capitalist theory and Ricardian theory, galactic astronomy, a cholera therapy that saved 50 million lives, the microchip, statistical analysis, marrow transplants to cure leukemia, cybernetics, the typhus vaccine, blood transfusion, Pavlovian conditioning, Turing computer theory, cloning, actuarial theory, and a little thing called the World Wide Web.

The nonbelievers include Kafka, Pushkin, Gorky, Keats, Mencken, Nabokov, Mahler, Munch, Brahms, Chaplin, Copland, O’Neill, Shelley, Dali, Godard, Proust, Steinbeck, Conrad, Eliot, Maugham, Arthur Miller, Pinter, Sartre, Hemingway, Ibsen, Twain, Brecht, Chekov, Schubert, Van Gogh, Matisse, Monet, Schumann, Bergman, Shaw, Vidal, Vonnegut, HG Wells, Virginia Woolf, Berlin, Zola, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the creators of Sherlock Holmes, the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Stranger, the Forsytes, Catch-22, Stranger In a Strange Land, Brave New World, Space Odyssey, Raisin in the Sun, and Frankenstein.

So there you go. Mass murder, religious warfare, terrorism, oppression and resistance to new ideas are overwhelmingly the work of the God People, because their Good Books tell them to do so. Nonbelievers are the thinkers and builders and artists who move humanity forward. And human morality happens in spite of religion, not because of it.

Subscription Note: 

Choosing to subscribe to this topic will automatically register you for email notifications for comments and updates on this thread.

Email notifications will be sent out daily by default unless specified otherwise on your account which you can edit by going to your userpage here and clicking on the subscriptions tab.

mysticrose's picture
That was an awful reality! I

That was an awful reality! I thought Hitler was not in favor with the Christian people because he killed the Jews where Jesus came from. Religions are really influential in our world and they are increasing as new religions had their birth these recent years. When will the growth of religions decrease? It seems that some founders found out that starting a religion is a good way to make business as well.

Henry Plantagenet's picture
It's already decreasing. In

It's already decreasing. In seven years the number of believers in America dropped an amazing 13 percent.

SammyShazaam's picture
I was just discussing this

I was just discussing this with someone this morning actually. From reading Mein Kempf and other things by and about Hitler, I was under the impression that he was against religion in general because it got in the way of progress as he envisioned it for science and the state.

Zaphod's picture
Well he did order the Nazis'

Well he did order the Nazis to burn books, bibles included and wanted to rewrite things from a more scientifically accurate perspective. In a lot of ways he was a genius, to bad he was also insane and a complete psychopath who wanted a unified Europe and woulds top at nothing to obtain this. He also wanted to preserve German culture and thought the Jewish people were responsible for the degradation of German culture while he apparently completely ignored Roman influence. Real German culture would have been Pagan in my opinion. but whatever the guy was crazy so as it is with crazy people it does not always matter exactly what the facts is. He said he was raised as a German Christian and thought of the Jews as a plague destroying the culture and many many Jewish people died because of this. In reality I think he was saying what ever it took to get people to do his biding. he was born a partial Jew and I guess the Jewish mentality was so strong he struggled with seeing how it could coexist with a more scientific world as he envisioned it. he took separation of class and its effects and turned it against the Jews Jewish people be cause they were the richer people and he fought for the underdog representing them against the Jewish people. He went to great length to exterminate the Jewish mentality and all along he looked at being Jewish as a form of faith that did not comply with his world view. People with strong faith would choose death before denouncing said faith. The main conundrum for Hitler being that Jewish faith was intertwined with with Jewish people as a nation a people and a culture making it hard to get them to comply with his plans.

Unknowntyper's picture
That belongs on a T-shirt :)

That belongs on a T-shirt :)

Zaphod's picture
That would be a long T-shirt

That would be a long T-shirt or very small font!

SammyShazaam's picture
So let me get this straight.

So let me get this straight. In terms of genocidal dictatorships, atheists have 3... Christians have too many to count. And counting.

Lol, UnknownTyper, if there were a shirt long enough to fit this post, it could also fit 7 or 8 people :)

firebolt's picture
And the award for the world's

And the award for the world's longest post goes to Henry! :) Awesome post and a refreshing read, something that we can reference in those times of atheist bashing.

mattyn's picture
I second that! Somebody send

I second that! Somebody send that guy a pizza for his time. When I first read the title of the post, I was fuming and I clicked on it expecting the worst. Instead, I got a history lesson. :)

SammyShazaam's picture
Mind*blown*. First off, how

Mind*blown*. First off, how can one send a pizza-gram? And sheepishly, how could one potentially receive a pizza-gram (I'm so hungry right now...)?

But of course, Henry deserves a pizza-gram for his epic and engaging post here :) Yep, paying it forward... just keep me in mind next time your giving out free pizzas.

mysticrose's picture
Very informative and

Very informative and awakening history lesson!

Rob's picture
Excellent post here. I

Excellent post here. I believe that in general we might be looking at religions as an obsolete form of belief in less than 3 more generations.

SammyShazaam's picture
I believe within 500 years

I believe within 500 years tops, our current spectrum of religion will look as ridiculous to us as Greek Mythology does to most Christians, and viewed as simplistic as Taoism to Buddhists.

ginamoon's picture
I first hesitate to read the

I first hesitate to read the opening post cause it is literally history already. :P
Great effort for the opening poster. No doubt he provided us piece of history and interesting read.

Zaphod's picture
It sure was a long post,

It sure was a long post, interesting indeed a little too intimidating for me to fact check on at this time, maybe someday. Where has Henry gone off to these days!

efpierce's picture
That post just took up a big

That post just took up a big part of my day! It certainly was a lengthy read, but well worth the effort in my opinion.

SammyShazaam's picture
btw, thanks for the list of

btw, thanks for the list of influential nonbelievers. I didn't no Chekhov was in the club! I've always loved his work.

mickron88's picture
this is the first longest

this is the first longest post ever in AR...

hahah....nice but still nonsensical BS i say....

its identical to the earlier post...(i don't know if you remember a couple of months ago) and on by looking at the post...as always...making atheist the oppressor.

"kings of genocide!" ...really?

Glacier's picture
There is no atheist doctrine,

There is no atheist doctrine, so by definition it's impossible to kill in the name of atheism. Now, that said, you could argue that atheism can lead to nihilism and other destructive belief systems such as Stalin, but it's not a direct link. The only religious belief that is directly linked with violence is Islam. For all the rest, it's more the case of So-And-So happening to belong to religion X, but was motivated by reason Y. In some cases you could argue an indirect link in the religion X makes one susceptible to becoming motivated by reason Y (be it money, power, greed, lust, or whatever reason people want to conquer or kill), but each case would have to be assessed independently.

Nyarlathotep's picture
Glacier - The only religious

Glacier - The only religious belief that is directly linked with violence is Islam.

Popes ordering religious wars doesn't count?

Glacier's picture
No more than if Dawkins

No more than if Dawkins ordered war on religious people (if he had equivalent political power).

Nyarlathotep's picture
Glacier - No more than if

Glacier - No more than if Dawkins ordered war on religious people (if he had equivalent political power).

I'm skeptical that you know the outcome of hypothetical events.

Glacier's picture
The point is, you would NOT

The point is, you would NOT blame it on atheism, nor do you when Stalin or his ilk do it. You can't. It's impossible because there's no religious text that says atheists should kill in the name of the Flying Lasagna Monster. Similarly, when the Pope issues a decree to go fight Muslims in Jerusalem, he was not doing it because of a religious text. It was political. The Byzantine Emperor appealed for help, and eventually he agreed, and issued the degree to gather troops. Along the way the slaughtered some Jews, which was also political, not religiously motivated.

Christianity = WWJD
Buddhism = WWBD
Islam = WDMD (What did Muhammad do?)

Everything else is political, cultural, or delusional.

Sheldon's picture
"Not long ago, a denizen of

"Not long ago, a denizen of one of these internet sites wheeled out the old conservative canard, to the effect that the worst mass murders and crimes in human history were the work of atheists: Hitler, Mao, blah blah blah."

Hitler wasn't an atheist and according to the bible genocide is fine, so what;s his problem? in fact I've yet to encounter an atheist who didn't find genocide appalling, but have heard quite a few religious apologists claim it is ok when their deity does it.

Glacier's picture
Have you encountered a Jew,

Have you encountered a Jew, Christian, Muzzie, or Hindu who doesn't find genocide appalling? Not that it matters because we all know that 99.9% of the population of all religious persuasions are against it.

The thing about mass murder is that you don't realize what you're doing until it's over. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc. got good people who were dead set against killing to kill. Lots has been written as to why, but really it boils down to whether or not you have the balls to stand up for what's right even if it means you get executed.

Most people don't.

___________________________________________________
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
~ Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984)

Sheldon's picture
"Have you encountered a Jew,

"Have you encountered a Jew, Christian, Muzzie, or Hindu who doesn't find genocide appalling? "

Yes, William Lane Craig is a christian and he is on record as an apologist for biblical genocide. Hitler of course was a christian, he not only was fine with genocide, but stated repeatedly that his persecution and murder of European Jews was God's work. You had to be christian to get into the German SS divisions, and they ran the death camps that committed the genocide of the Holocaust. In the Rwandan Genocide catholic priests played a major role in helping round up people to be murdered. In Serbia ultra right wing christians committed genocide against Muslims in neighbouring Croatia.

These are just off the top of my head of course.

"we all know that 99.9% of the population of all religious persuasions are against it."

Citation please, I'd like to see the research evidence for that claim. Many christians seem fine with the idea that humans will be tortured forever after they die, that belief seems incongruous with your claim.

"The thing about mass murder is that you don't realize what you're doing until it's over."

I'm very dubious, I think the first step has always been to single out a group or demographic and dehumanise them, this indoctrination is well documented in the regimes you mention. The countries that did the most to protect Jews and other groups from the occupying Nazis were the ones where people had been raised to think for themselves, and not indoctrinated in either religious or political ideologies. There were of course theists who bravely risked and even lost their lives to resist the Holocaust, but for me the RCC missed the chance to justify it's claims for moral ascendancy and in it's concordat with Nazism lost any justification for the claim forever. Given the revelations about its behaviour since it has shown it is not a force for good, and that individuals tend to be moral despite, rather than because of, their religious teachings.

Sapporo's picture
Christian and Muslim dogma

Christian and Muslim dogma says that those not of their religion will be tortured, and yet hundreds of millions if not a couple of billion have little or no problem with that.

Glacier's picture
William Lane Craig is a

William Lane Craig is a Christian. Hitler was an Odinist much like Anders Brevik. He was not a Bible apologist like Craig. It's totally dishonest to equate the two. Now, when Craig does things and says genocide is good, yadda, yadda, you can absolutely blame the Bible and Christian teachings. When hitler says killing is good, he did not use the Bible. If you cannot see why Craig is a Christian and Hitler is not, then you need to try take off your SJW glasses so you can see straight.

BTW, IF Hitler did use the Bible as justification, it would be like how he used Darwin to justify eugenics. He did not really understand Darwin or the Bible, so it's not the fault of Darwin or the Bible. If Craig and Dawkins get together to go on a killing spree because of the teachings of their respective holy books, then yes, you could blame the teachings of Jesus or Darwin.

Sheldon's picture
"William Lane Craig is a

"William Lane Craig is a Christian. Hitler was an Odinist much like Anders Brevik. He was not a Bible apologist like Craig. It's totally dishonest to equate the two"

Straw man as I never equated the two, it was your request for examples of christians who weren't appalled by genocide I gave some, so it's doubly dishonest now to pretend the comparison is mine, and to use the no true Scotsman fallacy to dismiss examples of christians that contradict your claim. It's not my claim Hitler was a christian either, it was Hitler's, and he made it all his life, even at the end when all political mileage was gone from the claim. The RCC had no problem with his claim, honouring his birthday with a special mass in churches all over Germany every year until he died. Hitler never claimed to be a pagan either, that was Himmler.

"When hitler says killing is good, he did not use the Bible."

Straw man as I never claimed he had.

"If you cannot see why Craig is a Christian and Hitler is not, then you need to try take off your SJW glasses so you can see straight."

Puerile name calling, is that your argument, ad hominem fallacy, and you had the nerve to call me dishonest.

"BTW, IF Hitler did use the Bible as justification, it would be like how he used Darwin to justify eugenics."

Rubbish, firstly I never claimed he'd cited the bible, so that's twice you have used that lie after calling me dishonest, irony overload. However the bible has ample text invoking violence. I have no idea why you've mentioned Darwin as it has nothing to do with your claim for examples, but since you brought it up he was a humanist and a pacifist.

The Nazis racist propaganda called social darwinism (small d deliberate) has absolutely no basis in anything Darwin said or stood for, and nothing at all to do with evolution. Though again what this has to with your request for examples of christian who were not appalled by genocide is unclear. This strikes me as red herring.

"He did not really understand Darwin or the Bible, so it's not the fault of Darwin or the Bible. "

I never claimed he understood either. You asked if anyone knew of christians who weren't appalled by genocide, and since Hitler claimed he was a christian and was not appalled by genocide ipso facto he is an example of what you requested. Just where exactly do you think virulent antisemitism has it's roots, if not in European christian beliefs? European christianity was responsible for centuries of virulent antisemitism, and Hitler was born and raised a christian in a country that was overwhelmingly christian and which under the Nazis was responsible for the genocide of the Holocaust.

"If Craig and Dawkins get together to go on a killing spree because of the teachings of their respective holy books, then yes, you could blame the teachings of Jesus or Darwin."

What on earth are you talking about, what holy book? Dawkins is an atheist and has no holy book. Craig by comparison is on record as an apologist for genocide, you asked if anyone knew of a christian who wasn't appalled by genocide, WLC is a christian who isn't, and thinks it is morally acceptable. What the hell does that have to do with Professor Dawkins? This sounds like a complete red herring to me.

I notice you haven't attempted to offer any citation after I requested them for your made up stat, quelle surprise. Another irony overload after accusation of dishonesty over a comparison I didn't even make.

Sheldon's picture
"Ever since the Middle Ages,

"Ever since the Middle Ages, persecutions of Jews took place all over Europe. This was mainly due to the Christian Church’s persecution of Jews and Jewry, which was frequently followed by public pogroms. Jews were seen as strangers who represented a different religion in Christian medieval Europe. According to the Christians, the Jews were brash enough to deny that Jesus Christ was the Son of God.

Accordingly, the Church and the people frequently accused the Jews of all sorts of misfortunes: The Jews were accused of being responsible for the death of Christ, they were accused of killing Christian children, and they were accused of causing natural catastrophes. When the Plague (The Black Death) broke out in Europe in 1348, the Jews were also accused of having caused that to happen."

http://www.projetaladin.org/holocaust/en/history-of-the-holocaust-shoah/...

"The Nazis exploited a variety of anti-Semitic myths, many of which had been entrenched in European culture for generations. They promoted the idea of a 'master race', claiming that Germany should be a nation of pure-blooded 'Aryans', uncontaminated by the influence of inferior peoples such as Jews. At the time of Hitler's rise to power, Germany was experiencing great economic hardship, and Hitler used the Jews as a scapegoat, blaming them for the collapse of German society. This is one of the reasons the Nazis found so many willing adherents to the Nazi cause against the Jews. In 1937, ****the Christian church seemed to do relatively little to defend the Jews, apart from those who converted to Christianity. The Pope at the time denounced the Nazi's ideas of racial purity, but did not condemn the anti-Jewish decrees implemented by the Nazis."

http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/voices/info/antisemitism/antisemit...

"Christianity and antisemitism deals with the hostility of Christian Churches, Christian groups, and by Christians in general to Judaism and the Jewish people.

Christian rhetoric and antipathy towards Jews developed in the early years of Christianity and was reinforced by the belief that Jews had killed Christ and ever increasing anti-Jewish measures over the ensuing centuries. The action taken by Christians against Jews included acts of ostracism, humiliation and violence, and murder culminating in the Holocaust"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_antisemitism

Pages

Donating = Loving

Heart Icon

Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.

Or make a one-time donation in any amount.