The British settlers weren't much better. John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, praised God for sending the plague to destroy most of the Indians. Again, God was on the Puritans side, which must of really pissed off the Indians.
Example such as these are seen through out history. People always seem to think God is on their side. Especially Americans. We fight wars knowing that God hates the enemy. Because of this, more people have been killed in the name of God that any other reason. Profit probably runs a close second. If there is a God (I am pretty sure their isn't) she needs to start striking down all these assholes who are giving her a bad name. God is a simple way of justifying our own selfish acts.
The next time you hear some athlete thanking God for favoring him, try to remember all the dead bodies caused by not being on God's team. It will make you want to become an atheist, if your not one already.
Great post. I hear people praise God often (like after the Super Bowl even), and I always think of all the people this same God does not help. What makes people think they are so special that God is on their side but not helping all those starving, sick, oppressed people around the world (and in our country) who could really use some divine intervention?
ReplyDeleteSarah@ Your comment is better than my post - well said!!!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteGod is on my side, every time I sit down to a plate of spaghetti. Pass the parmesan.
ReplyDeleteRamen.
On a more serious note, I think a bit of digging will show that all wars boil down to resources. More often than not that resource was water in the past, and more recently oil has taken the lead.
Religion is just a great took for motivating the rank and file soldier, but without that resource shortage you would have a hard time getting them to leave their comfortable homes.
I'm an atheist too, and would love to blame religion for wars. I need to be honest here, it's a symptom, not a cause. The good counter example is the billions of people who share the same exact faith yet somehow manage to not go killing everyone around them.
Stopping war has more to do with equitable resource distribution than ending bronze age mythologies.
If you look through the history of the 20th century it was actualy Ideologies(Communism and Nazism) that were the cause of the most human deaths.
ReplyDeleteIronicaly both of those ideologies were/are essentially atheist in their worldiew.
Humans have wanted to kill each other since ever since we first walked the earth. Yet only in the last 150 years have we really perfected it. All the Jihads, Crusades and Inqusitions in history, don't come close to the pre-meditaded mass murder of the Holocoust, or Gulags of recent memory.
Just because Communism and Nazism do not favor a God, does not make them Atheist. The day that a group of Atheist says that All Theists have two choices: abdicate of your God(s) or die. Then you can say that those people died in the name of Atheism.
ReplyDeletehttp://atheism.about.com/od/isatheismdangerous/a/AtheismKilled.htm
Especially since, you know, Hitler was a Catholic and was endorsed by the pope...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.secularism.org.uk/hitlers-election-poster-uses-the.html
Good points guys. However the basic theology behind Communism is an Athiest worldview, that that there is no God or supernatural force that is higher than dialectical theroy.
ReplyDeletePeople were killed or imprisoned for not renouncing their faith/beliefs in the former USSR, and not embracing Communism.
little drummer boy, first off, atheist isn't capitalized. It's a descriptive noun, like bicyclist, pianist, or teacher. It isn't a proper noun like Christian, Muslim, or Egyptian.
ReplyDeleteSecond, the ideas behind Communism are found in many different religions before Marx. Look up the Jewish Kibbutz system of governance for one example. Socrates also put forth a concept of governance that is very similar to the modern concepts of atheism. Communism is no more atheistic than Democracy is Islamic. Systems of governance and theologies are two separate things that can, but don't necessarily have to effect each other.
And to your point about that where you said:
"If you look through the history of the 20th century it was actualy Ideologies(Communism and Nazism) that were the cause of the most human deaths."
You are quite wrong. Influenza alone is responsible for far more deaths than all the wars combined. So is malaria, heart disease, cancer, and car accidents. Statistically, the odds of dying as an act of war or any other kind of violence are quite low for your average human.
oops. Proof reading is your friend.
ReplyDeleteThis sentence:
Socrates also put forth a concept of governance that is very similar to the modern concepts of atheism
should read:
Socrates also put forth a concept of governance that is very similar to the modern concepts of communism.
Bart. A tpyo on my part, the bit about idelogies causing the most deaths in the 20th Century was a reference to those caused by man(and you could loosely include WW2 ect.. in that as well) not natural causes.
ReplyDeleteTrue, some of the tenants and principals of Communist idelogy have their roots in much older ideas. Some people have even used the first few chapters of the book of Acts to justify God being all for Communism(if one can ignore a few inherent condradictions).
The point I'm trying to make is that inspite of all the failings and stuff ups of systems based on a Christian worldview(and you could include your own country's democratic beginnings in that analogy), is that they have been far less destructive to the world than those that have roots in atheistic or non-theistic ideology.
You've failed to connect atheism as the root of communism. I have shown communism was born in theistic environments. Trying to correlate the two is specious. The Nazi's had atrocities just as horrible as Stalin, and they were based on Catholicism.
ReplyDeleteThe horrible deaths were a result of advances in technology, not theology. The collective morality was still stuck in the 1800's.
And the United States wasn't founded on Christianity. We even have a document that states clearly that 'The United States is in no way founded upon Christianity'. It's called The Treaty of Tripoli if you want to look it up.
Atrocities occur irregardless of the national religion. My first post up top lays that out.
This is a stupid argument. The Indians had war, slavery, ethnocentrism, and misogyny too. As did the Africans before the Europeans came. The Europeans just joined in the African and Muslim slave trade already there in Africa, and were really good at it since they had huge ships and many guns. Finally, evil lurks in all men, but it is only the Bible and Christianity that says this and offers a solution, including an accountability system. Thus, it was Christians in Great Britain who ended slavery there and helped jump-start the movement to end slavery in the United States, which had Christians and Non-Christians on both sides. The evils of atheist and secular governments like Mao's China and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, or Barack Obama's growing tyranny, don't make me want to become a secular person or an atheist. Instead, it makes me want to stop big government and inculcate Christian values that much more.
ReplyDelete