Well, but some prominent atheists are in agreement that religion is bad and should be discouraged or abolished. So what I’m saying is if an atheist, like some of the authors who have published these books lately, are actively hostile to Christianity, or any religion, they need to offer something as an alternative.
Some prominent atheists may; most are pretty live-and-let-live about the whole thing.
The only societies that I know of that ever attempted to create for themselves an explicitly atheistic culture was Communism, which is not exactly famous for Social Justice.
The United States government could be considered explicitly agnostic, and it’s done quite a lot of good as well as harm – just as most any religion has. The reign of Ashoka the Great in India is another example of a government blind to religion, and it’s rightly considered a golden age.
On the flip side, one you missed is the government of France after the revolution there.
The “saints” of the atheistic philosophy that I know of are Peter Singer (who proposes baby-killing), the now-dead Margaret Sanger (the promiscuous racist who started Planned Parenthood), and Frederich Nietsche, who, after proclaiming God was dead, went (and stayed) crazy until the end of his earthly life.
Atheism is not a monolithic movement. To be an atheist, one only has to say ‘I don’t believe in God’ – not ‘I don’t believe in God, so let’s kill babies and exterminate minorities!’ Many atheists, if not most, strongly disagree with Singer’s utilitarian philosophy; some, in fact, happen to be strongly anti-abortion; some don’t even like Nietzsche!
I realize many atheists possess native intelligence, but it seems profoundly stupid to propose ridding ourselves of religion, which is a positive thing, without offering something better in its place.
Religion is not by any stretch universally positive; a great many evils have been committed in its name. We can thank religion for the genocide of the Canaanites, for the Crusades, for the Huguenot wars, for autos-da-fe, for human sacrifice, for the kamikaze strikes in World War II, for violent jihad, for countless other atrocities. To say ‘it’s a positive thing’ is whitewashing history: religion has been responsible for countless goods, but also for countless evils.
You want a better thing? Secular communism attempts that, but runs up against the fundamental problem of greed. Socialism tries, and falls through in its own way. The hippies tried, and either sold out or were relegated to being ‘those crazy potheads’. There
isn’t a solution, as long as human nature stays what it is. Religion, like all these other ways of getting us all ahead, takes as well as gives. It’s not any better, but for what good it does – and for what good all other such attempts have done – I am quite thankful.
Am I missing something? Is there some positive element of atheism that I don’t know about? If not, why would anybody advocate it?
You get to sleep late on Sunday
Seriously, once again you’re forgetting that atheism is not a religion: it’s answering ‘no’ to the question ‘do you believe in God?’. It has no rites or rituals, no canons, no take-it-or-leave-it ethics, no churches. The two cannot be compared as equivalent concepts.
grandfather:
There are tangible measurable fruits produced by atheism at a societal level. The 20th century was a sewer of a century. Two atheist ideologies took control of civilizations and turned the century into a bllodbath. Stalin murdered 20 million of his own people, starved about 10 million Ukranians to death and murdered another 10. THe murder went on in the gulags long after his death. Mao murdered about 150 million. Hitler murdered 6 million Jews and millions of non-Jews unleashing a war of unprecendented size and destruction. Pol Pot murdered 40% of the Cambodian population. And now we have another atheist lunatic in Venezuela threatening his continent. There were more people killed by atheist ideologies in seventy years than all human history combined.
Hitler professed Christianity all his life (and indeed, spoke quite vehemently
against atheism), and Pol Pot was, if I’m not mistaken, Buddhist – so don’t you go laying those two on the unbelievers’ doorstep. However, as I’ve said before, no totalitarian regime has ever killed ‘in the name of atheism’. They killed because religion was something they could not control – and what they could not control, they feared.
