Why don't you tell us what you really think Bill?
You read that title and you just know what's coming:
"Sure, some religious people (mostly Muslims) have done bad things but the atheists Hitler, Stalin and Mao killed way more people."
Yawn.
Anyway, here's Bill's first paragraph:
In these secular times, religion regularly gets a bad rap. And anti-Christian bigotry especially accelerates, with most of the world’s ills, from burnt toast to global warming, somehow pinned on the Christian faith.
We know the "burnt toast" quip is sarcasm (or is it?), but I wouldn't be at all surprised if he really believes that people are blaming Christianity for global warming. Bill always portrays himself and his fellow Christians as being persecuted. Someone found The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a Microsoft Word document, plugged "Jew" and "Christian" into Find and Replace..., and started selling the revised publication worldwide. For more on Bill's delusions of victimhood, see Brian's Blog at unBelief.
The secularists are especially happy to lay the blame for the wars of the world on the shoulders of religion. They argue that if we just get rid of religion, most conflict would cease, and we could all live together in peace and harmony.
Complete and utter strawman. Atheists may see religion as a source of conflict in the world, but they most certainly do not believe that if all religion suddenly vanished that everything in this world would be fine and dandy.
It's also worth noting that Bill uses the terms "atheism" and "secularism" interchangeably, as if they were the same thing. Bill, the main feature of atheism is a disbelief in a deity, while secularism is the notion that religion should be separated from the state (and vice versa), meaning that governments cannot make laws based solely on appeals to religion. It's possible to be a secularist and a theist at the same time.
Yet the secularists not only blame religion, they seek to whitewash the crimes of secularism. Indeed, a common trick is to claim that Hitler, et. al., were somehow actually religious! The atheists speak of ‘political religion’ and the like, attempting to defuse the secularism of last century’s great mass murderers.
The crimes of secularism? Bill, we live in a secular society right now. Why aren't people dying by the thousands? As for Hitler being religious, refer to Lenny Flank's comments about ridiculous attempts to link evolution with the Nazis and what Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf:
White Aryans, Hitler writes, are the special creations of God, the "highest image of the Lord", put here specifically to rule over the "subhuman" races: "Human culture and civilization on this continent are inseparably bound up with the presence of the Aryan. If he dies out or declines, the dark veils of an age without culture will again descend on this globe. The undermining of the existence of human culture by the destruction of its bearer seems in the eyes of a folkish philosophy the most execrable crime. Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent Creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise."
So, does this mean religion is to blame for the Holocaust Bill? No, and atheists (to my knowledge) aren't making such a claim.
In my opinion, blaming the crimes of Hitler and Stalin on atheism is not only absurd, it's immature. People like Bill are much more interested in throwing mud and spouting fallacy after fallacy. Muehlenberg claims his website "offers reflective and incisive commentary ", yet the most cursory glance at his article titles alone indicates it will offer nothing but more of the same childish rhetoric we've come to expect of the religious far-right.
posted by Sammy Jankis at
14:50
