Clarissa's Blog

6 responses to “Do Atheists Kill Over Religion?”

1. 

   thelyniezian

   December 24, 2015

   Those sorts of people would tell you that communism, or the form practised in the USSR was just another fanatical state religion, or suchlike. I’ve had that come up before, back when I held to any sort of Christian beliefs and was in an argument with some atheist, and was trying to point out that the term simply meant a lack of belief in god(s) when they disagreed.

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   1. 

      Clarissa

      December 24, 2015

      Curiously, the very same people get all upset when I say that Paris terrorists had nothing to do with Islam and Spanish conquistadors were too dumb to understand Christianity. 🙂

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2. 

   Shakti

   December 24, 2015

   They are completely forgetting about the Chinese government (which is not religious at all) and Falun Gong or really any churches as such in China, or really any ethnic minorities with a religion.
   The most contact any westerners would have with Falun Gong is through Shen Yun performances.

   If you want to be tricky you could say that this occurred because of their political opposition to the regime and not their religion, but to the people prosecuted it feels like a distinction without a difference.

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   1. 

      Clarissa

      December 24, 2015

      Good point! What is happening to the Falun Gong is an absolute tragedy. They came to protest at Yale when the president of China was visiting, and that’s how I discovered the horrors that were inflicted on them.

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3. 

   a1skeptic

   December 25, 2015

   Hey Clarissa, thanks for calling me a dumbass. However, before you get to smug in your self-righteousness, consider the question of whether the Nazis killed the Jews during the Holocaust because they were Christians — which almost all of them were — or because they were racists and fascists. Atheists are generally not communists. However, the early communist regime of the Soviet Union did, admittedly, promote atheism as part of their general world view, and they clearly engaged in a vicious campaign against the Eastern Orthodox Church (as against many others). My argument would be that their primary motivation was not to promote atheism; they were terrified of and wanted to undermine the political power of the Eastern Orthodox Church. And when it comes to a group like Falun Gong, I don’t know that the Chinese authorities who harass them are actually atheists. As Frances Fitzgerald pointed out in “Fire in the Lake,” her comprehensive history of the Vietnam war, Ho Chi Minh and his adherents were actually Confucian, or at least in the Confucian tradition. Even so, your overall point is well taken (although I never claimed that atheists were “pure as the driven snow”), but you could have made your point without the name-calling.

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   1. 

      Clarissa

      December 25, 2015

      I was born and grew up in the USSR. And it was an entirely atheist state. There is a lot of positives in that. For instance, nobody was forced to go to church, which is always good.

      However, the persecution of gays, the intolerance towards reproductive rights, the state imposed puritanical approach to sexuality, the denigration of unmarried mothers, etc was just as bad as it can be in any religious state.

      Religion is just an excuse. In its absence people come up with other excuses to police the morality of others and oppress dissidents.

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