But since they don't believe in the "Golden Rule" or objective morality, they don't see any reason not to mock others or accuse Christians - fundamentalist or otherwise - of violence when they feel like it.
In the comments to this post, Al Stefanelli, Georgia State Director for the American Atheists takes me to task for daring - daring! - to suggest that given the history of atheism, which has often attempted to achieve its goal of eradicating certain ideas by murdering the humans who carry those ideas, his calls for a jihad against religious beliefs might be less than, well, benign, or, if history is a clue, a stark foreshadowing of what will happen if these dime-store supermen ever get power.
And why shouldn't reasonable people be concerned given the history of murder that atheists have engaged in? After all, what are people to atheists? According to their leading lights, people are mere animals - slightly more evolved mammals, according to Christopher Hitchens, and a random collection of molecules that accidentally happened to develop something that deludes human beings into thinking they are self-conscious, according to Richard Dawkins. Given that view of human nature, why should we not believe that they wouldn't "break a few eggs" - or, hell, send millions of eggs off to the Gulag - to make their favorite omelette?
They've done it in the past.
But rather than answer that question, Stefanelli wants to assert some intangible, non-empirical "moral obligation" against me - as if life wasn't a meaningless stew of zombie humans attempting to beat the Darwinian game of survival:
Al Stefanelli said...
For such a respected blog as your to make such an amateurish mistake is very disheartening. The piece I wrote for the American Atheist blog did not call for the extermination or eradication of Christians, which has been explained ad nauseum already.
It was a call for the eradication of doctrines from within Christianity that are used to violent ends. Doctrines that espouse hatred and discrimination against homosexuals, etc.
The church has done this before, as we do not stone adulterers, etc. I am a peaceful man, and have made it quite clear that I abhor all levels of violence unless one is defending themselves from imminent danger.
Feel free to quote anything that I have had published in the media, but be responsible and do it accurately.
My response:
Peter Sean Bradley said...
Mr. Stefinelli,
Apparently, you didn't actually read what I wrote, or you lack the sense of irony that God - if you will pardon that expression - gave a turnip.
What I asked, in the light of your intolerant and mean-spirited communication, was, inasmuch as atheism had demonstrated a history of murdering people who atheists believed held ungood badthink ideas because those people held such ungood badthink ideas, what should we think when modern atheists once again started using "eliminationist" rhetoric to "exterminate certain ideas?
If you have a scintilla of honesty and/or self-awareness, you'll have to admit that historical atheists were not averse to - Hell, they were positively giddy about - murdering actual human beings as their way of "exterminating" ideas."
Long story short, in light of the murderous history of atheism, why should anyone believe that you aren't implicitly calling for the murder of religious believers?
What have you ever done to make us think that we'd be safe if atheists were once again in charge?
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4 comments:
Giving yourself an assumed fact doesn't make it a "given." Fanatics murder in the name of religions, usually, and non-religious ideologies, sometimes. No one kills in the name of what they *don't* believe in.
They are increasingly fond of eliminationist rhetoric.
What their irate disclaimers fail to do is explain precisely how stubborn "bad" ideas will be expunged from the body politic, without (1) violence or (2) tyrannical methods.
Dawkins himself has come perilously close to the latter with his description of religious education of the young as child abuse, and Sam Harris has tiptoed closer to the gas chamber.
Given their recent exhortations, I have no confidence their ideological heirs will be anything but worse.
XLRQ,
Atheists are so fond of the "kill in the name of" argument.
What a red-herring.
First, who cares what someone kills in the name of. What matters is that they killed.
Atheists have killed millions.
Atheists have killed in more volume than the representatives of any other religion/ideology/worldview/philosophy in the history of the world.
Are we supposed to ignore that fact and the fact that the atheism to which such murderous atheists adhere teaches that human beings are simply an accident with no inherent value as human beings?
Is that just a co-incidence.
Second, people don't committ mass murder "in the name of" anything; they kill because they hate.
Atheists - historical and modern - hate.
Anyone who reads historical and modern atheists can easily see the contempt, scorn and hatred that atheists have for religious people. In general atheists treated - and still treat - religious people as stupid, superstitious and potentially dangerous.
Is there any question, why there is such a history of atheists committing mass murder against people who they view as "sub-human," particularly when atheists don't have a very good sense of how there might be a value that transcends the individual and provides a moral obligation on them not to murder those whose life was "inconvenient"?
DP,
Richard Dawkins has said that raising children in a religion is a kind of "child abuse."
As near as we can tell, he was not speaking metaphorically or hyperbolically. In fact, based on the evidence, I doubt that Dawkins ever speaks hyperbolically or metaphorically, such is the grip of the weird kind of autism he suffers.
If atheists truly believe that raising your child in your religion is a kind of child abuse, I can't for the life of me see any reason why they wouldn't attempt to put an end to that practice, particularly in light of the tendency of atheists to create science fiction scenarios that no other group would dream of going near.
That concern is particularly heightened by the history of atheists in commiting the most heinous atricities that have ever been perpetrated in the history of humanity.
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