Re: REALLY OT: News Flash
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On 02/26/07 12:29, Steve Lamb wrote:
> Ron Johnson wrote:
>> Then Sam Harris was foolish for writing that.
>
> No, you're foolish for not reading more of what he's written...
>
>> If atheism is so fired up great, then the Soviet Union and the PRC
>> would have been workers paradises instead of mass killing fields and
>> the greatest(?) environmental polluters.
>
> ...and mistaking either of those as reasonable. Atheism in and of itself
> is reasonable. But it does not mean that there aren't other ways of being
> unreasonable than being religious. Furthermore you are making the leap that
> Atheism was the cause in either case and not just a byproduct of some other
> forces at work.
>
> http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/10-myths-and-10-truths-about-atheism1/
>
> "2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.
>
> People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot
> were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and
> communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem
> is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the
But they're still atheists. They don't believe in God, they believe
in Stalin or Mao, or whomever.
Thus, atheism *by itself* won't bring about a reasonable society.
> core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable
> from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing
> fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious
> dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run
> amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its
> people became too reasonable."
I see what you're saying, but it's Utopian. Everyone (even
atheists) want to believe *something*. We just believe different
(and maybe not as many) things than theists do.
And, *hopefully*, *theoretically*, we stop believing bits of
Scientific Dogma when they are repeatedly/provably demonstrated false.
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