So I started reading the God Delusion. I want to use this thread to kind of journal my thoughts and responses to it. Feel free to comment:
I'm imagining a world where people still have gratuitous reason to be horrible to each other. Do the new Atheists really believe that we'd live in some kind of Utopia without religion? Haven't we tried this in the former Communist states? Sure, you might not have those specific issues and atrocities, but we humans are good at massive conflict.
Imagine, with Guacamole, a world with no Atheism. Imagine no Gulag Archipelago. A world without Stalin's mechanistic democide: 40 million + dead because the Supreme Soviet was accountable to no one, especially not God. Imagine 16 to 40 million lives saved from the "Great Leap Forward." Imagine no re-set to the year Zero in Cambodia. etc. etc. etc.
Anyone who wants to dispute that the murderous Communist regimes of the Twentieth Century were not atheistic should try some google fu.
fwiw,
guacamole
Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as ‘Christ-killers’, no Northern Ireland ‘troubles’, no ‘honour killings’, no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money (‘God wants you to give till it hurts’). Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it.
I'm imagining a world where people still have gratuitous reason to be horrible to each other. Do the new Atheists really believe that we'd live in some kind of Utopia without religion? Haven't we tried this in the former Communist states? Sure, you might not have those specific issues and atrocities, but we humans are good at massive conflict.
Imagine, with Guacamole, a world with no Atheism. Imagine no Gulag Archipelago. A world without Stalin's mechanistic democide: 40 million + dead because the Supreme Soviet was accountable to no one, especially not God. Imagine 16 to 40 million lives saved from the "Great Leap Forward." Imagine no re-set to the year Zero in Cambodia. etc. etc. etc.
Anyone who wants to dispute that the murderous Communist regimes of the Twentieth Century were not atheistic should try some google fu.
fwiw,
guacamole
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