Religion is not evil

[Leumas]

Let me see if I understand your argument right:

1) Catholicism is a facet of religion.
2) Communism is a facet of atheism.3) Catholicism has killed a lot of people.
4) Communism has killed a lot of people.
conc. Tu quoque

Is that about right? There are two things you aren't seeing here. One is that 2) is false, as people have been trying to tell you and you've been condescendingly dismissive of their arguments, another is that a tu quoque argument is a fallacious one so you don't really got much point anyway.

In fact THE FIRST COMMUNIST AUTHORITY was The Christians.....read Acts 4:32 to 5:10

They shared their wealth....they demanded it....they killed people who did not do it....and people in the community lived in fear. And they had TWELVE leaders who were more equal than the others.

Acts 4:

32 All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. 33 With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all 34 that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales 35 and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.
36 Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus, whom the apostles called Barnabas (which means “son of encouragement”), 37 sold a field he owned and brought the money and put it at the apostles’ feet.

Acts 5:

1 Now a man named Ananias, together with his wife Sapphira, also sold a piece of property. 2 With his wife’s full knowledge he kept back part of the money for himself, but brought the rest and put it at the apostles’ feet.

3 Then Peter said, “Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? 4 Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied just to human beings but to God.”

5 When Ananias heard this, he fell down and died. And great fear seized all who heard what had happened. 6 Then some young men came forward, wrapped up his body, and carried him out and buried him.

7 About three hours later his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. 8 Peter asked her, “Tell me, is this the price you and Ananias got for the land?”

“Yes,” she said, “that is the price.”

9 Peter said to her, “How could you conspire to test the Spirit of the Lord? Listen! The feet of the men who buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out also.”

10 At that moment she fell down at his feet and died. Then the young men came in and, finding her dead, carried her out and buried her beside her husband. 11 Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.

 

[Belz...]

Am I unwilling to go back over my own posts and repost them with annotations and footnotes? Yes. If other people aren't willing to read them carefully in the first place that's an issue for them.

So it can't possibly be your own inadequacy as a communicator which is responsible ? Just quote the damn posts.

 

[westprog]

They don't believe they've misunderstood a thing, and your assertions otherwise have been less than stellar. Similarly, there's what your views are and what you say your views are. The former doesn't change much, while the latter seems to be somewhat more fluid. To use rramjet as an example again, his "views" had a half-life of about 4 pages. More than ten pages back, odds are you could find himself directly contradicting his latest screed, all the while asserting that his position hadn't changed and taking offense at people who called him on it. This went around several times, in almost a perfect circle.

What they "believe" about what I said and what I said are two different things. My arguments are all there, and it's telling that the rebuttals tend to involve paraphrasing rather than quoting. (Except for the odd poster who posts my quotes and then claims they mean something else).

Let me see if I understand your argument right:

1) Catholicism is a facet of religion.
2) Communism is a facet of atheism.
3) Catholicism has killed a lot of people.
4) Communism has killed a lot of people.
conc. Tu quoque

Is that about right? There are two things you aren't seeing here. One is that 2) is false, as people have been trying to tell you and you've been condescendingly dismissive of their arguments, another is that a tu quoque argument is a fallacious one so you don't really got much point anyway.

Why use a brand new phrase? "Is a facet of".

I was as precise as I could possibly be, and I showed precisely how communism and atheism were related. Two methods were employed to dispute this - the rephrasing attack as shown above, and efforts to show that after all, communism isn't as atheist as all that. The suggestion that (2) is false was not backed up by any realistic arguments at all. I had one priest whose Marxism and Christianity were never shown to be simultaneous, a Marxist thinker who disagreed with Marx and fled East Germany, and some unidentfied Chinese friends of someone. Against this I was able to put Marx, Lenin and the history of the twentieth century.

The argument was never a "tu quoque" - it was a suggestion that if one is to regard the evil of religion as something definite and real, then it has to be put in contrast to a known situation where religion does not apply.

How can anything, from engineering to mountain climbing, be judged except against either its absence or its opposite? The argument seems to be that you can judge religion entirely without considering what happens in its absence - that you can judge religion purely on what it gets wrong, and ignore what it gets right - and that you can judge it entirely on the basis of its worst examples- viz. the post that listed everything wrong with scientology and at the end said for scientology substitute religion as a whole.

 

[westprog]

So it can't possibly be your own inadequacy as a communicator which is responsible ? Just quote the damn posts.

What on Earth are you talking about? Quote what posts about what? What bizarre parallel world is this when someone can make a random assertion about my views and it's up to me to prove that I didn't say something by going back through everything I ever said? You can believe whatever you want.

 

[westprog]

In fact THE FIRST COMMUNIST AUTHORITY was The Christians.

It goes to show - even though I made it very, very explicit and entirely unambiguous, without a shadow of possible misinterpretation, exactly whom I was talking about, that won't stop this kind of thing happening.

It's not possible to be a (Marxist**) communist and profess a religion without contradiction.
...
**I specify Marxist communism because otherwise some irrelevant religious commune will get brought up.

Now, could anyone read the above post and my original reference to communism and consider that is arguing in good faith?

 

[Belz...]

What on Earth are you talking about? Quote what posts about what? What bizarre parallel world is this when someone can make a random assertion about my views and it's up to me to prove that I didn't say something by going back through everything I ever said? You can believe whatever you want.

Seems you've already forgotten what we were talking about.

 

[Leumas]

It goes to show - even though I made it very, very explicit and entirely unambiguous, without a shadow of possible misinterpretation, exactly whom I was talking about, that won't stop this kind of thing happening.



Now, could anyone read the above post and my original reference to communism and consider that is arguing in good faith?

Sorry WestProg... I did not read all your posts...I was just responding to the common misconception that communism and atheism are synonymous.

Most Americans do not even understand the difference between Socialism and Communism and have no idea that they are ECONOMIC structures and not political or religious.

Most do not even realize that some of the most oppressive regimes that have existed throughout history were capitalistic.

Many let out a horrified gasp when I explain that Jesus was a communist (or at least James and Peter) and start collecting kindle for the fagot.

 

[Last of the Fraggles]

How can anything, from engineering to mountain climbing, be judged except against either its absence or its opposite? The argument seems to be that you can judge religion entirely without considering what happens in its absence - that you can judge religion purely on what it gets wrong, and ignore what it gets right - and that you can judge it entirely on the basis of its worst examples- viz. the post that listed everything wrong with scientology and at the end said for scientology substitute religion as a whole.

The problem, as has been communicated to you several times and you have ignored, with your approach is that you want to equate the absence of religion with a very specific case of the absence of religion which was confounded by the presence of a number of other factors not least of which was a fairly violent revolution and the imposition of a totalitarian regime.

You are unwilling or unable to separate these factors and instead are presenting the case that the absence of religion and the imposition of a totalitarian regime are somehow connected.

If you really really really insist using the comparison of Communist China with religious societies then we can do so. Having lived in Communist China for a period I think I can pretty safely say that generally modern Chinese society does not miss religion all that much on a day to day basis (although the idea that all Chinese people are atheist doesn't match up with my personal experience.)

Yes, life would probably be better without the presence of a totalitarian Communist government but that's got nothing to do with religion. I'd rather live in largely religion-free China than the Catholic Philippines, Muslim Indonesia, pretty much any Middle Eastern Islamic state or religion-addled Africa.

 

[tsig]

What they "believe" about what I said and what I said are two different things. My arguments are all there, and it's telling that the rebuttals tend to involve paraphrasing rather than quoting. (Except for the odd poster who posts my quotes and then claims they mean something else).



Why use a brand new phrase? "Is a facet of".

I was as precise as I could possibly be, and I showed precisely how communism and atheism were related. Two methods were employed to dispute this - the rephrasing attack as shown above, and efforts to show that after all, communism isn't as atheist as all that. The suggestion that (2) is false was not backed up by any realistic arguments at all. I had one priest whose Marxism and Christianity were never shown to be simultaneous, a Marxist thinker who disagreed with Marx and fled East Germany, and some unidentfied Chinese friends of someone. Against this I was able to put Marx, Lenin and the history of the twentieth century.

The argument was never a "tu quoque" - it was a suggestion that if one is to regard the evil of religion as something definite and real, then it has to be put in contrast to a known situation where religion does not apply.

How can anything, from engineering to mountain climbing, be judged except against either its absence or its opposite? The argument seems to be that you can judge religion entirely without considering what happens in its absence - that you can judge religion purely on what it gets wrong, and ignore what it gets right - and that you can judge it entirely on the basis of its worst examples- viz. the post that listed everything wrong with scientology and at the end said for scientology substitute religion as a whole.

Engineering is judged by whether or not the structure stands and mountain climbing is judged against the mountain neither of which is the opposite or an absence.

 

[tsig]

Well, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and explain it just one more time.

A belief system that includes, as a necessary element, the existence of god is a religious belief system.

A belief system that includes, as a necessary element, the non-existence of god is an atheistic belief system.

Other belief systems don't include or exclude the possibility of god. I wouldn't describe those as religious or atheistic.

A belief system that explicitly claims that atheism is true, together with other elements, can reasonably be described as an atheistic belief system. Marxist communism undoubtedly qualifies in both theory and practice.

Claiming that atheism is just the absence of belief doesn't affect this. Communism is much more than just the absence of a belief in god. It includes all kinds of beliefs about the nature of human society. It is quite obviously a belief system, and it's quite obviously atheistic. To claim the contrary is merely perverse.

It goes to show - even though I made it very, very explicit and entirely unambiguous, without a shadow of possible misinterpretation, exactly whom I was talking about, that won't stop this kind of thing happening.



Now, could anyone read the above post and my original reference to communism and consider that is arguing in good faith?

The post quoted above is the first instance I can find of you mentioning communism and it isn't exactly like you remember it.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

What they "believe" about what I said and what I said are two different things. My arguments are all there, and it's telling that the rebuttals tend to involve paraphrasing rather than quoting. (Except for the odd poster who posts my quotes and then claims they mean something else).



Why use a brand new phrase? "Is a facet of".

I was as precise as I could possibly be, and I showed precisely how communism and atheism were related. Two methods were employed to dispute this - the rephrasing attack as shown above, and efforts to show that after all, communism isn't as atheist as all that. The suggestion that (2) is false was not backed up by any realistic arguments at all. I had one priest whose Marxism and Christianity were never shown to be simultaneous, a Marxist thinker who disagreed with Marx and fled East Germany, and some unidentfied Chinese friends of someone. Against this I was able to put Marx, Lenin and the history of the twentieth century.

The argument was never a "tu quoque" - it was a suggestion that if one is to regard the evil of religion as something definite and real, then it has to be put in contrast to a known situation where religion does not apply.

How can anything, from engineering to mountain climbing, be judged except against either its absence or its opposite? The argument seems to be that you can judge religion entirely without considering what happens in its absence - that you can judge religion purely on what it gets wrong, and ignore what it gets right - and that you can judge it entirely on the basis of its worst examples- viz. the post that listed everything wrong with scientology and at the end said for scientology substitute religion as a whole.

Weeelp, I gave you a fair chance to cut through the semantics and assertions, and you responded with more semantics and assertions. I'm back to the peanut gallery, then. Enjoy your trolling.

 

[Complexity]

To the thread title:

Yes, it is.

 

[Dismember]

What's this then?

westprog:
A belief system that includes, as a necessary element, the non-existence of god is an atheistic belief system.

Westprog's example seems pretty clear to me and I don't understand how it's being mistaken for equivocation (or conflation or whatever everyone seems to think it is). Maybe I'm missing something..? But as I see it:

To say that atheism is a necessary element in a belief system is obviously not the same as claiming it is the same thing as the belief system.

For example, how 'bout materialism: atheism is a necessary element of materialism; you can't be a materialist while believing in god(s). But that does not imply that atheism = materialism, nor does Westprog's post imply that atheism = communism, unless I totally misunderstood it.

Secular humanism (emphasis on secular) would be another example, not of an "atheistic" belief but of a non-religious one, at least. A nonreligious stance (including but not limited to atheism) is a necessary element in that particular worldview, but that is obviously not the same as saying they are the same thing. Just being non-religious doesn't necessarily mean you are also a secular humanist.

Disclaimer: I'm still 4 pages away from the end of the thread so maybe this has been resolved by now.

 

[Trent Wray]

How can anything, from engineering to mountain climbing, be judged except against either its absence or its opposite? The argument seems to be that you can judge religion entirely without considering what happens in its absence - that you can judge religion purely on what it gets wrong, and ignore what it gets right - and that you can judge it entirely on the basis of its worst examples- viz. the post that listed everything wrong with scientology and at the end said for scientology substitute religion as a whole.

Whether this is the argument or not (as you put it), I haven't paid attention to every post ... however, I would be interested if you would respond to my post here, because I see it as a valid point. If you don't want to respond to it, no worries.

 

[Akhenaten]

What's this then?

westprog:
A belief system that includes, as a necessary element, the non-existence of god is an atheistic belief system.

Westprog's example seems pretty clear to me and I don't understand how it's being mistaken for equivocation (or conflation or whatever everyone seems to think it is). Maybe I'm missing something..? But as I see it:

To say that atheism is a necessary element in a belief system is obviously not the same as claiming it is the same thing as the belief system.

<snippy>

Communism isn't a belief system.

 

[TubbaBlubba]

Well, things have changed in those centuries. The development of the scientific method since the 17th century has given humanity a reliable method of determining what is true - something that wasn't available previously.

The scientific method has been around for longer than that, at least to the days of Alhasen. The reason it didn't get widespread use until the 17th century (via Bacon et al) was probably because the dark ages were really dark.

 

[westprog]

Sorry WestProg... I did not read all your posts...I was just responding to the common misconception that communism and atheism are synonymous.

Fair enough.

 

[westprog]

You could specify a recipe according to what it leaves out, if it's a dish that actually exists.

Again, this goes back to the crux ... the believer thinks nonspaghetti exists. It doesn't exist. It doesn't lack any ingredient, it lacks EVERY ingredient because it's nonexistent. No one recognizes something that isn't there. It's not fat free, or low on sodium ... it isn't anything whatsoever. I think the believer struggles with wrapping their mind around the idea that atheism is not a religion, because they are looking at nonexistent nonspaghetti as though it were something that were real.

The point is that religion really does exist. Communism really does exist. Whether or not the beliefs are justified or not is a seperate issue from the effects these beliefs have on society.

 

[westprog]

Communism isn't a belief system.

Part of being a communist* is a package of things that have to be accepted. A lot of these involve how things work - which includes materialism, economics and politics. Some more involve a wish as to how things should be - the kind of society that should be created.

I don't see how this doesn't qualify as a belief system. It's something other than a religion, but it's a system of belief. It starts with atheism as a founding principle, and picks up a lot of other stuff along the way.

*Marxist variety. Or Marxist-Leninist, to impose an even more restrictive definition which still includes most of the so-called communist regimes that ever existed

 

[AlBell]

Communism isn't a belief system.

It is if one wants to be a Party member.