Christians/God - Rights/Seductions/
Threats/Evidence
(Top Posts - Distance From Belief
in christianity - 012109)

Someone wrote:

> Tell us about all of the Christian "loonies" who
> have slaughtered millions of people. Come on,
> seriously. I know, you could go back to the
> Crusades. Hey, that was only 500 years ago,
> very relevant to our times and to modern
> Christians, right? [...]

Hitler was a christian, a Catholic. 50 million dead,
including over 8 million in the holocaust, and of
note, a large percentage of the dead were victims
of christians, either German christians or British
christians or American christians or French chris-
tians or Italian christians or other christians. How-
ever, a large number of christian Germans were
killed by non-christian Russians.

Stalin trained to be an Eastern Orthodox minister.
Debatable, the role that impact played when he
stopped believing in God, as christian Europe
had a long history of combining religious faith
with torture and death, and hey, some christians
say "once a christian, always a christian", so ...

Notable, for all the Germans and Russians killed
by Stalin, to this date, not one Russian nuclear
bomb has been launched against any nation, and
the killing of Germans, after all, resulted from the
attack of Russia by Germany. The killing of Rus-
sians and others within the former borders of the
Soviet Union, on the other hand, the cause may
be studied in the following:

Anti-Humanism, Faith, Authoritarianism, Totalitarianism
  http://tinyurl.com/antihumanism-faith

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America, on the other hand, dominated by chris-
tianity, is the only nation to launch a nuclear bomb
(make that -2- nuclear bombs), against a nation that
happened to have, at the time, next-to-no christians
in it. Germany, with christianity playing a large role
in its history and in its war efforts, not attacked with
nuclear weapons, not that the devastation America
and Great Britain (and other 'christian' nations)
wrought upon Germany was any less dire by virtue
of not bombing them with nukes. Fire bombing of
civilian targets played a large role in the destruc-
tion of Germany.

Mao, for all the Chinese that he killed, his nation,
the 3rd most powerful nuclear power in the world,
a predominantly non-Christian nation, has not yet
used a nuclear weapon to attack any other nation.

So, among the top 3 nuclear nations in the world,
only one, the predominantly christian nation of  the
United States of America, has used nuclear weapons
to attack another nation, a non-christian nation (and
yes, it has been argued that those attacks were the
'best' that the US could do at the time, but it could
also be argued that the result was a nuclear arms
race that brought humankind to the edge of extinc-
tion, and may still end up in mass death despite the
end of the Russian-American 'cold war').

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Someone wrote:

> Atheists might think they're being logical and
> "scientific," but in fact you're just in denial of
> the one true God.

Define "one true God", and provide one iota of
evidence that he/it/she/they exists. Disbelievers
also disbelieve in the tooth fairy, allah, the devil,
angels, jinns, and all the other magic beings cooked
up throughout written history, so don't be too put
out that we don't believe in your version of God,
as we're equal opportunity disbelievers.

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Someone wrote:

> And that's okay, He gives you the right to believe
> or not.

Humans, at least in America, are given the right
to believe or disbelieve, by other humans and
by law. In many Muslim countries, right now,
humans don't have that right, and can be sen-
tenced to death for disbelief (among innumer-
able other infractions of Muslim law).

In Christian Europe, torture and death for differing
with the Church on religion was the price paid dur-
ing the darkest period in western history, and their
source for their laws against disbelief and against
other religions was the same christian bible that
modern-day believers use -and- refuse to update
by removing incitements for anti-humanism which
are profuse throughout both the old and new testa-
myths.

As for God, your version, many of the religious
believe his sentence for disbelief is eternal tor-
ture -or- eternal death, so if you claim that that's
a "right", by God, that's one "right" I'd rather do
without, thank you.

Heaven, sounds like it could be fun, but hey, one
can only wonder if it is, as nobody has been there
(that we know of). If the cost for that is that most
will be eternally tortured -or- eternally damned,
I don't think I'd be able to, in good conscience,
live there without objecting strongly to that
eternal torture or eternal death thing, and therein,
I suspect I'd end up eternally tortured or eternally
dead, regardless.

Once again, when you talk about "rights", I don't
feel it's right to eternally kill or torture anyone,
and the so-called love of God, that shouldn't end
at death, but hey, just call me a radical freethinker,
actually daring to think that there are much higher
values than threatening people with eternal death
or eternal torture, and much higher values than
seducing people with promises of immortal bliss
-but- providing absolutely no evidence that im-
mortal bliss is reality rather than "make believe".

Evidence, something the blind faith crowd is ter-
ribly weak in, and something that many require.
As Carl Sagan's wife said after his passing, Carl
didn't want to believe, he wanted to *know*.

Me, too.

Seductions and threats aren't enough for me. Evi-
dence, that's what I need, and when you have some,
please get back to me. Until then, I'll remain a dis-
believer.

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