Psychology (and science) is not atheist but secular. Most civilized countries in Western Europe have secular governments that enforce secular rather than atheist mores. Some of these secular mores are offensive to religious people but these mores are still the result of gradual evolution of social and moral norms throughout society. If religious people don't like it they are free to live in another country that supports their sacred mores.

Some religiously based views like being anti-gay simply go against common human decency. How are their beliefs inherently different from a KKK-member who thinks it's an abomination that he is forced to interact with blacks as free members of society?

Atheism doesn't need "moral defense", as it contains no ethics. It is, simply, lack of belief in Gods. That in itself offers no morals, norms, laws, edicts or similar. Just as not believing in Yetis does not in and of itself offer any such things. You can speak of trends if you want, but claims about that need to be based on something better than pulling convenient claims out of thin air.

There is no such thing as "atheist psychology". The example with the psychologists treating gays is absurd. First of all it is irrelevant, and second of all odds are that religious practitioners were the majority simply based on historical demographics. Which is probably also irrelevant, but you can actually make a solid case to why that might not be.

The problem is the conclusion some people draw is that atheists have no ethics whatsoever. To them we're free floating unguided objects capable of murdering and pillaging everything around us because we have no magical being or ancient book to tell us we shouldn't.

Why is not wanting to associate with gays against human decency? I believe that forcing people to associate with whom they don't like - and taking their property and/or putting them in a cage if they refuse to - is a greater mark against human decency.

This is what I mean about mores. The "secular" state has taken up the religion of inclusion as an all-encompassing moral good, that gets to trample on other rights.

Perhaps that is or isn't a good thing, but let's not pretend it's any different to religious groups forcing their preferences - also based on their own view of "decency" - on society through laws.

The "go and live in another country" just shows how morally bankrupt your position is.
These are dodges. Atheism creates a worldview that has different practical results to theism. It's a valid thing to look at it. And atheism - creating a view of people as biological units rather than souls - certainly influences how we treat the mentally ill. For good and bad. God never ordained that we should chemically castrate gay people by force. That was atheist science, creating a view of humans not as souls but as biological robots with broken processing units.
This is pretty much correct, however. The only explicitly atheist societies have been dystopian regimes of mass murder, terror and oppression, worse than Nazism, if such a thing is possible.

They can just drink in the separate but equal water fountains we build them.

Sure, but we still can't go around pretending we get our morals from not believing in gods.

And yes, people are much quicker to ascribe "the other side" as a selection of fixed traits and their own side as rational. That isn't really an argument against "the other side", it's an argument against polarizing everything into A or B.

But that's nonsense, as there is nothing about atheism that prevents people from believing in souls or that dictates that you have to view humans as biological units.

Congratulations on proving Godwin's law in one reply.

Again you're acting like humans are uninquisitive robots. That atheism is merely the lack of belief in God and it has no other side effects. That's a dodge, to me.

We try to understand and model the world. It's just what humans do. It's how religion got started. If you start from atheism, or if you take out God, you come to a different understanding and modeling than if you start from theism. One of those understandings tends to be materialism, the belief that we're no more than biological robots and that there is no grand meaning or purpose. From that comes genocide, the deification of ideologies (like communism), and so on. You can deny it, but there's a causal link.

Let me give you an analogy, If you start from the view that one race is superior to another, if you belief the evidence shows that, you more easily get to discrimination or even genocide. There is NOTHING in the belief of the superiority of one race over another that leads to either discrimination or genocide. They're not linked at all. Yet the negative practical outcomes do tend to be linked to that particular belief.

And so it is for atheism and its poisonous offshoots like atheistic communism or purely biology-based psychiatry (which locked up gays and forced them into chemical castration).
1. I didn't prove it, I provided a data point
2. It would be impossible to do it in two replies.

Atheism causes genocide? There is a new one.

Of course it does. All declared atheistic states have been horrifically genocidal and murderous and oppressive.

So the middle east is all about peace because the religions know to value human life and would never blow themselves up in schools, target civilian areas or use cluster ammunition?

The Pakistan/Indian conflicts were because those darn atheists just couldn't stop treating each other like robots.

The biggest aggressor in the world right now is a mostly Christian state. You know, the one that has you declare to god that you're telling the truth in court, with 7 international conflicts. By the way, each of the countries it intervened in were religious states.

Islam is as bad as atheism. I'm not a defender of religion, in general especially Islam, which is the worst and most destructive and oppressive religion on Earth. As for atheism, see: the history of the 20th century atheist states (Cambodia, USSR, China). This is where the facts lead. Regardless of which team you bat for.

Again, Islam.
Again, Islam. And the US is a world peacekeeper - the world is far far better than it would be if the US didn't exist. US Christian ideals have made the world the mostly free and mostly happy place it is today. You can hate it all you like, but it's true.

This is a complete failure in logic on every front.

Pretty sure you're just doing this now because you like arguing though.

Hey, we don't have a billion data points. The ones we do have, show that declared atheist states are the deadliest and most oppressive places on Earth. That's not even debatable.

Instead of just asserting that "it's a logic fail on every front", why not explain why? There's nothing illogical in what I said.

Kelvis, at his wit's end because the idea that atheism might not be superior to religion makes him agitated, strawmanned me. I responded that atheist belief is a strong causal factor in many things from mass murder to genocide to oppression. That is a true statement.

Yeah he is trolling and doing a piss poor job at it too. Have a good one eh.

I'm not trolling at all. In any way. You guys are as stuck in your atheism team-cheering as religious people are in theirs. It's sad.

The truth is that atheism as a worldview has the potential for some extremely negative side effects that surpass even the worst of religion. History supports that strongly. Denying a link between atheism and these atrocities is just an amazing amount of head-in-the-sand.

That's funny because religion is responsible for the most decapitated "heads in the sand" at the moment.

I'm no fan of Islam if you read my posts. But atheism as a population-wide worldview (unmoderated by Christianity) leads to even darker places, however. Like it or not, history is very clear on that.

There's a difference between "atheism causes genocide" and "atheistic declared states historically have carried out genocide".

Yes, the obvious one you pointed out was the number of data points, but more importantly cases of genocide are probably far higher in any state that declares a particular belief system rather than allowing people to decide their own (it's a hypothesis, I haven't checked data). That would mean that being a "declared state" is the issue, rather than what you are declaring.

Also cause and effect are hard to prove, that's why you start with a logical hypotheses and then test data.

The centrality of atheism to these brutal states is laid out in various Marxist writings. Read Lenin, for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxis...ninist_atheism

Atheism leads to a greater belief in materialism. It's a natural fit. When built up as an intellectual structure, it leads to horrible things, worse than anything the worst religion has produced.

For the most part these isms are in the past thanks to prosperity and the might of Christian societies suppressing these atheist societies, but they'll likely come again. A permanent 1984 type society will necessarily be an atheist one; such is impossible under Christianity.

Many of the religion haters would be willing participants in these societies. The instincts are the same, just not the capacity for action.

Kind of a big leap here still...

Any belief system can be turned crazy and used an an excuse for genocide with a thought process of "the world will be better if there are only people like me around". You've failed to justify why atheism is any more so prone to it than religion.

Here is a list of the ten countries with highest percentage of respondents claiming to be either not religious or atheist:

China: 90%
Sweden: 76%
Czech Republic: 75%
Hong Kong: 70%
Netherlands: 66%
UK: 66%
Israel: 65%
Japan: 62%
Germany: 59%
Australia: 58%

I guess Sweden gets pretty dark with those long nights, but some pretty good countries overall.

Isn't there an appreciable difference between "not religious" and "atheist' ?

Its shocking that someone would think they could use China with 1.3 billion oppressed people as the first an example of an atheistic country that supposedly treats people well. Individual rights are routinely violated there. Executions are the highest in the world, labor camps, slave labor factories, restricted internet, the one-child policy, the political and legal status of Tibet, and neglect of freedom of the press in mainland China, lack of legal recognition of human rights and the lack of an independent judiciary, rule of law, and due process. The founder of this political system, Mao Zedong , killed an estimated 35 million innocent people. Is this okay? This is what happens when you think of people as cattle.

For some reason the above list fails to include the anti-religious paradise of North Korea. I don't need to go into horrendous way people are treated there do I?

Compare these two countries to the religious countries of Taiwan and South Korea who have similar ethnic groups but where people are treated with God-given individual rights. It is night and day.

Do people really think that atheism is benign?

Yes, but probably not one relevant to ToothSayer's claim.