First off gun right activist might fight for their rights even violently, claiming the higher authority of the constitution gives them the right. God supersedes everything in all things with moral authority. People have done and continue to the worst things with that authority.

Yes I am using some extreme views to illustrate the point that religions can go from peaceful to ultra violent depending on who is running the religion. That's what makes them so dangerous to everyone.

What do you mean by "enter into a discussion"? I think most people who believe in Jesus would be thrilled to have a conversation about Jesus.

You also have to be clear in your mind about *how* you present yourself in the conversation. There are ways to make either conversation go poorly by how you communicate your point of view.

This isn't a good apples-to-apples comparison. One is explicitly arbitrary.

Following up with "that's interesting, why do you believe that?"

Maybe I'm wrong, but my perception is that would be considered offensive by some to question their beliefs.

I agree on the second point, you've made that very clear in this thread.

You really haven't made your point. You're just making a really bad generalization about religious beliefs.

But you haven't made any argument that this type of thing is a uniquely religious thing. By this argumentation, we should be anti-government because governments like 1940s Germany or present-day North Korea are dangerous governments.

They both seem pretty arbitrary to me. I was going to go with "it's not natural", does that work better?

I can't imagine anyone would find that objectionable.

In your view, what is a non-arbitrary position?

Not really. But I think you should clarify the previous question before moving forward.

Nazi Germany was about as close to religious fanaticism as it gets. At the time Hitler replaced God as the highest moral authority in Germany and we all know how that turned out. Same thing with Russia with Stalin. I already conceded that religious people are not the only ones susceptible to bad ideas and cultures.

My point is that religion can turn otherwise normal gentle people into monsters and can pit entire societies against each other. It seems very unlikely that world can have all these different Gods and live in peace. Do you concede that religions past and present are responsible for terrible evils?

But Nazi Germany isn't actually a religion. All you're doing here is word play. You call it "religious fanaticism" (even though it's not actually a religion) but I could just as well call it "nationalistic fanaticism."

Again, this isn't specific to religion. Societies have been pitted against each other for economic reasons, or just because they don't like each other.

Why?

Sure. I don't claim that there have been no negatives associated with religion.

I don't know, I can't think of a justifiable reason for being anti gay rights to compare to the religious argument, that's the point.

Obviously, terrible evils have happened in the name of many religions...
but what about science?
Nuclear bombs? Machine guns? Tanks? Fighter jets?
All weapons of mass destruction have been invented by scientists.

(Not saying that science is inherently bad -- just that it isn't innocent).

And then we have communism which is strictly atheistic.
Being atheists didn't stop communists from executing millions of people.

Seems atheism is the answer either..

I mean in general, what makes a position non-arbitrary? This can be either for or against.

What you'll probably discover is that at a certain level, everything is arbitrary. And the basis of whatever belief you have ultimately ends up being like a religious belief.

How religious people hold their core beliefs isn't actually that different from how most others hold their core beliefs. Theirs is just more exposed.

Sorry I got distracted, I will get back to you later.

This thread has all my favourite RGT things.

! Missed having you around!

+1

Thanks you two.

I am probably just flying in and out - I don't really see the point in posting here anymore. The forum isn't really the place to challenge to one's atheist views.

Aaron owned you in this thread, but not because of the merits of your respective positions - it never even got to that point. The topic didn't matter.

He owned you because you just weren't capable of engaging in a logical debate. You guys are simply operating on different levels, with a wide gap in between.

So this post was in the middle of about five or six related posts, all of which have been deleted. So why it still here? Everything that it refers to is gone.

Perhaps it was the only one that referred to the initial post but without quoting it and without referencing any specific violation-worthy words contained in it? Or maybe the clean up crew just failed to click a box and left it behind on accident.

How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie pop? The world may never know.

How do you account for the largest atrocities in history being carried out by communist/socialist regimes entirely absent of religion?

When you take out the religion variable things don't get any better. One could argue it gets worse.

While I agree that morality seems to be the most prominent excuse for committing terrible acts, having a God doesn't seem to be a necessary or sufficient condition to commit these acts.

Seems like the Nazis were religious to me. Didn't most of them claim to be Christian? They even targeted another religion, kinda like the Crusades. Sure their main purpose wasn't religious, but it didn't prevent anything.

This may be true, but not for the reasons you might be thinking. You had a divided Christianity in Germany not dissimilar to the divided Christianity in the US today. So the tool you're using is a bit too blunt to draw any deep causal analyses from. Christianity didn't "prevent" Trump's presidency, but if you look with a deeper analysis, you'll see that it's primarily a particular sub-population of Christians that had the predominant influence on the election. So it's true, but there's definitely more nuance to it.

You would have to engage in a much more sophisticated analysis of German nationalism (National Socialism) in order to parse things in a useful manner.

All i'm claiming is that the worst atrocities were not all committed by professed atheists.

Nazism was a socialist movement, although they aligned with some christian powers later for political reasons.

And the death count from the Nazi's significantly smaller than people like Pol Pot and Mao