To your edit, which I missed:
Quote:
Originally Posted by jeccross
"- Atheist societies have been incredibly evil, all of them. Atheists are a tiny fraction of the world's population, yet the three avowed atheist societies have been places of oppression, mass murder and horror Again, 3 data points
We have one data point for Nazism. A handful for fascism (itself often closely linked to atheism, but not necessarily). Yet you have no problem whatsoever linking those philosophies with evil. It's a given.
Yet for atheism, it's "three data points".
In reality it's not just three data points. These are entire populations, billions of people under vast geographical areas. Just like the Muslim world isn't 10 or 15 data points - there are far more than that even there are only that many countries.
Quote:
The makers of the philosophies that created those society claimed atheism as an inspiration and necessary part." It's irrelevant what they claimed. They probably weren't above lying.
Everything else is your assumed causality because of your prejudiced starting view.
Is this some kind of high level leveling? You think that Marx was really a Christian pretending to be an atheist to smear atheism? That Lenin was? This is an incredible claim. The milder claim that you could be making is that Marxism has no philosophical links with atheism, and Marx just said it did. This is simply false, there is a large body of literature, and Marx's reasoning is explicitly atheist in parts. Lenin's is absurdly athesist.
You can play the non-cognitivist game ("atheism is just a lack of belief and implies nothing else"), but that's as silly as claiming "the belief in the inferiority of Jews is just a belief and implies nothing else", while ignoring the causative links this has with genociding Jews.
My starting view, my prejudice, was that of course atheism has no links to evil. You have it backwards. It was evidence that led me here, learning about history, reading the actual sources, not my starting view.