Yet again with the assumptions. Can you just post a link to the atheist bible you seem to be referring to - it would be much easier.

How about because I prefer the security of a loving trusting relationship and a stable environment to bring up my children?

You are so full of it. There is nothing wrong with relationships for people that want it but society expects people to be in a committed relationship at some point which can be problematic for people that don't want to. That doesn't make cheating right but it's a consequence.

But you would rather force people to be in a relationship regardless?

I still think he just likes playing devil's advocate given he's an atheist himself.

If these are actual beliefs though it's intriguing that he has such a dim view of atheists.

Well it's not like atheists have a bible so I can't say what he believes. Even if he believes atheists are totally evil it's not like he can just start believing in a god.

You can distance yourself from a claim but you can't distance yourself from a lack of claim. In his case even if he thinks we're all going complete ape**** and atheists will completely destroy earth he can still be an atheist and be ok with that.

The problems that an atheist worldview causes don't come from cucks, cowards or the naturally moral. In the same way that the problems that a Nazi philosophy causes don't come from these kinds of people either. Your point is irrelevant.
I don't want to force anything. But in general, there is a tension between personal desires and sacrifice for the sake of group needs that religion has been resolved in favor of favoring good social outcomes.

Perhaps we've finally escaped that need with a legal & humanist framework. Perhaps. It's far too early to tell. We're only a generation out from millenia of near total religious belief and the institutions and mores that created that benefited society.
Atheists are just people, like Muslims or anarchists or Nazis. There's nothing interesting there. What's interesting is how atheism as a philosophy interacts with people and societies and where it tends to lead them. I contend that the final outcomes are far worse than Christian societies. As data points, I point to the explicitly atheist societies we've had so far. They've been hell on Earth.

I'm trying to discuss atheist tendencies in that regard (note:tendencies), but you won't even admit that atheists are necessarily, on average, going to have a more materialistic view of many things than theists will. If you don't realize or won't concede basic truths like that, then the conversation goes nowhere.

Regardless of that point, you've still made a ton of other leaps to get to your conclusion.

Sure. I think this deserves its own thread

You ignored the point that I made earlier on how the societies you also pointed to were deeply oppressive, and how deeply oppressive religious societies have also been hell (and still are). Deeply oppressive regimes are the problem, no matter what philosophy they are based on. You are interpreting your massive sample of 3 data points falsely in my opinion.

Of course you can take the view that no consequences means you can do what you like to people, but there's plenty of ways to take a view that you can do what you like to people from religious texts too.

Perhaps people leading these regimes just wanted to do what they like to people and they chose the justification that would work best with the people in question at the time.

I won't argue with that.

The same Gallup survey also limits it to just atheism (although I think that is actually less accurate for your thesis - a Christian atheist would count as a Christian in your schema):

China: 61%
Hong Kong: 34%
Japan: 31%
Czech Republic: 30%
Spain: 20%
France: 18%
Belgium: 18%
Sweden: 17%
Germany: 17%
Netherlands: 15%

Again, I would say generally pretty decent, and not just because they've been moderated by Christianity (eg Japan). I think you are pattern-matching too hard off basic principles here. I'm sympathetic to some Straussian interpretations of Christianity, but I don't think the contrast with atheism is very helpful. In general, the Douthat's and other conservatives that make these arguments place too much weight on theological principles as the drivers of political and economic outcomes in ways that seem pretty unlikely. Only a very few people actually know or understand their own religion's theology, and those people are not a random sample.

I would like to point out that China is actually improving at a very rapid rate in many different ways. The main reason I believe is the increase in wealth and I also think that is by far the biggest factor in a society. The more there is to go around the less people are going to fight each other within and most people don't need to have a vast amount of money to be happy. I am pretty much kicking in open doors here but if we're looking at how religion influences a society and take examples from countries that are terrible you need to look at the economic status first.

Japan; got starved from resources in WW2 but was rebuilt and is now doing much better. Germany; never recovered from WW1 and got into an economic struggle before WW2 allowing maniacs to take over. I don't think it would have mattered how religious they were at that point. North Korea; If you have an established dictatorship for that long with international relationships that bad and in a state of war for an eternity you can't ever thrive.

If you correct for all other factors for the difference between atheist and religious societies I don't know what you find. I think in small scales both systems work fine because people have empathy regardless of their beliefs and will work together. On larger scales religious systems might function better because of our tribal instincts we're naturally inclined to be a bit defensive to people outside our inner circles and religion can bring people together (even though it is forced). On the other hand atheists will understand that working together creates a stronger nation. I'm still trying to figure out how atheists would start a genocide though as it serves no purpose.

Just to be sure, the heliocentric conception predated Roman times and morphed into the Ptolemaic approach to the meandering of the planets/sun which did center the earth ordinate of these movements.

For some, who mouth the present logic the sun as the center has become a shibboleth but in no way is it the only approach to the calculations of planetary movements. At the time of Copernicus it was presented that the sun sits still in outer space and the planets perform some type of elliptical movement around the sun.

Even today it is known that the sun moves which makes the idea of "elliptical" movements somewhat suspect. All one has to do, without having a telescope, is to try and trace the movements of a planet (for instance earth) and force the geometric ellipse on the earth's path with respect to the movements of the sun. It is a compelling and humbling experience which one can perform within the environs of home.

Back to Ptolemy, calculations can be and are performed with the earth as the center , only they are more complex for when tracing the movements of Venus with respect to earth,, for example, the movement becomes more of a spiral movement , open ended, without closure. The calculations are different, but accomplished, never the less.

I'll go out on a limb here for I've reached the end point of any knowledge of this, but I understand that the astrophysicists, when calculating the position of the sun, actually use three methods to perform this calculation with the Ptolemaic being one of them. The may not call it that but it is fascinating that his calculable perfection is not present, nor should it be , in planetary calculations.

If the cosmic movements were ever to be perfectly calculable, as in the mechanistic sense, then the cosmos would come to a screeching halt, dead on arrival.

Galileo and his descendants initiated the separation of religion and knowledge and this was the heresy he promoted , the denial of higher powers through implication which leads to our present time , or the materialist ethos. The men who judged him had an insight of what was happening but were not able to stem the tide for many of the early scientists were members of the clergy, especially the Jesuits.

This separation resulted in everything relative to the earth, from the matter of far distant stars to the heat of Mt. Vesuvius . This is the Ptolemaic inversion of another type where little thought is given to the possibility that the nature of the sun or stars themselves would be different than earthly matter (table of the elements). yada,yada,yada,,.....

Genocides serve many purposes. If you believe people don't have souls and are merely biological units, why wouldn't you kill off the faulty ones? No one has a problem selective breeding or culling dogs - because no one believes dogs have souls (even though they feel as much as we do, and think to some degree). When you take out the mystical aspect of a human soul, when you take away the God given idea that no man has a right to kill another except in certain circumstances, why wouldn't you engineer your populace like the Nazis did? Atheism lowers the bar on eugenic genocide. I don't think that is arguable, frankly.

Japan is a poor example as it was as evil as Nazi Germany. Unit 731, for example, is one example of many (don't read on a full stomach). Japan was only civilized by American Christian occupation, just like Islam was only (partly) civilized (for example, the ending of slavery) by reluctant Christian occupation after centuries of (Islam started) war and child kidnapping.

Atheism also lowers the bar on acceptance of various isms. Marxism, for example, is a natural fit for atheism. God is diminished in Marxism, seen as "the opiate of the masses", and replaced with a veneration for the all-powerful state, to which people must be loyal, rather than God and their own conscience. Hence the atrocities of atheist China and atheist USSR and atheist Cambodia, which have no parallel that I can see, they are the worst examples in human history of horror and oppression.

So you're saying that different groups of people have a hard time living together in peace. How do you believe Europe would have evolved under Christianity if there were less technological improvements and conquests providing revenue? In other words, how ethical would you expect people to be when the colonies failed and trade was taken over by other continents due to technological superiority.

It's very easy to be moral when the country is wealthy. When faced with economic setbacks, war or natural disasters things tend to change. Do you have an example of a wealthy population (not just the regime) that was atheist that just couldn't help themselves and had to kill everyone around them?

This explains we our jails are full of atheists!!

Atheists, like Nazis, tend to be more law-abiding than the average person. And harmless when they're a shunned minority without power.

lol

I actually looked up the atheist stats. Pretty fascinating. Key takeaways:

1. Going on prison stats, Muslims seem to be extremely violent people, on average, compared to all other religious groups. No one else comes anywhere near their ratio.

2. Atheists and Pentecostals have the lowest populations by far. The Pentecostal stats are amazing. What is their secret?

3. Buddhists are actually 2x more likely than the general population to be in prison. This is especially interesting since Asian crime rates are well below the population, as are wealthy crime rates (both correlated with Buddhism).

Probably because they a shunned minority without power kept in check by Christian values.

That wasn't what I was asking. You describe atheism as basically irredeemable, responsible for a myriad of awful outcomes that presumably you would personally never support. Therefore, what's so special about you? How are soulless biological units treated by ToothSayer?

Atheism implies materialism? Which position do you think comes first? Do you think someone who thinks that the universe is probably materialistic would conclude there are probably no gods? Or do you think someone who holds the position there are probably no gods would then conclude the universe is probably materialistic? It sounds like you're saying the latter, which is like someone declaring themselves to be pro-life, and being pro-life led them to considering all life should be protected. You know - thinking backwards.

Like I said, the cucks, the cowards, and the naturally moral will survive any philosophy. I fit somewhere in those three. Lots of Nazis would never dream of hurting someone. Most people who think blacks are highly inferior intellectually would never dream of discriminating against them, and would protect them from people who do. Does that mean those philosophies aren't dangerous? Does that mean they're not more likely to lead to discrimination and genocide?

Most people are moral because of habit and indoctrination and social pressures. When there's a revolution and a society becomes avowedly atheist, history shows it turns into a horrible place, nearly all the time.

They're obviously linked, but atheism comes first for most. Very clearly comes first. Religion is a product of childhood indoctrination for 90+% of people, and once indoctrinated, it sticks. If you start off theist, you won't be purely materialist, because Christian theism blocks extreme materialism. If humans have eternal souls then part of humanity isn't purely material. Individuals have an innate worth. Etc.

It's you who have it backward. The lack of theism leads to the more extreme versions of materialism like we saw in atheists-communist Russia, China, Cambodia.

That couldn't be any further from the truth if you ask young altar boys.

Or religious countries for that matter. It has always acted on personal desires, that's why they were and still are to some degree the richest and most (corrupt) powerful countries in the world. To say that they favor good social outcomes is beyond comical. I suggest you go back and read the the history books with an open mind!

You have easy pickings when it comes to comparing religious to non religious countries. What you seem to forget is that all those countries were religious before their atrocious acts.

Are you an expert that you are willing to say that their religious past had nothing to do with how they carried forward? I don't think it is fair the way you are trying to get your point across. It would be much fairer and more logical if those countries had the same amount of time being Atheist as a whole for the same amount of time that they were oppressed religious countries.

I don't think you can judge it the way you are doing. Furthermore most of atrocities done throughout history has been because of religion, the fact that you are trying to blame Atheism or paint it in such a way that it is far more evil is pretty comical.

Your leaps from Atheist to serial killer is pretty amusing too. I guess every religious person is also a suicide bomber to your logic!

This is a really weak dismissal of contradictory evidence.

What are you all talking about, isn't it obvious that atheists are pure genocide on legs if you set them loose?