Communist regimes killed millions of people. Communist regimes are oppressing people today. Communist regimes were dogmatic and irrational. Dawkins and Harris acknowledge that, they don’t have to admit to anything, they’re not communists, and they weren’t supporters of communist states

Hitchens was a Trotskyist, it’s a form of communism. You write like there’s only one form of communism, like you’ve never heard of Marx, Mao, Lenin, or Trotsky. Marx didn’t claim divine authority, and I’m not so sure he wrote “you shall kill political dissenters” either. Please, do tell me what’s specifically irrational about it.

Umm, no one said Dawkins and Harris supported Communism AJ. I do feel however, that they should have spent more time on it. Especially Harris-he talks about being dogmatic-communism in practice has been very dogmatic, and I think it deserved more than a page. Just b/c it’s not religious doesn’t make it good. I lost several members of my family to Commuinst regimes, so I do know a little something with it, but I don’t know if that holds much water with you.. Mao? Mao killed lots of people too-to quote wikipedia, he was “blamed by critics from both within and outside China for causing severe damage to the culture, society, economy and foreign relations of China, as well as enormous and unnecessary loss of lives, a peacetime death toll in the tens of millions”

Lenin wasn’t too bad, but he didn’t live very long and his followers didn’t follow what he originally wanted. There are several forms of socialism-that’s what Marx spent some of his time on-and some of them are very good. The non-radical socialist policies in Western Europe for example, are doing well.

However, it seems that Communism, in all the forms that have been tried, has not done well .Can you name one Communist country that hasn’t suffered b/c of it? Just b/c something isn’t religious doesn’t mean it can’t be dogmatic and irrational. Getting rid of religion by force only made people more willing to die for their beliefs, and it came flooding back in the former Soviet Union after it fell apart. This is why government force with something like that doesn’t work, just like religious oppression didn’t make non-religious people become religious. Communism became the worship of the state-the zeal for diety worship was replaced with state worship-and no one could criticize the state.

If this country became communist I’d hightail it as far away as possible. Try saying anything against the government, even disagreeing with it, under a communist regime and see what happenes to you. There are stories about people just walking down the street-and getting taken to the Gulag b/c there were “quotas” to fill. Or a woman who went to report to the police about an abandoned baby whose parents had died-she was sent to Siberia for “disturbing the police”. Or farmers being starved to death (30 million) for not agreeing with Stalin’s collective farm program. What about what is happening in China, Latin America, and Vietnam today? There is nothing rational about this. There may be several forms of communism, but in practice, they all seem to degenrate to the same type of oppression. So even if some of it is good in theory, it doesn’t seem to come of well at all in practice.

No one ever said Marx claimed divine authority-but he wasn’t exactly a great prophet in some his predictions-he claimed that radical socialism, if it turned into communism would “free the worker”-and it just oppressed the worker in different ways. It ended up being getting rid of one opressive regime for another. Some of Marx’s ideas about socialism were very good, and about communism were good in theory, but communism doesn’t do so well in practice. George Orwell touches on this very well in his books.

As for Hithchens, from what I heard, he was against dismnatling the Soviet Union, even though it oppressed many people. Yet he’s okay with invading Iraq?? Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris I do respect, but Hitchens is too full of contradictions for me.

…no one in the NT ever envisioned or expected to be in a position of political power until AFTER Armageddon. So they just didn’t give it much thought, leaving the question pretty wide open

Agreed. It’s the openness that caused the problems. The NT seems to have been written from the perspective of an underdog. Then suddenly, like you say, they’ve got all this power. They have nothing in the guidebook about how to handle it, so, they have to make up the rules as they go along.

sidenote: Xians today still think they are the underdog, even though they are the majority in the US. They still suffer from a persecution complex every time someone dares to challenge their dominance.

umm, communism killed millions of people and is STILL oppressing people today (oddly I don’t hear people like Hitchens talking about that-in fact, didn’t he once support communism?). It very much IS irrational and dogmatic (Dawkins and Harris admit that too)-one dogmatic belief is kill anyone religious, and/or kill anyone who teaches that communism is bad-it’s happening today in Vietnam and happened and continues to happen in many communist countries. this isn’t mentioned much at all. one of my closest friends is from a former communist country-don’t tell me communism is “rational”.

Communist regimes killed millions of people. Communist regimes are oppressing people today. Communist regimes were dogmatic and irrational. Dawkins and Harris acknowledge that, they don’t have to admit to anything, they’re not communists, and they weren’t supporters of communist states.

Hitchens was a Trotskyist, it’s a form of communism. You write like there’s only one form of communism, like you’ve never heard of Marx, Mao, Lenin, or Trotsky. Marx didn’t claim divine authority, and I’m not so sure he wrote “you shall kill political dissenters” either. Please, do tell me what’s specifically irrational about it.

Communism is still around, doesn’t require dogmatic beliefs, or irrational beliefs, it’s a political ideology concerning economics and the class system.

umm, communism killed millions of people and is STILL oppressing people today (oddly I don’t hear people like Hitchens talking about that-in fact, didn’t he once support communism?). It very much IS irrational and dogmatic (Dawkins and Harris admit that too)-one dogmatic belief is kill anyone religious, and/or kill anyone who teaches that communism is bad-it’s happening today in Vietnam and happened and continues to happen in many communist countries. this isn’t mentioned much at all. one of my closest friends is from a former communist country-don’t tell me communism is “rational”.

I agree. I would change the quote to “for good people to do bad things, it takes dogma” b/c communism was not a religion, but it certainly was a dogma.

I would change the quote to “for good people to do bad things, it takes faith” b/c religion, certain communist regimes, superstition, faith healers, since it doesn’t have to be dogmatic for good people to do bad things because of irrational beliefs.

Communism is still around, doesn’t require dogmatic beliefs, or irrational beliefs, it’s a political ideology concerning economics and the class system.

As to atheism being a tool of Stalin, it was. The church was a threat to Stalin so atheism was a means to either destroy or geld it. This is far different than the theist claim that atheism drove Stalin so atheism is bad. I would argue that it was Stalin who drove atheism, therefore Stalin was bad. Stalin’s actions are not a commentary on atheism. Atheism was a tool to break the spell religion had on the masses so he could take control of them, just as other leaders in the past used on religion to break the spell of others to take control. If an idea is merely a tool and not a driving force, then I don’t see that as a credible means to assess the value of the idea.

many people make the same argument with Hitler using christianity as a tool-especially since he made many quotes against it and did kill christians who opposed him too. that he used it as a tool to get the christian masses to follow him. yet I heard this argument dismissed a lot too. how come it’s okay to say it for Stalin, but not for Hitler?

I believe this is a verbatim quote from some atheist pundit or other. But I guess when things pass into the realm of conventional wisdom, an attribution is no longer felt to be necessary.
I think what the example of Stalin shows us (also Pol Pot, Baader-Meinhof, SLA, and the Weather Underground) is that religion is not the only way that people can be motivated to evil deeds as a means to some purported higher good. All it takes is the human ability to rationalize our behavior and our need to think well of ourselves. Cf. Tavris and Aronson’s new book “Mistakes Were Made – But Not By Me” As Ben Franklin said: “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do.–”

I agree. I would change the quote to “for good people to do bad things, it takes dogma” b/c communism was not a religion, but it certainly was a dogma.

I still think it’s difficult to get the Inquisition et. al. from a reading of the vast majority of the NT….certain out-of-context verses not withstanding.

It’s a good job Christians don’t print the OT alongside the NT, and consider the OT obsolete… It’s funny how people can complain about taking passages out of context, when they’re not willing to take the NT in context of the OT, the former referencing the later quite a bit.

Much of the teaching of the NT is diametrically opposed to violence – except when committed by god

How much?

Short answer: No, the IDEA of something isn’t necessarily negated by the actions of one or more of its adherents.

Long answer: Having said that my biggest problem with religion is that it is simply off limits. You can’t reason with a believer, for their religion is above logic and reason. In fact, faith is elevated onto a pedestal where to have faith is the ultimate goal (faith of course is where you get the story of Abraham and his unfortunate attempt at human sacrifice and suicide bombers).

I can debate with someone about the next presidential candidate but if religion enters into, well, that’s just personal. In fact, you can argue with just about anybody about any ideology (political, social or economic) but as soon as that ideology is expressed as a religion you are immediately barred from discussion.

The real question should be put in the following way, (uh oh sounds like “framing the debate”), does a particular belief lend itself to extremism/radicalism and more importantly does a particular idea actually dissuade the use of logic and reason or some other kind of self-correcting mechanism.

To me as an atheist, religion is absolutely prone to fossilized, uncritical thinking and leads too often to extreme behavior.