Does Anyone Actually hate Christians??

originally posted by: Serdgiam
Atheists and agnostics would actually do well to team up with the minority of Christians who follow their own teachings. Their goals are pretty much aligned across the board, but I suspect ideological differences will just lead to more bias confirmation and division.

They already do that. Atheists and agnostics are largely democratic. Well something like 65% of the Democratic party is Christian still.

A world run by people filled with love and wisdom doesn't sound so bad.. Of course, a theocracy would contain none of the above. It is just another form of control using whatever banner is convenient and effective. And the adherents of the label tend to blindly follow, again because of bias confirmation and division.

Yea. Theocracies are scary.

a reply to: Annee


I'm an old hippie, I think she is cute.

a reply to: DeadSeraph
And...?

Atheists have never claimed to be the moral compass of the universe. Comparing Christian atrocities to the secular worlds atrocities is apples and oranges at best. Christianity doesn't get to claim the high ground, and then say, "you did it too!"

a reply to: Seamrog

Window dress it however you like, it's not free will if he is going to kill you for it.

a reply to: Klassified

Here's a great breakdown of the Christian persecution complex and why many conservative Christians fall for it. The article is written by a Christian too.
The Evangelical Persecution Complex

There are some understandable reasons for this exaggerated sense of persecution. Globally, Christians face incredible discrimination. In North Korea and many Muslim-governed countries, Christians risk imprisonment and death for their faith. The Christian community in Mosul, Iraq, was exiled, and many Christians are still persecuted by the ISIS, a jihadist group. Christians with a global perspective on their faith rightly identify themselves as part of a persecuted people in the 21st century.

In the United States, evangelical values have often been in tension with public policy and cultural mores, especially in the last several years; this includes recent debates over contraceptives coverage, abortion rights, and the rise of same-sex marriage. Some Christians anticipate major restrictions to religious liberty in the future as a result of these tensions, a concern that is not unfounded. But in anticipating such restrictions, it is easy to imagine, wrongly, that they are already here.

That’s not to say there aren’t very real incidents of discrimination and even hatred toward Christianity in the United States. But as members of the largest faith group in America, Christians are relatively well-protected and more often accommodated than actively harmed.

Read the whole article though. It is very illuminating. Again it is written by a Christian who is seeing the problems in his own religion. It's not like this is an atheist standing on the outside looking in or anything.

dbl post

a reply to: Klassified

Is that how you view Christians? That they view themselves as the "moral compass of the universe"?

I think you might be mistaken. Infact the only reason I refuse to define myself as a Christian anymore, is because I am such a poor representation.

originally posted by: DeadSeraph
a reply to: Entreri06

Joseph Stalin alone killed more people than the entirety of the inquisition. Literally killed more people than all the kings and bishops and popes combined. Add Pol Pott to that, or Mao. Now add up the bodies and tell me how altruistic atheists are.

If you are going to bark down that alley, I certainly hope you added Hitler to the list of Christian despots.

originally posted by: Megatronus
a reply to: Seamrog

Window dress it however you like, it's not free will if he is going to kill you for it.

Well, except for that promise He made that the bow is a reminder of.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

sure. Let's add hitler even though he was an occultist and fascinated with Blavatsky more than he ever was the Bible. Now let's add Mao, Pol Pot, etc etc etc. Body count is still way higher.

a reply to: DeadSeraph

I'd love to at some point in time. I don't think this thread is the place for it, though. I'm not convinced any good discussion can happen here, at least not for long.

a reply to: Seamrog

That aside, people can not have free will wile also being part of God's plan. Either there is no plan from God or free will is an illusion.

a reply to: works4dhs

You can Hate the Sin but not the Sinner....So we can Hate the Religion but not the uh Religioner (lol new word?).

I hate Organized Religion and its attempt to push itself into My life (Yes I know thats its nature).

a reply to: Serdgiam

I agree. Consider my interest piqued though. We will have to address this issue in another thread. I think it's one worth talking about.

And how do we determine when something has moved from a persecution complex to actual persecution?

a reply to: DeadSeraph

Not a single one of those killed anyone in the name of atheism. Hitlers Christian beliefs are controversial it can be argued either way. All the rest of them replaced religion with them selves and the state. They certainly never killed in the name of atheism.

originally posted by: DeadSeraph
a reply to: Klassified

Is that how you view Christians? That they view themselves as the "moral compass of the universe"?

I think you might be mistaken. Infact the only reason I refuse to define myself as a Christian anymore, is because I am such a poor representation.

That's not what I said. I said Christianity as a whole. Individual Christians may see themselves as imperfect. I certainly was no shining example, and I preached and taught from the pulpit, but Christianity does see itself as the light of the world. It sees itself as the moral aggregate of humanity. Since I know you have read your bible, the gospels alone paint a picture of just what I'm talking about. On top of that, Jesus himself raised up an army to conquer the world, and put it under a totalatarian regime. "But bring here those enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, and slay them before me."
ETA: Christians are not called soldiers for no reason.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Posts got mangled somehow.

I was wondering if you have links to groups that are actively working together, while expressing their ideology. I'd love to get involved, unless you are referring to politics.

And then the persecution question above ^^^

originally posted by: Megatronus
a reply to: Seamrog

That aside, people can not have free will wile also being part of God's plan. Either there is no plan from God or free will is an illusion.

Not so - The fact that God has a plan for your life does not mean that you have to follow it.

I think you are mistaking humans for robots.

a reply to: DeadSeraph

Hitler may have been those things but he certainly said he was Christian, so that is good enough for me. Of course the Catholic Church backed him up early in the war as well, so there's that.

Since you are stretching the definition of an atheist and what their beliefs entail so you can include communist regimes, then we get to include all self-professed Christians from various Christian cults as well as Hitler. So Crusades, Inquisition, Jim Jones, Witch Hunts, George W. Bush (I count him since he declared the war in Iraq to be a new Crusade), massacre of the Natives in America.

But in any case, this discussion is a rather dumb one. And is rather tedious whenever Christians bring it up. Who Kills More, Religion or Atheism?

Christians charge that the most killing in history has come from modern atheist regimes. Adolf Hitler led Germany during World War II when he executed six million Jews in the Holocaust, three million Poles, three million Russian prisoners of war, and as many as eight million others throughout Europe. Joseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Soviet Union following the Russian Revolution until his death after World War II. Between 10 and 20 million Soviets and German prisoners of war died under his regime, depending on how many famine victims you count, from Gulags, execution, and forced resettlement. Mao Zedong, who led China for more than a quarter of a century following World War II, created the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution programs which collectively killed unknown tens of millions of Chinese, most of them in public executions and violent clashes. Pol Pot led the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during the 1970's, when as many as 2 million Cambodians, or as much as 20% of the population, died from execution, disease and starvation.

History is full of uncounted massacres by armies carrying a religious banner, though most such episodes were in ancient times with much less efficient killing technology and microscopically smaller populations. The number of religious exterminations of entire villages throughout history is innumerable, though most had body counts only in the hundreds or thousands. Alexander the Great is estimated to have executed a million. 11th century Crusades killed half a million Jews and Muslims. Genghis Khan's massacres of entire populations of cities probably totaled a million. The Aztecs once slaughtered 100,000 prisoners over four days. An unknown number, probably in the millions, died in the Devil's Wind action in Colonial India. Up to four million Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims died in post-Colonial India. The Ottoman Empire massacred two million Armenians over the years. Franco's Spanish Civil War killed a hundred thousand. A million have died in Rwanda, half a million in Darfur. And Christian vs. Muslim violence has obviously dominated our headlines for a decade, totaling somewhere in seven figures.

So who has been the worst throughout history: atheist regimes or religious regimes? Obviously the big numbers come from the 20th century superpowers (China, Russia, Germany) so the answer depends on how you classify those. And this is where the meat of these debates is usually found, splitting hairs on which regime is atheist, which is merely secular, which is non-Christian and thus fair game to be called atheist. Hitchens points out that Stalin's government had all the trappings of religion, including Orwell's totalitarian theocracy, and thus it's merely a play on words to say that it was not religious. Pol Pot was raised a Buddhist monk who grew up to execute Buddhist monks, along with anyone else he could lay his hands on. Whole books have been written on the occult underpinnings of Nazi Germany, the symbology of the Norse gods, to say nothing of the claims that Hitler was a Christian, Hitler was a Jew, and his own writings expressing the kinship he felt with the Muslims. A favorite counterpoint raised by Christian debaters is that these despots practiced Social Darwinism and were thus atheists by definition. In summary, the winner of these debates is the one who can convince the other that the big 20th century genocidal maniacs were motivated either by religion or by a desire to destroy religion. The entire debate is the logical fallacy of the excluded middle.