Are all Christians blindly hypocritical?

After reading several posts about Christians judging the recent wave of Atheist movements I began to wonder if they realized how hypocritical it was to cast those judgments.

Our society today is still dominated by the effects of Christianity. The moral code insisted by Christianity still persists in politics in the form of stem cell research control and abortion control. It is still a force in the school teaching of the history of the earth and evolution. It exists in football games, movies, music, money, ceremonies, and even holidays. If that is not enough it is brought to my house by door to door preachers and plastered all over my facebook feeds.

When this permeates our culture so much by those conspiring to force their beliefs on others what are those who break free of ignorance supposed to do?

I dont understand why it is ok for people to post their love of Jesus or God on my facebook without fear of criticism and yet when I try to thumb up a simple logical argument presented by Epicurus (A philosopher born before Jesus) who stated, "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"- Why do I get bashed senselessly by Christians?

How often do Atheists ridicule or bash Christians? They don't because Atheists are those of us who have enough logic and an ability to discover truths that others are not prudent enough to find. With this amount of intelligence comes such qualities and patience, kindness, understanding of others, and respect.

What kind of oppression has Atheism brought upon our society? It has not. Atheism is not about oppression but about release of the mind bound by the constraints set by our forefathers who sought to enslave himself. There are laws prohibiting the physical slavery of other humans, When will there be laws prohibiting the mental slavery? It must first start with us.

No matter if you are Christian or Atheist we need to show respect for each other. Stop trying to bind each other in your beliefs hoping to change mankind on a whole. It will never happen at once. The information that everyone seeks is out there on the web. Let everyone decide for themselves what they believe. Because who knows, maybe Atheists AND Christians are both wrong. Maybe there is no God, Christians; Maybe there is a God, Atheists. Maybe the answer is us. Maybe we are God. And as such maybe we should act how you would imagine a God should.

With this amount of intelligence comes such qualities and patience, kindness, understanding of others, and respect.

What kind of oppression has Atheism brought upon our society? It has not. Atheism is not about oppression but about release of the mind bound by the constraints set by our forefathers who sought to enslave himself. There are laws prohibiting the physical slavery of other humans, When will there be laws prohibiting the mental slavery? It must first start with us.

I agree with this sentiment. Brainwashing children at a young age and forcing them to believe in things that either a) Don't make sense, or, b) are not real... Is just setting them up to have major issues trying to understand the world around them. It also makes them easily pliable, easily manipulated... For whoever's goals, whether it be positive or negative.

reply to post by Dynamike

imo, christians wear blinders or rose-colored glasses.

reply to post by icepack


To answer this as simple as possible after carefully considering all the evidence at hand then the answer is YES!

reply to post by AthlonSavage


I was hoping that I was wrong.

Oh here we go, one thread with christians playing the victim, now one with atheists. You people need to just drop all these institutions because its getting you nowhere. Atheism is starting to feel like the new priesthood, and who knows, maybe one day they will all go on a grand crusade to purify the lands of all the faith worshipers.

I just came to a funny realization, that atheists and religious folk need each other to keep fanning the flames so they don't get tired of themselves.

Yes.

S+F for a second line.

what kind of oppression has atheism caused humanity?

is that a serious question.

communism for starters. stalin, pol pot, the kim jung's, ho chi minh, mae zedong, benito mussolini all responsible for well over 100 million deaths and almost causing world war 3, nuclear annihilation of the human race.

not to mention abortion, atheism's wet dream coming true.

i would make atheism a capital offence as a pre-emptive measure to ensure the survival of the human race.

but unlike what your atheists pals reject, God forbids me to kill, for you to kill and for every single person on earth to kill or harm each other.

it's the people who reject God, use God's name for evil, or don't believe in God causing all the problems on earth. not the other way around.

reply to post by Dynamike

Of course they are hypocrites. I've rarely seen as intolerant and oppressive a religion as Christianity with the exception of maybe Islam.

I'm not a Christian, I have a faith that a lot of Christians have found abhorrent and I'm currently 'discussing' issues about Christianity elsewhere on ATS.

However, are they all Christians blindly hypocritical? No. Simple as that.

You can't make sweeping statements about very, very large demographics like this. Take people as you find them, whatever or whoever they are. If they're dicks, treat them as such, or better still, just avoid them. Apply this to everyone whether they're Christians, Muslims, black, white, men, women, gay, straight, fellow countrymen, foreigners or whatever.

reply to post by randomname

communism for starters. stalin, pol pot, the kim jung's, ho chi minh, mae zedong, benito mussolini all responsible for well over 100 million deaths and almost causing world war 3, nuclear annihilation of the human race.

I knew this one was going to come up but you're wrong. Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler... All of them religious, or raised religious.

Were Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot atheists?

Theists hold up Communism and Nazism, along with the regime of the Cambodian tyrant Pol Pot, as evidence of murderous "atheist" tyrannies that have caused the deaths of tens of millions. While it may be true that Communism portrayed itself as "godless," it did not wage war in the name of atheism, nor were its founders and leaders raised as atheists. They were, in fact, preponderantly Jewish and Christian. Communist Manifesto writer Karl Marx was born a Jew, the grandson of two rabbis, and was converted to Christianity at age 6. Leon Trotsky, whose real name was Lev Bronstein, was born and raised a Jew but later declared himself "an internationalist."

Stalin?

Josef Stalin's "very religious" mother named him after St. Joseph, and wanted him to become a priest. Stalin himself supposedly claimed that his father had been a priest, and he was purportedly "damaged by violence" while being "raised in a poor priest-ridden household." As a youth, Stalin spent five years in a Greek Orthodox seminary, after which he purportedly renounced his religion. In his later years, Stalin apparently embraced Christianity once more.

Hitler?

Adolf Hitler was raised a Catholic, and in a speech in 1922 he remarked, "My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter..." In his autobiography Mein Kampf (1.2), Hitler stated:

Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
Throughout his life, Hitler invoked God and "the Lord," demonstrating his religious, not atheistic, nature.

Pol Pot?

Pol Pot was raised a Buddhist and Catholic. In this regard, Dr. Ian Harris, a Reader in Religious Studies at the University College of St. Martin, relates: "In one of his early writings Pol Pot wrote approvingly that the 'democratic regime will bring back the Buddhist moralism because our great leader Buddha was the first to have taught [democracy].

Maybe you can chalk up a few more marks for religion in that regard? Perhaps if those people were not raised under the guise of religion they might not have been so screwed up..

reply to post by randomname


Another person who doesn't know what he is talking about and taking notes from non historical sites....

If Pol Pot and Stalin killed for Atheism, then Hitler killed cause he was a vegetarian, we agree?


The chance they were Atheist(they actually weren't) was just a side note, their main motive was political control.

They saw in order to unite and control is to get rid of foreign religion in their lands, who was influencing his mass.

If he was Anti religious, he would have killed off all the religious from everywhere.

reply to post by randomname


I'm still going with this one:

Benito Mussolini - Mother raised him Catholic, hated the Church because of the corruption. **

His father Alessandro Mussolini was a blacksmith and a socialist,[12] while his mother Rosa Mussolini, née Maltoni, a devoutly Catholic schoolteacher.[13]

Kim Jong Il, well, he kinda worshipped himself, but besides that he commissioned an orthodox Church:

The Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Church opened in Pyongyang on August 13, 2006. The church was reportedly commissioned by Kim Jong-il after he visited an Orthodox cathedral in Russia in 2002. According to a Russian press report, a Russian priest served the cathedral, and a religious leader who traveled to the country confirmed that the church was run by a priest of North Korean origin who had studied in Russi

The political ideology forced on the country was Juche, wiki found here.

The original Patriarch of the family, who instigated the Kim legacy was Kim il Sung, who was

born to a Christian family on April 15, 1912 in South Pyongan province in today's North Korea, which then was under Japanese occupation. Kim Il Sung's maternal grandfather was a pastor and both of his parents were active members of their church.

www.northkoreanchristians.com...

See this reoccurring theme here where the worst of the worst are born to priests and pastors?

reply to post by luciddream

The chance they were Atheist(they actually weren't) was just a side note, their main motive was political control.

It doesn't even matter, even the illogical argument they are trying to push actually goes against any religious person that uses it (if you include real facts).

Nearly all of them were either raised by people involved in the church, or like in the case of Stalin, was a seminary when he discovered communism.

Source.

Here's an interesting article on RT yesterday:
"Report: Atheists face worldwide persecution and harassment"
rt.com...

I didn't know about much of what is contained in the report:
www.iheu.org...

reply to post by randomname

Originally posted by randomname
i would make atheism a capital offence as a pre-emptive measure to ensure the survival of the human race.

but unlike what your atheists pals reject, God forbids me to kill, for you to kill and for every single person on earth to kill or harm each other.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa... Whoa. Stop right there.

One can only tolerate so much, but I have to say it. This has to be the most disgusting thing I've read or heard in over a month, period. I'm just trying to think of how many filters your thoughts had to go through before you typed it.

This is hypocrisy at its height. Day after day, thread after thread and video after video there are Christians who scream persecution, all the while mocking and denigrating the beliefs of others.

If I wrote the same thing you did right there...

It really is spectacular. Supporting gay marriage means you want to infringe upon the religious freedom of others, but idly mention that you feel atheists should be executed means you care about the human race.

Simply astounding.

reply to post by randomname

communism for starters. stalin, pol pot, the kim jung's, ho chi minh, mae zedong, benito mussolini all responsible for well over 100 million deaths and almost causing world war 3, nuclear annihilation of the human race.

Add up the deaths that were attributed to Hitler, Stalin and Pot. Then round up for good measure. You can safely say that the number is staggering. Probably upwards of fifteen million. However, consider the following conflicts where the only differences between the opposing factions were and are religion:

Albigensian Crusade, 1208-49
Algeria, 1992-
Baha'is, 1848-54
Bosnia, 1992-95
Boxer Rebellion, 1899-1901
Christian Romans, 30-313 CE
Croatia, 1991-92
English Civil War, 1642-46
Holocaust, 1938-45
Huguenot Wars, 1562-1598
India, 1992-2002
India: Suttee & Thugs
Indo-Pakistani Partition, 1947
Iran, Islamic Republic, 1979-
Iraq, Shiites, 1991-92
Jews, 1348
Jonestown, 1978
Lebanon 1860 / 1975-92
Molucca Is., 1999-
Mongolia, 1937-39
Northern Ireland, 1974-98
Russian pogroms 1905-06 / 1917-22
St. Bartholemew Massacre, 1572
Shang China, ca. 1300-1050 BCE
Shimabara Revolt, Japan 1637-38
Sikh uprising, India, 1984-91
Spanish Inquisition, 1478-1834
Taiping Rebellion, 1850-64
Thirty Years War, 1618-48
Tudor England
Vietnam, 1800s
Witch Hunts, 1400-1800
Xhosa, 1857
Arab Outbreak, 7th Century CE
Arab-Israeli Wars, 1948-
Al Qaeda, 1993-
Crusades, 1095-1291
Dutch Revolt, 1566-1609
Nigeria, 1990s, 2000s

If you add up all of the lives that were lost in the name of one religion or another, you come up with a staggering figure that is in excess of eight-hundred-million. That's eight-hundred-million. An eight, followed by eight zeros. So, even if the believers who are uneducated enough to think that Hitler, Stalin and Pot were psychotic mass murderers because they thought these men were atheists, it is horrifically clear that religious murder wins out.

Source

reply to post by boncho


It is patently obvious that what religion someone was "raised in" has absolutely no bearing on their later behaviour. The vast majority of Americans was "raised as" Christians, but do we see Christ-like behaviour rampant in the United States? Of course not.

Saying that Stalin, Hitler or Castro were Christians simply because their parents were is baseless and ignorant.

To the OP: No, "all" Christians are not blindly hypocritical. Painting all members of a group with some perceived trait of a subset of them is called prejudice.

reply to post by Klassified


I prefer the non-biased War Audit, which takes a scientific approach to the analysis of the impact of religion on war. The findings there are that there were only three major conflicts that were entirely due to religion, and 60% of all conflict have ZERO religious influence.

As for your list? "Al Qaeda", "Arab-Israeli Wars", "Vietnam", these are religious conflicts? Are you kidding me?