Atheist Church opens in London

reply to post by AngryCymraeg



It doesn't matter if you are spiritual or not if you are capable of organizing groups and working them up into a frenzy of hatred and look down on others for what they believe or don't believe the group can become violent.

I have issues with action of religious sects, but atheist look down their noses at the religious, and vice versa, if this catches on think how wonderful the world will be a a few centuries.

Humans are humans and they want to control and force their damn opinion down other throats.

example
League of Militant Atheists
en.wikipedia.org...

In 1929, the Second Congress changed the society's name to The Union of Belligerent (or Militant) Atheists.[8] At this Second Congress of Atheists, Nikolai Bukharin, the editor of Pravda, called for the extermination of religion "at the tip of the bayonet."[12] There, Yaroslavsky also made the following declaration:

It is our duty to destroy every religious world-concept... If the destruction of ten million human beings, as happened in the last war, should be necessary for the triumph of one definite class, then that must be done and it will be done.[13]

The People's Commisariat for enlightenment was heckled and Glavnauka, the Chief Administration for Science and Scholarship was also singled out for criticism. A spokesperson for the latter tried to justify their behaviour to the LMG by claiming that they had reduced the total number of historical buildings under its protection (mostly ancient churches and monasteries) from 7000 to 1000, by destroying them.[16]

Within about a year of the revolution, the state expropriated all church property, including the churches themselves, and in the period from 1922 to 1926, 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200 priests were killed (a much greater number was subjected to persecution).[53] Most seminaries were closed, and publication of religious writing was banned.[53] The Russian Orthodox Church, which had 54,000 parishes before World War I, was reduced to 500 by 1940.[53] A meeting of the Antireligious Commission of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) that occurred on 23 May, 1929 estimated the portion of believers in the USSR at 80 percent, though this percentage may be understated to prove the successfulness of the struggle with religion.[55] Today, approximately 100 million citizens consider themselves Russian Orthodox Christians, amounting to 70% of population, although the Church claims a membership of 80 million.[56][57] According to the CIA Factbook, however, only 17% to 22% of the population is now Christian.[58]

If a person says they can't wait until the earth is free from all religion then they are just as dangerous and intolerant as any religious fanatic

You will never stop mankinds desire for the sacred, unless you destroy the man.

The League embraced workers, peasants, students, and intelligentsia. It had its first affiliates at factories, plants, collective farms (kolkhoz), and educational institutions. By the beginning of 1941, it had about 3.5 million members of 100 nationalities. It had about 96,000 offices across the country. Guided by Bolshevik principles of antireligious propaganda and party's orders with regards to religion, the League aimed at exterminating religion in all its manifestations and forming an anti-religious scientific mindset among the workers. It propagated atheism and scientific achievements, conducted 'individual work' (a method of sending atheist tutors to meet with individual believers to convince them of atheism, which could be followed up with public harassment if they failed to comply) with religious people, prepared propagandists and atheistic campaigners, published anti-religious scientific literature and periodicals, organized museums and exhibitions, conducted scientific research in the field of atheism and critics of religion. The League's slogan was "Struggle against religion is a struggle for socialism", which was meant to tie in their atheist views with economy, politics, and culture. One of the slogans adopted at the 2nd congress was "Struggle against religion is a struggle for the five year plan!"[4] The League had international connections; it was part of the International of Proletarian Freethinkers and later of the Worldwide Freethinkers Union.

Just like today in.

Amerika,

how to best exterminate religion,

It employed the powers given to it by the CPSU Central Committee at the 1929 congress to dictate orders to schools, universities, the armed forces, the trade unions, the Komsomol, the Young Pioneer Organization, the Soviet press, and other institutions for the purpose of its antireligious campaign. It criticized many public institutions (including the Communist Party) for failing to adequately attack religious belief and instructed them on how to be more effective

en.wikipedia.org...

reply to post by Stormdancer777

So, a single example of an organised atheist group which was disbanded between 1941 and 1947? OK.
I'm glad those militant atheists are not as numerous as the religious fundamentalists who cause so many problems in the world today.

reply to post by grainofsand



There are plenty of examples and you know it, don't play coy.

Vox Day notes concerning atheism and mass murder:
conservapedia.com...

Vox Day notes concerning atheism and mass murder:
“ Apparently it was just an amazing coincidence that every Communist of historical note publicly declared his atheism … .there have been twenty-eight countries in world history that can be confirmed to have been ruled by regimes with avowed atheists at the helm … These twenty-eight historical regimes have been ruled by eighty-nine atheists, of whom more than half have engaged in democidal162 acts of the sort committed by Stalin and Mao …

The total body count for the ninety years between 1917 and 2007 is approximately 148 million dead at the bloody hands of fifty-two atheists, three times more than all the human beings killed by war, civil war, and individual crime in the entire twentieth century combined.

The historical record of collective atheism is thus 182,716 times worse on an annual basis than Christianity’s worst and most infamous misdeed, the Spanish Inquisition. It is not only Stalin and Mao who were so murderously inclined, they were merely the worst of the whole Hell-bound lot. For every Pol Pot whose infamous name is still spoken with horror today, there was a Mengistu, a Bierut, and a Choibalsan, godless men whose names are now forgotten everywhere but in the lands they once ruled with a red hand.

Is a 58 percent chance that an atheist leader will murder a noticeable percentage of the population over which he rules sufficient evidence that atheism does, in fact, provide a systematic influence to do bad things? If that is not deemed to be conclusive, how about the fact that the average atheist crime against humanity is 18.3 million percent worse than the very worst depredation committed by Christians, even though atheists have had less than one-twentieth the number of opportunities with which to commit them. If one considers the statistically significant size of the historical atheist set and contrasts it with the fact that not one in a thousand religious leaders have committed similarly large-scale atrocities, it is impossible to conclude otherwise, even if we do not yet understand exactly why this should be the case. Once might be an accident, even twice could be coincidence, but fifty-two incidents in ninety years reeks of causation![10]

Atheist are just as capable of crimes against humanity as religious fanatics.

reply to post by Stormdancer777

Coy has nothing to do with it, any attempt to compare a militant atheist group which disbanded over 60 years ago, with a weekly social meeting of likeminded people who do not believe in gods, is questionable at best.
If such a weekly gathering presents issues to you or anyone then I'm interested in knowing what they are, without any irrelevant history stories attached of course.

The Soviet Union was the first state to have elimination of religion as an ideological objective

The Soviet Union was the first state to have elimination of religion as an ideological objective. Toward that end, the Communist regime confiscated church property, ridiculed religion, harassed believers, and propagated atheism in schools. Actions toward particular religions, however, were determined by State interests, and most organized religions were never outlawed. Orthodox priests and believers were variously tortured, sent to prison camps, labour camps or mental hospitals, and executed.[20][21] Many Orthodox (along with people of other faiths) were also subjected to psychological punishment or torture and mind control experimentation in order to force them give up their religious convictions.[22][23]

Thousands of churches and monasteries were taken over by the government and either destroyed or converted to secular use. It was impossible to build new churches.

Stalin era

The main target of the anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and 1930s was the Russian Orthodox Church, which had the largest congregation. Nearly all of its clergy, and many of its believers, were shot or sent to labor camps

Between 1917 and 1935, 130,000 Orthodox priests were arrested. Of these, 95,000 were put to death

en.wikipedia.org...

The comments made by some atheists on forums positively lead me to believe they would throw me in shackles if I didn't renounce my faith.

reply to post by Stormdancer777

Atheist Extremist are just as capable of crimes against humanity as religious fanatics.

Fixed it for you.


I love when people bring the soviet revolution/fight as some sort of Atheist movement, in fact, it was not. It was more of a political control rather an religious. Stalin and others saw Religion as a reach into their countries by outsiders, trying to break their control over people. If Team of Baseball fanatics did that, Stalin would have probable banned all Sports as well. Just because he banned all region does not mean the movement was an Atheist movement. He saw religion as a bad influence for his power.

The comments made by some atheists on forums positively lead me to believe they would throw me in shackles if I didn't renounce my faith.

Actually, anything against religion would be evil in your eyes because religious nuts had total monopoly on people for close to 2000 yrs, now people are questioning them and pulling them down from their high horse, so all of a sudden for them it looks like the slaves are fighting back. So to them any argument is like "wow how dare they people speak to us" kinda attitude,

Church, a place to pray, and all that..
A Lab could be called a church, for a scientist.
Were he "prays" to the "gods" of physics? Perhaps

A could call it a religion, easily.

As long as certain coditions are met however...
EVERYTHING is possible, i guess...
Even the christian notion of Jesus...

Originally posted by Stormdancer777
The comments made by some atheists on forums positively lead me to believe they would throw me in shackles if I didn't renounce my faith.

As a man who believes in no gods, I believe there are many who would wish me the same fate as well.
An example:

Originally posted by TheChosenKing
Frankly I'm appalled that you don't believe in God ,you should be killed denying your creator.Hell is heating up for people like you.

Source ATS Topic

On-topic again though, I would definitely check out a non-gods-believing group in my area, social contact with likeminded people in an environment without imagined mystical entities is welcome as far as I'm concerned.

reply to post by Barcs

1. Near death experiences do not prove god. Soul / afterlife / spiritual realm do not require god to exist. It's an entirely separate phenomena.

Never said they did.

2. Proving a NDE happens without a functioning brain is impossible. It's just personal experience and nothing more. It would be like somebody saying they could prove god because they talked to Jesus yesterday. It's impossible to verify.

I agree it's impossible to 'prove' by the exacting standards of the scientific method.

How could you prove such a thing that way?

But, by any human criteria, it has been proven beyond reasonable doubt.

At the end of the day, we're stuck with anecdotes.

The reason you distrust the anecdotes is not because they come from unreliable sources (in the case of Pam Reynolds, a surgical team - come on!) but because they haven't been given the stamp of approval by the scientific community.

There are numerous such cases from reliable sources, which are as near to proof as damn it is to swearing.

But again I ask - how do you prove this phenomenon in such a way as would satisfy the suits in Harvard and Oxford?

Originally posted by CJCrawley
how do you prove this phenomenon in such a way as would satisfy the suits in Harvard and Oxford?

How does that link into a discussion about people who don't believe in gods meeting up each week for a shared social experience?

reply to post by grainofsand


I was reacting to a poster who stated that NDE could be dismissed as "hallucinations and dreams."

Feel free to read through the posts....

reply to post by CJCrawley
Yep, I understood that, just thought it was irrelevant to the atheist weekly gathering thing in the OP, unless the intention would be to descend into the usual faith/no faith silliness.

Feminism was supposed to save the world from itself at one time also. Instead, it completely destroyed (and is still destroying) what was once referred to as "a family"

Atheism is no different.

It's more about enslavement than any religion is, ironically. It might not seem that way at first....then,

www.conservapedia.com...

Good luck with that.

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

Atheists have long been acting in exactly the same way that they say condemns (so to speak) the religious types.

Non-belief system or belief system, either way.. the fanatics, zealots, and extremists can be a direct danger to the society around them.

There are good people in all camps.

If there is a God, I will live my life with kindness and respect. If there is not a God, I will live my life with kindness and respect.

Originally posted by HIWATT
Feminism was supposed to save the world from itself at one time also. Instead, it completely destroyed (and is still destroying) what was once referred to as "a family"

Atheism is no different.

It's more about enslavement than any religion is, ironically. It might not seem that way at first....then,

www.conservapedia.com...

Good luck with that.

Sorry, but Conservapedia? Really? Are you serious? That site's now the place where crazy ideas go to die. Their page on Obama consists of every single conspiracy theory ever. The place is so nutty that the site's founder is still trying to claim that E=MC2 is not only a worthless theory, but is also a liberal conspiracy.

reply to post by GafferUK1981


#pointless
/second

Originally posted by AngryCymraeg
The place is so nutty that the site's founder is still trying to claim that E=MC2 is not only a worthless theory, but is also a liberal conspiracy.

Interestingly, at least to me, that sort of claim is not exclusive to religion (or lack-thereof). Its more of a counter-culture result, which tend to be direct derivatives of what they decry. In this respect, I tend to find the atheistic non-belief system to be the most predictable out of all of them. At a very close second, infinitesimally even, is the "alternative science" crowd. As always, there are exceptions to every rule.

I still find it to be one of the strangest claims around though. While it is not all-encompassing, and I view it as a stepping stone to greater understanding, the pattern is as consistent as it gets in the material/physical universe.

Originally posted by HIWATT
Feminism was supposed to save the world from itself at one time also. Instead, it completely destroyed (and is still destroying) what was once referred to as "a family"

Atheism is no different.

It's more about enslavement than any religion is, ironically. It might not seem that way at first....then,

www.conservapedia.com...

Good luck with that.

Lame.
I don't believe in any gods but that has no influence in my political ideology, sidetrack much?