Were Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot atheists?
In debunking atheism and using the tu quoque or “you too!” argument to point fingers in the opposite direction whenever religious atrocities are raised, defenders of theism often bring up the notion that some of the most destructive and genocidal ideologies in history, Communism, Nazism and “Pol Potery,” were “atheistic,” because their leaders were “atheists.”
In my book The Gospel According to Acharya S, I delve briefly into these subjects, raising a few facts and conclusions that may not be widely known – but should be, because of these anti-atheist arguments. Here is a pertinent excerpt from The Gospel, also included in an Examiner article, “Is atheism the answer, Part 3?”, which is the source for the last two paragraphs of commentary here. (All facts in the following excerpt are carefully cited in The Gospel from reliable sources.)
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.”
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. As Stalin biographer Edvard Radinsky remarks, “During his mysterious retreat [of June 1941] the ex-seminarist had decided to involve the aid of the God he had rejected.” Radinsky likewise chronicles a number of religious comrades in Stalin’s immediate circle. It is evident that, whether for good or bad, religion played a significant role in Stalin’s life.
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 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].'” Although in comparison to the Abrahamic religions its history is far less violent, Buddhism has not been entirely devoid of atrocity in its spread and practice.
If we are to insist—as many people have done, including numerous theists and atheists alike—that religious human abuse is the cause of atheistic reaction against religion, we need look no further, it would seem, than to Josef Stalin’s religiously abusive childhood to discover from where much of his rage appeared to emanate. His atheistic reaction therefore would be caused by religion. Hitler, who was also fascinated by mysticism, could not be deemed an “atheist” by any scientific standard, and Pol Pot also was not raised an atheist in a vacuum devoid of religion but was obviously affected and motivated by it.
If atheism is frequently but a reaction against human abuse by religion, then in itself such disbelief may not be the cause of malfeasance.
Sources & Further Reading
The Gospel According to Acharya S
Is atheism the answer, Part 3?”
Was Hitler Christian, Pagan or Atheist?
What is a mythicist?
153 thoughts on “Were Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot atheists?”
Comments are closed.
Thank you for writing this article. I have seen this issue come up time and time again.
It is a valid question to raise: were Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot a result of religious conditioning and abuse? The answer appears to be yes.
Well, 2 things. As much as I hate Christianity (that creed of slaves), I will defend even my worst enemies from false accusations. Second, there’s a point that needs mention.
1) If Hitler was a Christian, how do you explain the Nuremberg Project?
http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/endC.htm.
(PS: Don’t worry. There’s still plenty of massacres to blame Christians for.) As for what faith Hitler or any of the Nazi party leaders and members actually were, it gets confusing; some felt like using the German churches as political tools, some liked atheism and others still wanted to return to pre-Christian Norse/Germanic paganism. The Nazi party really had no consensus on this.
And btw, Mein Kampf is meant for [u]public consumption[/u], and it not necessarily what Hitler believes. In private he referred to Christianity as “Bolshevism in a tinsel of metaphysics” (see Table Talk–apparently someone made a book of all the conversations he had with his generals/advisers etc at Berchtesgaden during the War) This is 1924. He’s still trying get out of Landsberg Prison at this point. He’s not showing his true hand just yet, or they’d keep him there.
2) How did Hitler and Stalin portray themselves? In a Messianic way, of course. That Germany and Russia were Christian paves the way for the “one great leader” who has come to “save the country.” In Germany, Goebbels even claimed “God has not manifested himself in Jesus Christ, but in Adolf Hitler”. And of course the Jews were the devil. As for the Marxists, has anyone noticed the May Day Parades feature crowds carrying ICONS of Lenin, Marx and Stalin, as if they were gods? While Marxism may be very different than Christianity, to the frankly disinterested Russian, it still feels like the Russian Orthodox church with a few new gods to replace the old.
In short, while Hitler was not a Christian, he would have found his work impossible if Christianity never existed.
I don’t see why it’s so important if Hitler, Stalin, Mao etc were atheists. We see massacres and butchery whether the authorities are religious are not. The real problem is statism; where there is greater centralization and love of intrusive government, there is problem. Personally I’m a Deist, but I think Athiests following the US Constitution would work fine.
Steven, in your hasty response you failed to point out how anything I said (or in this blog) was “false.” Your selective perception and biases has certainly revealed itself as transparent as glass.
“My feeling as a Christian leads me to be a fighter for my Lord and Saviour.”
– Hitler ([url]http://books.google.com/books?cd=2&id=ARloAAAAMAAJ&dq=%22My+feeling+as+a+Christian+leads+me+to+be+a+fighter%22&q=%22My+feeling+as+a+Christian+leads+me+to+be+a+fighter+for+my+Lord+and+Saviour%22#search_anchor[/url])
“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.”
– Hitler
“The national government…will extend its firm protection to Christianity as the basis of our moral system…”
– Hitler
Perhaps you just forgot how much Hitler was helped by the Catholic church and other churches:
[quote]”Whether Protestant pastor or Catholic priest, each did his very utmost in helping our powers of resistance to hold out, not only in the trenches but also, and even more so, at home. During those years, and especially during the first outburst of enthusiasm, in both religious camps there was one undivided and sacred German Empire for whose preservation and future existence they all prayed to Heaven.”
– Adolf Hitler, on WWI, Mein Kampf, I, 3[/quote]
Hitler took Jesus to heart when he said:
[quote]”My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice… And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.”
– Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922[/quote]
History of Hitler and Muslim Waffen SS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3pq1KIUZb4
The Association between Naziism and Arab Antisemitism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBFBvceJvIU
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc., never killed in the name of atheism and that is the monumental difference omitted by far too many.
Okay the thing that bothers me here is that you are quoting things he said BEFORE he came to power. Here’s a quote from Hitler’s Table Talk
“The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that’s left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic. When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.”
He did what any good politician would do before he came to power, and in the early days of that power. He used the country’s religion to bring the people together under his rule, and bring about war against all who would oppose HIS viewpoints
Thanks. That may be a valid point – I would have to see a timeline to know whether or not all of his pro-Christian quotes were said before he was in power. I do know that he was hailed as the “new messiah” after his rise, with comparisons to Jesus. Moreover, the fact is that he was raised a Catholic, was an altar boy, continued in his childhood faith and made seemingly sincere expressions of faith as an adult. Moreover, he clearly used Christianity for his purpose of “driving Jews out of the temple,” so to speak, so the Christian weapon of choice remains the same. Without the Christian doctrine and long tradition of Jews as anti-Christs and Christ-killers, Hitler likely would not have succeeded.
The Table Talks were wrongly translated.
Genoud fabricated the anti-Christian quotes
At the time of the first publication of the table-talk translations, Trevor-Roper, Cameron and R. H. Stevens, probably did not know about Genoud’s fake quotes. However, later publications do not excuse the errors, and that makes them dishonest at the very least.
As stated before, there are two versions the original German table-talk. One edited by Martin Bormann called the Bormann Vermerke (“Bormann Notes”) which, until 1980, existed only in the collection of Francois Genoud. The other version came from Picker who got is copy from Heim and then added his own entries. According to Richard C. Carrier, “the Bormann Vermerke also contains entries made by Bormann, and presumably Heim, during the period covered by Picker’s text, which are inexplicably not found in his copy. There is also supposed to be a third copy, which Bormann forwarded to an office in Münich, but it was lost (most likely destroyed by Allied bombs).”
Picker’s edition has the strongest claim to authenticity because it contains the actual German, has the support of eyewitness testimony and has scholarly backing. Next in authority is the scholarly work of Werner Jochmann who published the German of the Bormann Vermerke in 1980 (which Trevor-Roper, et al, used from Genoud’s French translation). The German versions of the talk do not include the anti-Christian quotes.
The English version endorsed by Trevor-Roper (and everyone else) contains the fabrications. These lies come, verbatim, from the translation of Genoud’s French!
http://www.nobeliefs.com/HitlerSources.htm
Thanks. I don’t know about all the details, but “According to Richard C. Carrier…” I don’t really care about ANYTHING Richard Carrier has to say, as he is a pretty despicable character of poor integrity.
In any event, your clarifications are interesting otherwise.
At the very least, even without a timeline, Hitler’s Quotes from Hitler’s Table talk show what he said in private which reflect his intimate beliefs.
His quotes in public to rile the masses are just lies used to manipulate people into doing what he wanted. He was truly an evil person. Was Hitler a Christian? He certainly didn’t act like one! He certainly spoke very harshly of it in private!
Too many people use “He said he was a Christian!” as a litmus test for who is a Christian.
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. ‘By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Hitler,Stalin and the rest it had nothing too do with theist or atheist, they were all psychopaths who wanted to rule the world. They were not secular humanist. If you look up who have killed the most people in the name of God compared to people who killed people who were not religious and religion wins by far. We can’t count just Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Pot there were many more than them. Christian wars have killed many more than Muslims wars. Catholics have killed many. Atheist are not even close to the amount of people killed. However, all are guilty of genocide. It needs to stop but I’m afraid the worst is yet to come. The world would have been much better off without religion.
You have an extended version of the “No True Scotsman” right there.
Buddhism was not originally theistic. It still isn
I suspect that the strain in Cambodia is of the atheistic variety. Too often in the U.S. religion is equated with gods, when there’s a huge variety of ungodly superstition out there.
Stalin – Atehist
All of them were too preoccupied to think about matter such as this.
They DID NOT experience any respectable experience of any kind. Dogs with a diabolical gift for hell.
I’m sorry, but I don’t just make things up. As I stated above: [b]All facts in the following excerpt are carefully cited…from reliable sources.[/b]
According to Joseph Telushkin ([url]http://books.google.com/books?id=yzewmitzYgEC&pg=PA270&dq=telushkin+joseph+marx&cd=4#v=onepage&q=%22Christianity%20when%20he%20was%20six%22&f=false[/url]), Marx was a Christian convert at the age of six, just as I stated. The same was related by Hendrik Marinus Ruitenbeek ([url]http://books.google.com/books?cd=4&q=Karl+Marx%2C+the+founder+of+Communist+theory%2C+was+born+to+a+Jewish+family+in+1818%2C+but+was+converted+by+his+parents+to+Christianity+when+he+was+six.&btnG=Search+Books[/url]) and several other authors ([url]http://books.google.com/books?cd=4&q=%22Christianity+when+he+was+six%22&btnG=Search+Books[/url]).
Simply saying “no” does not disprove this contention. We can be skeptical of other of your claims as well.
ideas, not God, the problem
It’s not God, who, if He exists is ineffable and beyond the knowledge of humans, that is the cause of the atrocities committed by religious and non-religious people.
The real cause of atrocity is the elevation of an idea and an ideology above the rights of a human being.
Catholic persecution of pagans, protestants, and jews was of the religious against the religious. Thus, it was about the dominance of an idea, and an ideology backed by brute force and violence.
Communism, as an ideology, acted with violence against all other ideologies that stood in competition with it. Christians, bhuddists, capitalists- all were violently suppressed in Communist nations.
Where protestants assumed political power during the reformation, the protestant state acted violently towards witches (pagan), and catholics, as well as against other protestant sects that did not adgere to a proclaimed creed (ideology), such as anabaptists.
Thus we can see that the ascendancy of an ideology to political power without the safeguard of a commitment to the freedom of conscience, leads to persecution of any competing ideology. It matters not if the ideology is based on a mystical perception of reality (religious), or whether it is a materialistic outlook. ideology and political power has proven a fatal combination in most cases.
The majority of people int he world had a religion, especially pre liberal 1960’s or so. Implying that religion is the cause of all that is wrong in the world is like saying government is the cause of all suffering in the world.
in search of truth in education
Well I like the article as well. I knew that Hitler was a confirmed
Christian and was hand in glove with the Catholic hierarchy in Europe.
I am not as well versed in Pol Pot nor Stalin though I knew Stalin had a Christian upbringing. I think the main point of the article is how atheists are tainted by the theists as having created some of the worst war criminals in the 20th century. I think EDUCATION is key here. The theists do not want to examine the FACTS that led to these men being so outrageously abusive to humanity and their own people.
We need to keep educating people as to the truth so they will not make these obnoxious blanket statements that really make the theists look oh so pious. It’s still this ignorance masquerading as truth that
we have to fight against time and time again. The agenda is simple. Find a group, point a finger, make statements that they are bad, wrong, evil, immoral. Meanwhile the group that does that is
just as complicit in the actions they rail against in the first place.
It’s textbook psych 101 disinformation.
Please people, when you hear something, do some research.
Don’t just accept anything anyone tells you at face value. Educate
yourself, look at the facts, examine both sides. Then make up your mind. Blindless devotion is what caused these holocausts
of WWII, Soviet Stalinism, and The Killing Fields to begin with.
I believe Hitler was a Catholic, not a Christian.
A Catholic is a Christian…
No, a Catholic is not a Christian. A true Christian will obey Christ’s teachings, and keep the commandments of God. An example of this would be the heavy persecution of the Anabaptists by both protestants AND catholics during and after the Reformation. The Anabaptists believed in loving your enemy, doing good to those hate them,and praying for those despitefully them. These are all teachings of Jesus. Many atrocities have been committed in the name of Jesus. But no TRUE Christian has ever taken part in such gross injustice! Otherwise, he would not be Christian. Maybe they weren’t all atheist, maybe they had several types of religious backgrounds. One thing is for sure, and I want to set the record straight: if you do the things these people did for WHATEVER reason, you are no Christian! None of these these mass murderers were Christians. God bless you.
In comes the parade with torches and pitchforks. Always people like yourself to come charging in and make claims about their religion that are entirely false. It is truly amazing how people (just as yourself) rant, rave and preach about their religion and know incredibly less about it than atheists. If you truly knew your religion, if you truly knew everything in your bible then you would know that everything you argue against is exactly what makes a christian a christian.
How ignorant – Catholicism is one of the strands of Christianity and different strands fight against each other.
James is incredibly ignorant on the subject. In comes the atheist with the self-righteousness, misinformation, and hatred…
No True Scotsman fallacy.
Beliefs
It makes sense that religions would have influenced these monsters. All religions by their very nature are exclusive and allow thoughts of marginalizing those who are not members of their club. Even aetheism is a belief and thus not a truth. So even aethists need to free themselves of their religion and allow choices for themselves. We are all one.
On Beliefs
Athism is as much a belief as not collecting postage stamps is a hobby.
And I have never heard anyone claim that atheism is a truth whatever that means.
I don’t understand this notion that Atheism is not a belief. It seems to be spreading like wildfire, but it makes no sense. Atheism is in part a system of thinking by which you deduce there is no god. Or, if you are unsure due to lack of evidence, there are still associated beliefs.
To say there are no beliefs with regaurds to any system of thought seems ludicrous. If you say you are an atheist, you must mean something by it, and therefore believe something. Otherwise what’s the point of saying it.
I personally think that atheism is picking up steam as a meme, and that it is taking on many characteristics. I don’t see why atheism can’t be used as a battle cry just as any theism can. “Atheism is not a belief” seems to harbor the seeds of such a battlecry. It doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to be relevant culturally.
Atheism
Wow………if there is any doubt about Communism being Atheistic I’m sure it is with the doubters………
No, Christians were not Communists. Jews were………..
Anybody really doubting that??
And how about A. Pike? And his ‘we’ll let loose on the world the Atheists and the Nihilists?’.
Yes, many people have been murdered in the name of God.
None of these murderers were of God.
Atheism is showing this really religious fervor in denying God. Religious, because in a scientific sense, God can be proven nor disproven.
Nonetheless you have the Atheists literally preaching God does not exist.
If you cannot cope with God, stick to Agnosticism. That is at least plausible. Religious Atheism is just childish.
Childish is the belief in any known Gods. There is nothing more immature than to believe in God. I am an atheist towards all known earthly religions. I can be agnostic towards any unknown being that might have God like powers. Go crawl back in your closet you mental midget.
Here is an example of someone who uses their atheistic beliefs to be antagonistic, even hostil. You will find remarks like this all over the net. My guess is this has to do with many evils that are associated with religion, so talking down to these “evil doers” is warranted. The scary part is what else is warranted if these assumptions are to be held as fact? Or if atheism is considered a panacea?
I think many of the statements I see show that many proclaimed atheists look at theists as something less then human. This points to a culture of dehumanization that lead to attrocities. I seems a no brainer that dehumanizing people with religious convictions is to be judged as worse then having religious convictions.
Nurturing other people is more important then a facad of philosophy that we dress ourselves up with. This includes educating people, but being gentle with them. And ohhh, one more really important thing, give them a chance to educate you.
I see the same thing all over the Internet of Christians bashing people for their beliefs, some of which aren’t even religious. They use their Christian beliefs to “be antagonistic” towars Muslims, Gay people, and anybody else wh might not agree with their beliefs. They promote exclusion and put themselves above everybody else.
Looks like both of you are two sides of the same pile of shit.
He said this.
You said that.
They was born “this” so “that” team gets the credit. Especially if “they” became “my team”.
Sounds like the problem isnt religion. Religion is the tool assholes use like any other ideology to committ atrocities.
Saying Stalin was a Christian first and Communist later doesnt make the first, or second, the solo cause of his exterminating 13+million people. BOTH ARE
YOURE BOTH ASSHOLES
What Atheism actually is, and ridiculous things th
Atheism is the absence of theism, nothing more. This means no belief in god. It does not necessarily mean that they believe gods don’t exist.
Agnosticism however deals with what you claim to know.
Anyone who is religious, should be agnostic, which should then lead them to be atheists, are there is no proof of any god.
Also, what about the tooth fairy, easter bunny, big foot, Santa, leprechauns and so on?
We don’t have proof they exist, or proof they don’t exist.
So should we remain agnostic and say we don’t know if they exist? Or is saying they don’t exist perfectly fine? I would say most people would say it is perfectly fine to say ridiculous things like this don’t exist.
So why should it be any different for the even more ridiculous concept of a god?
Contrary to what some conmen would like to tell you, absence of evidence is evidence of absence, however it needs to come from looking for evidence and not finding any, rather than just ignoring any or not seeking it.
We assume heaps of things don’t exist, because there is no evidence that they do and no logical reason for their existence.
If a god does exist, then its existence is indistinguishable from its non-existence and thus it effectively does not exist.
All evidence we have of gods, shows they are made up by man in various myths and legends.
This means any truly rational person will say that gods don’t exist.
Gnostic atheism makes sense. Theism is just childish.
I’m sorry Anthony, but Hitler killed Jews for God (he was Catholic and here are some of his famous quotes. Don’t believe me or the internet you can buy the book Mien Kampf in German that means My Struggle, it was Hitlers manifesto and is available in English turn to page 46 and 125) “I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord’s work.” [Adolph Hitler, Speech, Reichstag, 1936] “I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so” [Adolph Hitler, to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941] that is an act of religious hatred that shouldn’t be tolerated anywhere, but intolerance for new ideas shouldn’t be supported either. We are both entitled to our opinions, so let’s leave it at that. There is no need to preach. It doesn’t fix anything. I’m an atheist and I know you are a smart guy, you are probably very intelligent… So, I’m hoping you will hear me out…
Atheism is not a religion. It does not take faith, and there is no believing required. It would be like saying “you don’t believe in Yetis? Well, then you must have faith that there’s not a Yeti…It takes the same amount of faith to not believe in fairies, unicorns (my favorite), leprechauns, and dragons as it does to just accept them into your heart.”
Now, we both know fairies aren’t real and that it’s silly to believe in them because there is no evidence supporting their existence so you logically deduce that they are not real. No faith. No believing. (Did you follow that, Anthony? I don’t want to sound rude. I’m sorry if this is upsetting to hear but this is my take on it. You can keep an open mind right?)
Lastly, Atheism shouldn’t be about knowing. Knowing something we can only speculate on is close minded and will lead to violate behavior when we realize all we’ve been taught or have known was wrong. Atheism, to me, is about the very humble phrase “I don’t know.” I don’t know if there’s a God, there probably isn’t, so I’m not going to spend my days scaring others with the fires of hell. I’m going to live, before I die. I want to celebrate life! I want to travel and help the needy because I WANT to, not because I’m scared of punishment. I’m not saying Christians bad or Muslims or Catholics or Jews or Buddhists (<— Buddhists are awesome.) They aren't, most are beautiful people you are just as smart as you, Anthony. You see, when people start spouting hate, towards anyone, I am stricken with the grief of what people can make religion. They can twist it and destroy lives.
Were Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot atheists?
Just because a person was born to religious parents or a church or synagogue doesn’t mean they stay with that religion forever. Hitler may have attended the Catholic Church, but many biographers have delved into Hitler’s deep involvement with the occult.
Karl Marx was certainly not a Christian as the author incorrectly suggests. Marx stated that religion was the opium of the masses. Marx was never a Christian.
Pol Pot never practiced any form of religion in his adult years, but certainly murdered many thousands of religious leaders during his evill and Godless reign.
Trotsky stated “Marxism is saturated with the optimism of progress, and that alone, by the way, makes it irreconcilably opposed to religion.”
It’s time atheist come to terms with the evil of their religion and stop trying to push the blame for the world’s troubles, past and present, on others. Communism was based on atheism and the communist leaders stated that fact. Communists leaders knew that without a moral compass and a belief in the judgment hereafter, killing would come more easily.
In response to Kenny Breaz, it is indeed true that Hitler was a Catholic and he admitted and professed such proudly many times in his speeches and in his book Mein Kemp. Kenny is obviously in denial. Po Pot (Saloth Sar) was a Buddhist and many consider Buddhism to be secular since the Buddhist religion does NOT recognize a deity (Supreme Being or God ) as is the case of Christianity, Islam, etc. Stalin attended a seminary in his youth at age 15 then later in his adult life and declared he would start his own religion) . Stalin purged those who posed a threat to his regieme just like Pol Pot. The USSR citizens and government officials acknowledged that in the years preceeding his death when Stalin had made a major conversion to religion that he was indeed the most ruthless. Chair Mao was originally a follower of Buddhism and later converted to Taoism ( which many Christians consider to be a heathen or heretical religion which is also a misnomer, and was in no way secular ). I have heard people say that Sadaam hussein was a secular Muslim ( there is no such thing—-you can’t be secular which means non -religious and be one who practices Islam which is a religion which believes in the god called Allah ). Another blatant lie spread by Christians to confuse the issue and cover up for their hidieous religious attrocities . The most evil tyrant that ever existed is the Christian God that gave us hurricanes, plagues, tornados, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, blizzards, etc etc . Wake up people and face reality !!!!!!
religion is the opium of the people….
Marx went on to say
“The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.
To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.
The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears that is religion.”
Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler committed their atrocities in the name of warped ideologies and power not because ascribed atheism.
Remember “Gott mit uns” “God with us” was on every German soldiers belt buckle and nearly half the Wafen SS were confessing catholics.
A moral compass is innate in most humans (notwithstanding sociopaths/psychopaths) and doesn’t come from a book.
Marx was baptised Lutheran and grew up in a Lutheran dominated society. He adopted his atheism later.
“No, I don’t know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God.”
– George H.W. Bush, when he was candidate for president
“Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land – for Jesus Christ – to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect life & godliness. It is dominion we’re after not just a voice. It is dominion we’re after not just influence. It is dominion we’re after not just equal time. It is dominion we’re after. World conquest. That’s what Christ has commissioned us to do.”
– George Grant, “changing of the guard” pg 50-51
“Our goal, as Christians, is to dominate society”
– Pat Robertson
“Christianity & Democracy are inevitably enemies”
– R.J. Rushdoony “Independent Republic” pg 122, 1964
“The church should be a disciplined charging army Christians, like slaves & solders ask no questions. We are fighting a holy war”
– Jerry Falwell
“Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost. As the vice regents of God, we are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government, our literature and arts, our sports arenas, our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors — in short, over every aspect and institution of human society.”
– D. James Kennedy
“Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith … We need believing people.”
– Adolf Hitler, April 26, 1933, from a speech made during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordat of 1933.
Did Bush claim this from personal knowledge or
just utttered it to garner the votes of the naive?
As a Native American, let me remind yoy America only exists because the blood of a 100 million indigenous people are on your hands…Your blood thirsty God must be so proud of you…
Belief Systems and Social Perception Structures
Belief Systems and Social Perception Structures
http://www.trufax.org/general/beliefsystems.html
Logic and Fallacies | Influence and Persuasion | Suppression of Sound Ideas
Belief: Whatever an individual is willing to accept without direct verification by experience or without the support of evidence, resulting in assumption which is taken as a basis for action or non-action.
Beliefs are tools for social conditioning, rather than expressions of inner realization or universal truth.
Ideology: Vague term for the embodiment of beliefs in abstract ideas that can drive human behavior to pathological extremes.
Hitler had a definition of “God” and “Lord” which was different from what is being implied in this article.
If you want to know his views on religion, look at the TABLE TALK: “The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practices a lie of the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them. In the ancient world, the relations between men and gods were founded on an instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance. Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its keynote is intolerance.”
“Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of human failure.”
“To make death easier for people, the Church holds out to them the bait of a better world. We, for our part, confine ourselves to asking man to fashion his life worthily. For this, it is sufficient for him to conform to the laws of nature. Let’s seek inspiration in these principles, and in the long run we’ll triumph over religion.”
“…there will never be any possibility of National Socialism’s setting out to ape religion by establishing a form of worship. Its one ambition must be scientifically to construct a doctrine that is nothing more than a homage to reason.”
Table Talk is not a reliable source. Hitler expounded on a range of subjects to an essentially captive audience. Hitler’s teas were highly formal affairs and frequently included influential and famous guests, none of whom dared to contradict Der Fuhrer, who was a haphazardly educated man with no shortage of poorly thought out spur of the moment opinions. Moreover, transcripts of the conversation were turned over to Martin Bormann, probably the leading Occultist in the Nazi regime, who substantially edited and revised them. They were later translated by a French Nazi named Genoud, who freely included many invented “Hitler quotations,” claiming them as statements Hitler WOULD have made. An edition published shortly after the war during an intense mania for all things Hitler included an introduction by the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, which gave the book an undeserved stamp of authenticity.
Despite his semi-coherent tea time pontificating, Hitler never left the Church, and the Church never left him.
The “atheist” dictators often cited by Christian apologists all arose in the 20th century when technology made mass killing relatively easy due to rapid communication, efficient transport, automatic weapons, chemical weapons, airplanes, and powerful bombs. I shudder to think of how many millions more would have died during the Christian crusades centuries ago if the Church had had aircraft carriers and tanks. Anyone who believes that the Crusaders, the Inquisitors, and the witch hunters, who tortured and killed millions with their primitive weapons, would have been too godly to employ modern weapons against the infidels, the heretics, and the witches is hopelessly naive.
As Voltaire said, “A man must put a high price on his conjectures to burn another man alive.”
Atheism is the absence of supernatural conjectures.
Thank you for writing this very much needed article. I’ve just been through Easter here in Sydney where just about every Christian leader publicly fulminated against atheists and suggested they were the cause of many of the world’s problems. On reading about leaders like Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot though, I see it’s their religious upbringing that shaped their basic outlook and made them (or Stalin and Hitler at least) into the monstrous people they were.
We could go further and see how the Roman Catholic Church collaborated with Franco’s government in Spain from the 1940’s to 1975, and with the military governments in Argentina and Chile during the 1970’s, and how many people in those governments were fervent Catholics. As for Communism, there may be evidence that churches in Communist countries collaborated with the regime where it suited both church and government to work together to distract the public’s attention away from food and other shortages and to encourage nationalism.
HAHAHAHAHA your logic is fallacious in nature. You suffer from confirmation bias. I can blame whatever I want for whatever I want by connecting the dots in my own manner. For instance, I can cite examples of Australians throughout time committing acts of violence and link such behavior to being Australian. I can state the origin of Australia has undoubtedly shaped the behavior of future generations and created an atavistic society prone to crime like the ancestors that populated the nation. Give me a break. You see what you want to see. You purposely overlook facts that oppose your belief and omit factual information due to some personal bitterness and contempt. Grow up. People like you are laughable.
Without religion how the hell would we get a good war off the ground. What could these tyrants use to convince a young man, with everything to live for, to go and perhaps die in a war that he doesn’t even understand. Would they use our love of chocolate to convince us to go kill people we don’t know? “Go to war young man or no more Snickers bars for you.” Of course not. This war is for god and country” “God is on our side”, “Allah will reward you with 72 virgins” etc…
Also, never forget that it was Jews that Hitler murdered, not plumbers. Religious people love to forget that little detail.
Starting a War is as easy as 1,2,3
1. Inflate the people’s ego. At first it was “you have a God given right!” now it’s “We were born superior, science made us superior!”
2. Resources involved. Even if there was no religion on earth watch people get testy when we run out of anything and are forced to expand.
3. Glorify the cause. “We are liberators! We can give the people an opportunity to better themselves.” You’d be surprised how many people believe that.
Stupidity, Ethnocentrism, Pride, Jealousy, Hate etc are not exclusive to religion. Only ignorant people believe that getting rid of religion will reduce any of those things. People always find a way to justify wrong doing. And there will be people who believe it regardless.
Yes, because no wars erupted prior to the existence of modern religion. How ignorant. Keep buying into your own brand of history.
actually, they were satanists.
No peace on earth
NO PEACE ON EARTH
According to the Bible, we are the descendants of a cold-blooded murderer (Cain), and an incestuous mother (Eve). As we all know, the man without a navel (Adam) did not have any daughters.
With such a dark, and evil, legacy, it is not surprising that violence, wars, injustice, and cruelty, have been with us since the creation of the Human Race. The annals of our planet show that long periods of peace have been very scarce.
However, we cannot put all the blame on our progenitors for creating a “bipedal jungle”.
Wars are a necessary evil for the greedy capitalists, and the unethical nations who have land-stealing aspirations. In other words, war is good for business and an excuse for land-theft.
Everything destroyed in a war (except human life), must be replaced. Big business does all the restoration work, pocketing billions of dollars for their effort. That is why big business, and greedy capitalists, will never kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Major wars, civil wars, and armed conflicts are often funded by capitalists who stand to benefit from the misery of others.
The protagonists of World War 2 (including Hitler), were funded by Jewish bankers.
The same Jewish bankers also benefited when the economically devastated nations needed enormous loans to rebuild their ruined nations.
Multi-billion dollar businesses make huge profits when humans are slaughtering each other and destroying their cities, and towns, with conventional and nuclear weapons.
Wars are often created to control vital strategic commodities (e.g. oil and gas); and establish essential military bases (e.g. Iraq and Afghanistan).
War is also used as an excuse to steal land from vulnerable small nations (e.g. Palestine).
War is a bonanza for manufacturers of Battleships, Aircraft carriers, planes, helicopters, tanks, rockets, ammunition, bombs, torpedoes, etc. The Armaments Industry is a TRILLION DOLLAR global business. When you have trillions of dollars at your disposal, you can afford to buy, and bribe, as many politicians as you want.
The main beneficiaries of the “2008 GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS” were the Jewish Bankers.
There are no prizes for guessing who created the crisis.
The affected nations have obtained huge loans from the Jewish I.M.F (International monetary fund) and the Jewish WORLD BANK at inflated interest rates.
Were the greedy Jewish bankers punished for creating a crippling recession? On the contrary, they were rewarded with generous “STIMULUS PACKAGES” amounting to BILLIONS of taxpayers’ dollars.
So much for Obama’s famous slogan: “YES WE CAN!”
It is no coincidence that the recent Global Financial Crisis (GFC 2) emanated from the Zionist Capital of the World (the USA). The previous Global Financial Crisis (GFC 1) occurred in 1929.
The epicentre of the first GFC (which became a depression) was in the USA. There are no prizes for guessing who created the two GFCs.
The gullible “GOYIM” (Gentiles) have been duped once again by the crafty Jews!
If the Gentiles do not wake up, we will have a third Global Financial Crisis in the not too distant future.
As a pragmatist, and a realist, I can categorically state that wars will never cease. The perpetual slaughter of innocent men, women, and children, will continue until Homo Sapiens (Latin for “wise man”) becomes extinct in a Global Nuclear Holocaust. Unfortunately, that is the sad truth.
Len Giles
BRILLIANTLY SPOKEN…A THOUSAND THANK-YOUS
hitler catholic
Hitler’s parents were devout Roman Catholics, what does thiis mean? who knows but obviosly the church at the high military level have established everthing from the inquisition to the CIA to the majority of false flag attacks………..Titanic,9/11,JFK, to the medical/psychiatric inquisition and more. So It wouldn’t exactly suprise me but to say these dictators are athiest and thats it would be undermining history itself
Myth: Religion Caused Most Wars
It is absolutely laughable that religion is the ultimate root cause of all wars.
War is, and always has been, about land and resources, and identity (patriotism/nationalism, religion, race, etc.) has been infused into this and used by the elite and powerful who control the wars to build support for the wars.
Ever taken anthropology 101??
Why do primitive societies and tribes war with neighbouring tribes? Over Jesus ???? Over their Sun God????
Was WW1 or Vietnam, or Korea or the Congo about religion?
Above, someone argues that Hitler’s evil war was rooted in his hatred of the Jews, and therefore WW2 was based on religion. Anyone with even a basic understanding of that war understands that Hitler suffered from an irrational fear of not having enough land for the expansionist exploitation of the “master race”. Expansionism and resource/land grabs were the consistent and constant core themes of his writings, speeches, and policies. He thought this could only be accomplished through war and annexing neighbouring countries. He didn’t attack Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France to get Jews, he attacked them simply for land, resources, and greater power.
I absolutely detest the simpleton, idiotic statement that sooooo many people now spout: “Religion has caused so much war”. Stop and think about that for a moment – think of all the wars in all of mankind’s entire history.
The main reason I hate this is that it takes people’s analysis away from the real causes of war, and hence moves us away from real solutions.
Just one of several factors
It is not laughable. Religion has been used throughout the history of the world to manipulate people to kill others. The Crusades provide evidence of this, as do many other wars that followed. People in positions of power understood that they could use peoples’ fear of hell and ignorance of Science to their advantage, and they did just that. Religion has long been used to gain control of land, but religion and the fear it invokes was used to take the land and brainwash the people.
agreed, religion is great for keeping your flock under the thumb and easy to manipulate. it has been used to motivate your group to kill others (strangely), however one of the main reasons for conflict, historically would have to be competition for resources.
water is the next big one (oh and fish).
it is never as simple as a slogan i’m afraid.
I also would like to add the defense.
Germany was 90%+ Christian/Catholic Christian at the time of WWII. It was not atheists manning the gas chambers. It was not atheists being cruel and sadistic to the Jews. It was “CHRISTIANS!” The reason for such a population to be able to do such atrocities. Was they were in the belief Jews killed their fictitious deity.
Stalin was a JEW.
Stalin was born, Iosif Djugashvili. Iosif is Joseph.
Do you know what Djugashvili translates as? Try pronouncing the word.
“Djuga” means Judah. “Shvili” means son.
Djugashvili means son of Judah.
Stalin had three wives, all of whom were Jews.
But I guess this doesn’t mean that Stalin was a Jew, only that he had a fetish for big noses, right?
Stalin named his first son Jacob (Yakov).
One of Stalin’s wives was Rosa Kaganovich the sister of the murderous Jew, Lazar Kaganovich, who deliberately starved some 6 million Ukrainians to death.
Stalin spoke Yiddish at home.
The first Jewish homeland, Birobidjan, was set up by Stalin and company. The “national” language was Yiddish. The Jewish homeland, Birobidjan, was mainly paid for by Americans Jews, another Stalin, American Jew, joint project.
Before Djugashvili called himself “Stalin,” he used the pseudonym “Kochba.” You know who Kochba was?
Kochba was the mad Jew who lead a revolt against the Romans in 132-135 AD. The revolt was harshly put down by Severus (from whom comes the term severe).
All but one member of Stalin’s Politbureau were Jews, and who knows, probably even Bubov was a (secret) Jew.
Stalin tore down Churches, or had them converted to museums, etc, but only made the appearance of persecuting the Jews.
Of the 54,000 Russian Orthodox churches in existence prior to World War I, only a few hundred remained. Of the 1,500 synagogues in existence prior to World War I, 1,103 were still legally operating in 1926 and the number of synagogues in the large cities increased with Jewish immigration to these areas.
But none of this could possibly mean Stalin was a Jew, could it?
By the way, the first law passed after the Communists seized power in Russia made being anti-Jew a crime punishable by death. Izvestia, July 27, 1918.
But none of this could possibly mean the commies were all Jews, could it?
Stalin Jesuit
How could Stalin possibly be a jew? He killed more jews that Hitler. Josef Stalin was a devout Catholic.
Josef was born to influential Catholic parents Vissarion “Beso” Dzhugashvili and Ekaterina “Keke” Geladze. His father Beso was a successful and relatively wealthy local businessman. However, in later biographies, he is variously described as poor, dirt poor and a violent alcoholic.
Whatever the real truth, Josef was accepted into the Catholic Cappuchin run school at Gori. He graduated in 1892 first in his class and at the age of 14 he was accepted to enter the “Orthodox” Seminary of Tiflis (Tbilisi, Georgia), a Jesuit institution to be trained as a Jesuit priest.
Stalin did Romes’s work. He destroyed the Russian Orthodox church, the enemy of the vatican, under the smokescreen of godless communism.
ALL ISMS are created to distort the human psyche in order to re-constitute politics in their favour. Fascism is national socialism. Communism is International socialism.
Red Herring
This is a red-herring. A very old red-herring. It has already been very clearly illustrated that religion had nothing to do with the nationalistic behaviors of these criminals.
So you think that the Christian beliefs and values had nothing to do with them being able to sleep at night? Wake up and go to the camp for a fun day of starve, mutilate and gas some Jews? They thought Jews were sub-human. They were OK, because of religious indoctrination. The Catholic Church blamed/hated the Jews. That is why a whole nation committed those heinous crimes. A whole nation of Christians. That is not a red herring. Get a clue apologist melon head.
If Christians had real morals and values. None of that would have happened. None!
Evidently you’ve never studied psychology. Why could Jeffry Dahmer sleep at night? Oh, I guess it was due to religion. Idiot. LOL
Get real
“Master Race; God’s Chosen People; Mohamed is the only prophet; The Just Society; In God We Trust” etc, etc, etc…. These are all very similar in concept and are examples of beliefs that separate us. These are primative tribal beliefs that we all have practiced forever. Man has continually created his gods in his own image in order to justify exclusivity. Except for the anti-semitic rantings of a few, the insights offered by this site are enlightening.
Beliefs including religions are not bad, but they limit us when we begin to accept them as universal truths. Aethism is also a belief.
This is a weak argument
Stalin might have gotten ‘mystical’ in the early days of WW II, when the Germans were racing across the western USSR — I suspect most atheists would be grasping at whatever straws, totems and lucky rabbits’ feet were available under such stress — but he remained steadfastly atheistic in public. I doubt that someone who was secretly religious would have been so viciously anti-religion in practice. But people do funny things.
As for Marx and Trotsky, their Jewishness is an ethnic identifier. Nothing more.
Hitler was what would now be called a pagan/pantheist. He liked the old Nordic religion. Christianity, of course, was a Judaic trick foisted on gullible Aryans.
As for Pol Pot and his Buddhism, one often hears that Buddhism is not really a religion, but rather a conglomeration of practical ideas for living. Sort of like Confucist thought (which Mao and co. tried to eradicate in China).
People have done horrible things in the name of religion. There is no denying that. Whatever their personal beliefs, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot convinced others to commit mass murder in the name of ‘scientific atheism’.
It’s worth mentioning here that Christopher Hitchens lent his voice as a militant atheist to chorus calling for war against Iraq. He remains unrepentant, despite the fact that no WMD were found. Why? Because of his hatred for Islam. Ironically, Saddam’s Iraq was one of the most secular of Muslim countries. Now it is much less so.
What is a “weak argument?” What follows your first statement?
It is perfectly logical to suggest that someone who is anti-religion may have been badly abused by it. Heck, people try to throw that in my face all the time – but it isn’t true in my case.
Just recently someone who claimed to have been raped repeatedly by priests was ranting about how he wanted to kill all priests, nuns, imams and the like – anyone who was religious.
What if Stalin was likewise abused by priests? There is evidence that he was, although I don’t know about the sexual abuse part, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Again, many people are rabidly anti-religion because it has abused them. It’s a very strong argument, in reality.
So Stalin was rabidly anti-religion because of religion. Even when Stalin was burning down churches and hunting down the faithful, it was religion’s fault. Nice circular thought there. When atheists commit crimes, they aren’t culpable, I guess.
For the record: I am an atheist. I just happen to think that any human institution will have abuses — even institutions run by ‘free thinkers’.
😆
It’s really not difficult to understand – I suspect you are being willfully dismissive rather than uncomprehending.
I mentioned someone who was out for blood against religious people because he was abused by religious people. Like I say, not too difficult to understand.
Your subsequent supposition based on your original erroneous one is likewise fallacious.
Thanks for adding a little historicity here Lloyd.
We all have to be critical of our prejudices atheists n theists alike. Its too easy to talk about the Christian God as if the old and new testaments somehow were one and the same or as if individuals don’t have any self direction after a certain ‘effect’ has occurred to them. I mean its easy to map events along the way but avoid facing indeterminate transformations. Hitler never used propaganda and always said and always spoke from his heart. Scientific atheists, materialist dogmatists positivists etc are so often enamoured of their mechanistic logic (the world is just a clever matter machine-work out how the gears and levers work and you have the theory of everything/one day.) that they revel in their genius at identifying causal patterns…Hitler was such and such at age six and he said this in Mien Kampf…Jesus on a bicycle life is never, was never, so simplistic… It takes imagination to see profound complexity and the actual individuality of all situations, and intellect to critique another’s argument…we have intellect in spades precious little imagination. It takes a humble, generous man/woman to admit they have provided a convincing theory rather than absolute proof.
Atheists at the end of the day see themselves as the most evolved realistic and special beings in the known universe…pretty good role to assume but they have to maintain that position by refuting the one ‘being’ that would pull you off the plinth. Personally I think atheists have a crippled imagination whilst many uncritical religious people allow unspeakable evil and stupidity to go unchecked. I quite like Nick cave’s statement that: ‘there is only one thing worse than a militant atheist and thats a true believer…”
There is a great chapter in the book The Christian Delusion that deals with this very subject. If we look at Martin Luther’s 7 point plan which maps out how to eliminate the Jews, it is an the exact road map used by the Nazi’s. Hitler references Christianity many times as his religion… read Mein Kampf. Hitler was a continuation of the Jew hating Christianity invented and carried out for hundreds of years.
Blindness
Communism as practiced by Mao, Stalin etc.. and written by Marx had no room for religion or religious freedom. Religion was the “opiate of society” an addiction that Communists believed people needed freeing from. Atheism was part and parcel of Communist ideology and application of these ideals in a world with many believers was going to cause conflict. The presence of devoted, uncooperative believers in Communist countries could be resolved in a number of ways, many of them violent. That Communist countries took to murdering, torturing and expelling religious individuals on behalf of Communist ideology, which included atheism, is not surprising.
Atheism is not the moral bastion of freedom, civility and enlightened thinking it desperately wants to be seen as, there are those who have engaged in fairly loathsome activities to promote it as part of a larger political philosophy. Intolerance comes in many flavors and some of the recent Atheist vitriol I’ve seen directed at otherwise decent, law abiding citizenry and fellow human beings because of their religious convictions has driven that home. Most any ideology, secular or religious can be used to justify violence or simple bigotry against the “enemy”, whoever that may be, it would seem the biggest flaw in these ideologies are the humans who practice them.
Bill is closer to the truth, I think, in the true causes of war. Natural resources, wealth, paranoia and personal ambition have driven the leaders of men to sacrifice their countrymen for the expansionist cause, regardless of the practiced faith of choice. Religion, to these men, is simply a useful tool, propaganda, to manipulate the populace. A peasant may not be moved to take arms against a neighbor simply to fill his lord’s coffers or expand his lord’s holdings, but if he is told (by both church and political leadership) that his neighbor is an ungodly monster who does not share his values and would slit his throat as soon as say hello, he will sacrifice his life to see his family and friends kept safe. As it goes in war, the “enemy” is defeated and his land claimed on behalf of whatever authority financed the conflict and the peasant is none the wiser as to the true reasoning behind the madness. There was nothing Holy about the war despite receiving the church’s blessing and promotion, and the moral/religious justifications were a smokescreen to create a motivated, compliant, fearful population who would kill and risk being killed on a politician’s greedy whim.
Authority with that goes eternally unquestioned is the dangerous factor in all social hierarchies, and unfortunately this cancer will appear in whatever social medium is available. The only prevention is an informed and vigilant populace, atheist and believer alike.
Wow – Sooo intellectual. Imagine if you just spent 2 seconds looking up the definition of atheism. Do you get it? Are you retarded? Can you imply anything beyond we do not believe in a supernatural retard maker?
Religion places their morals above ours. Look at all the freedoms religion is willing to trample now. That is why we point at their infractions. They spread lies that atheists have no morals and eat babies. Do you understand now?
Yep I am sick of religious tards.
Nice display of hypocrisy, and a great failure in refuting such an intellectual point. You lose 100 points. Pathetic.
Balance people, balance,
I find this rise in militant atheism both very understandable and extremely disquieting. I expect it to grow by leaps and bounds as conditions on planet earth continue to worsen. Surely we have al lfelt it, the drive to spit at the ground when contemplating the idea that any compassionate, loving deity could’ve created THIS
But then what good does it do to shout down non believers of the atheist creed as ‘mental midgets’ and the like? you start to sound like the very dogmatic fundies you so despise. Swinging to the other extreme of the spectrum isn’t any answer.
And you have no right to judge my belief in something More- how many of you have been to the deepest darkest recesses of the soul & seriously despaired over the lack of meaning in such a brutal world?
i dont blame people for their atheistis beliefs, but neither do I blame the faithful for holding out for something More. It doesnt make them, us- weak, insane; itsa justifiable response to an insane world.
I could never go fully atheistic, the idea of man as god is too terrifying to behold, personaly.
God is beyond our puny human classifications & arguments
New ideas
How about contemplating something nothing at all like religions vs aetheism. We seem to be in a circular argument re. gods vs no gods.
There are other ideas which great thinkers thru-out history have hinted at which negate both concepts but open the door to a third reality. Where all is one consciousness, where we are all connected, where we have unconditional free-will, where no tempramental deity is pulling strings to manipulate us, where there is no right or wrong, good or evil, where there is no judgement. This concept would apply if we individually and collectively create our own realities. Quantum physics is all about this concept. Where our future outcomes in life are based on mathematical probabilities given our current activities and behaviours. Don’t like your world…change it…you have choices. Your choices expand exponentially when you put aside religious and aethiest beliefs and look for limitless solutions based on truths…not beliefs.
We don’t know if there is an afterlife, however intuitively we all suspect there is more than our objective reality. It’s early in the game, let’s not give up on the potential for a spiritual aspect within all of us. Aethiests believe in nothing, while the religious hang on to their tired and boring dogma which no longer works for them. Whats the difference? There is a shift in progress which some have noticed. Get on with the search for truths not beliefs.
Non-believers of the atheist creed? What the f**k is that? Non-believers of the no belief in God creed? Is that what you said? WTF!
Balance is when they start critically thinking about those beliefs. Balance happens when one side(religious) stop being bat sh*t crazy. That is when balance happens.
We have been nice long enough. It is about time fu**ing idiots get called fu**ing idiots. Maybe they will decide to educate themselves or hide in their closet with their delusional religion.
Ask them yourself…
Were Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot atheists?
Why not ask them yourself? This reporter did, thanks to a special machine called a ‘Psychopomp’ which allows you to speak with the dead.
http://www.youtube.com/user/NonStampCollector#p/u/18/LZr-JZYctvA
Thank you!!
Thanks for addressing this issue Acharya!!!
I have been arguing for years about this, even with atheists. Sadly, most just can’t make the connections. Patriarchal religions do endorse harsh punishments and extreme oppression for children. Study after study proves that spankings, harsh punishments, and over controlling parents do more damage to children than anything else.
Shoot, not too long ago yahoo had an article about the dangers of spanking and that children who are spanked have a higher chance of being aggressive adults. Even CNN has an article on it.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/09/16/spanking.children.parenting/index.html
IT IS NEVER OK TO HIT A CHILD!!!(Or your pets for that matter!) It will create monsters. I’m not saying that everyone who was oppressed, spanked, or even abused will become a monster,(that just shows how good natured humans really are!) but you can bet your sweet a** that it is the main factor.
You know, this past Sun. I laid on the couch all day with a nasty cold watching ID,(investigate Discovery) about serial killers and children that kill, and I couldn’t help but notice that every single one of them had some type of abusive religious upbringing.
big lack of logic
The fact that Marx was baptised at age of 6 years is completly irelevant. He was a child at that age ad he do wat ever his parents want him to do.
But what Marx do at age 30 is complete diferent, it his choice an only his.
Search on goole “Marx satanism”,
http://www.crossroad.to/Quotes/communism/marx.htm
Lesson: befor accept any conclusion make at least a breaf search on google.
An Hitler was a politician. He lie aboat everything for power. Do you have proofs that he realy practice and belive cristianity? I think not. He just was full of lies in public like any politician, but how he was in private? Any proof? I think not.
Red Herring
Stalin and Pol Pot committed atrocities mainly out of over-zealous nationalism.
Hitler was a Catholic! He even attempted to enter Catholic theological seminary. But that is not what drove his genocides.
Either way it is a red herring.
What nonsense!
Equating religions with the character of their namesake gods is flaming stupid, with the possible exception of Islam, because Allah “cannot be known.” To say that Stalin returned to the God he rejected when he got religious again is simply idiotic.
Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, George W. Bush, etc., all hurt people because they wanted to. The result reveals the reason for human behavior; even Jesus said that. Those men killed millions because they wanted to kill millions.
When people like that are developing, you MAY be able to persuade them to take a different road. Striking them with a stick between the shoulder blades would reach deep into the hindbrain with a persuasive message, but most of you have no stomach for rebuking evil and requiring that people who are considering doing evil stop thinking it, stop doing it, and change their ways.
Until then, you will be blessed with Hitlers, Stalins, Pol Pots, Maos, Ws, and Obamas (just wait; he’s more bloodthirsty than all his predecessors).
Wisdom is the tree of life to those who embrace her, and wisdom tells us that when you TRAIN up a child in the way s/he should go, s/he will not depart from it.
Wisdom also tells us that a fool is someone who, among other things, hurts random people. Wisdom also tells us that a rod is for the backs of fools.
Start listening to wisdom, and your history will be less bloody and futile.
I’m going with my prev. statement
They were (TRANSHUMANISTS) and 1 of the 3 mentioned was a MASON, Hitler actually abolished Masonry and yes was a “spiritualist? his own words” as well a militarist. Pol Pot was also a Transhumanist he wanted what all COMMUNIST?SOCIALISTCOMMUNITARIANS want a robotic acting knee jerk run and hide sheeple with my hand out, please can I have some more, post free- add your own adjective. Religion was the very first GOVERNMENT, then came gods chosen, now gods son left his seed and now we have again DEMIgods to deal with.
All of “their?”” rhetoric is utter bull, and to give an old saying new life “I wouldn’t piss down their throats if there guts were on fire!” This comes, from perspective from my Grandmother” another one ” she said was they aren’t worth the powder and lead it will take to blow them to HELL!” I guess thats were my “piss and vinegar” comes from a little Irish/Indian woman named Anne Mae.
Independence is our best weapon, become mentally and physically independent and the rest is, a minor nuisance to you, including people!
Historical revisionism?
There are a great number of Atheists who come from a religious background and they’re not driven to commit atrocities as a result. Rather then engaging in historical revisionism, I think it more useful to look at the history of Communism around the world and in almost every case is devolves into barbarity. Being an Atheist doesn’t automatically protect against dogmatic ideology.
can we believe that humans who created over 100000 gods forgot to name so many,
were atheists?
all believe in some power, somewhere, or at least within temselves.
a true non believer in any powr, cannot exist,
they believe in gravity
will not le go of whatever they are holding onto?
its a recurring tendency of just one god,
that no one ever belived in,
thats the problem.
even fundaments christians,
keep having god, splintered and present in every place of worship, every church,
but also denies no church is neesary for a force to exist,
so why buid churches and waste money??
they know there isno one plae or one god,who is omnipresnt when convinient,
god is actually the power within all humans, and all beings[maybe therea re other powers that we fully do not undestand today]
but it will change,
the vast majority ,even when not given a choice,
do not believe in one power.
or they will show it in their actions.
The front porch
Yes atheist “believe” that if they open the door the front porch will be there, but if one day they opened that door and it wasn’t there, they would change their belief without a 2nd thought.
The faithful would open the door not see a porch and proclaim they are blind and a “belief” the porch is still there.
The subject is belief in faith, not just belief.
Thir religion
From what I know Pol Pot was a buddhistic monk when he was young.
Stalin was propably an atheist but he was studying religion for 5 years.
Hitler was saying that he was killing Jews for God becaese Jews do not believe in Jesus.
Stalin was Jesuit!
Hitler, Mussolini, General Franco, and Stalin were all Roman Catholics. Stalin did for Rome what Hitler did and maintain their programme of killing jews. Stalin was a RC priest and also a jesuit. Hitler was said to have styled his SS on the Jesuit model.
The Roman church is outwardly holy and pius, but inwardly rotten. Pope Pius the 12th brought Hitler to power by bringing the Catholic Centrum party to vote for Hitler as was instructed to the priests.
Franco paid a glowing tribute to Hitler in magasine El Pais, when he ‘mourned the death of Hitler as a great servant to the church of Rome.
The second world war was an attempt by the Vatican to win back its Holy Roman Empire. We have had 1700 years of bloodshed, torture and evil from the church of Rome. They destroyed the gnostic creeds of christianity. They destroyed Ireland when Pope Adrian 4th gave Catholic monarch Henry 2nd the overlordship of the Island so that Rome could tax the Irish.
They are responsible for the trouble in Palestine. As it was their programme of ant-semitism that left the jews after the war with no home, then they put them where the globalists wanted – a foot hold in the middle East, controlled by Zionist America. The church of Rome has billions of dollars and owns so much property and assets in America alone. America was doomed after the civil war, when the church of Rome and the European bankers infiltrated it and destroyed it as a free and prosperous nation.
All this bullsh*te about Hitler and Stalin being atheist is a smokescreen. The evidence on Hitler’s past is concrete. Where does the current Pope come from? southern Germany, one of the biggest catholic areas in Europe. Austria is just an extension of south Germany where Hitler was from.
We are heading towards an increasingly centralised world where fewer people are taking control of the world’s assets. The church of Rome is NOT religious, but political and power mad; the religion is just a means to their ends. People need to wake up and smell the coffee and think for themselves. We keep hearing politicians talk of the New World Order. That is what we will get unless we start to shake of the manipulation of religion, especially the most dangerous one – The Church of Rome.
ISMS,Atheism,
are often used to claim that belief in a god,or gods,is the expected norm?
surely this itself is a myth, clearly,unless one is brain dead as a result of religion based indoctrination.
no one is an atheist,
they believe in many powers,
but many, and almost all who believe in facts,
decide that gods do not cause or have any role in the effects, of many unexplained phenomena.
gods were created by men and maybe other intelligent life,
to control the thinking, and force one way of thinking,
the basic concept, of a gods, as a part of our collective intellect,
is equated with a god,
to claim superiority and power,
this concept changes from time to time,many religious factions, and cults, calling themselves religions,
believe in Islam,Catholicism,various factions of other christian groups[ever rady to kill one another, whether they agree or not]
and the jews,
who claim to share something in common,
but prove it to be a hollow claim,
as they have killed one another,
to establish a more powerful concept of the man created gods,
pol pot could not have been even remotely aware of buddihist philosophy[not a religion]
that clearly has no conflicts, with anyone,
and absolutely teaches non violence
Ahimsa,
against all,
there are no believers in Buddhist philosophy,
its one decision , to accept ,question, reject or add others,
as said in Ehe Passiko
there is no conversion ,
that is the ISm, ,
Pol Pot was trained or forced as an animal,
and maybe influenced by Catholics,
who were the primary people, who killed
to convert,
never allowed tolerance,
but are somewhat different today,
but will stoop to anything to continue conversion,
and never based on acceptance,
it is always via some force, or job, or starvation,
and not dissimilar to he Portuguese Spanish version,
if the right hand with bible does not get you
the left hand with the sword will sure do[cut the head off]
it has not changed much,
all cults and religions, disapear,
many of the recent cults, turned religions, will begin to disapear soon.
after so many centuries of murder to convert
Catholics are less believers in what the church forces them to,
they divorce,,are sexually far less controlled by churches,
priest abuse sex, at will, many church leaders have been jailed for sexual abuse, and the cover up continues,
the actual believers according to strict las,
maybe a couple of hundred thousands,
but so many are so illiterate re religious force, used to convert or convince,
that
the sing in a trance,
do not know that the jews, Islam they hate, is almost identical,and they are told, identical is not the same as same??
idiotic concepts, that people publicly will not accept,
with 7-7.5 billion,
and only a tiny fraction actually convinced that it has no real value,
the masses are turning away,
very soon they may look for,
and only for
acceptable facts,
and discard, jealous, angy, revengeful, killer gods AKA devils in disguise,
Your conclusions are illogical
The trail of logic you use is completely flawed. You rely a lot on assumption.
Hitler was not a Christian. He embraced mysticism.
But that is of no consequence because your argument that exposure to religious thinking creates a weakness of character condemns anyone who has embraced atheism after being raised in a religious household.
That’s gonna come as a shock to some of your followers. What are you going to do? Separate out those who are unfortunate enough to have the “exposure” from those who haven’t.
Apparently this exposure cannot be revoked.
If you are going to make that lame argument, which totally invalidates anyone’s ability to “choose another way” – just so you don’t have to claim your buddy Stalin as part of your club, you are walking on thin ice.
The truth is these people chose to do what they did based on their will to do it. The whole “brainwashing” meme is nothing more than a way to further separate out religious believers from your group as defectives.
That is incredibly close to the ideologies of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.
Another point is this. I brush my teeth religiously each day. Religion is a word that means “repetitious actions”.
What you are really trying to do is criminalize anyone who believes in God. Because your religion is the worship of man. It is humanism. And the two are diametrically opposed to each other.
Practically everything you’ve said here is incorrect. Regardless of your ad hom remarks and your snide personal attacks, in this very blog I’ve provided FACTS about Hitler and his crusade, which was clearly based on Christianity, even if involved mysticism, of which there is also plenty within Christianity as well. To say that “Hitler embraced mysticism” is also an assumption. What he wrote is clear enough.
The rest of what you have said is a ludicrous straw man full of utter lies you’ve simply made up. I have never said any such things, and you don’t know my work in the least. My “buddy Stalin?” Do you go around smearing everyone with such lies? My argument is clear enough: Stalin was abused by religion. His striking out against it would make sense as part of the abuse he endured. You’ve never heard of anyone else in the history of the world who was abused by religion and subsequently detested it?
But thanks for the libelous and irrational drive-by proving that religious fanaticism makes people behave badly. Much appreciated.
Not all nonbelievers hate religion ([url]http://www.examiner.com/article/not-all-nonbelievers-hate-religion[/url])
Wake up….
Wake up and face reality. Lol. It doesn’t matter at all if these men were Christian or ay other religion by name. “for they will say lord, lord. But I will say get back, I nor my father ever knew you”. Internet religion protesters always think that their so smart for not falling into a trap for the ignorant masses. Get off your high horse.
non sense.
Hitler was not Christian. He spoke as one until he came into power. He did it to fool the masses. Here is another of Hitlers quotes :””You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”
“The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity….
“Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things.”
Don’t be so naive. Hitler hated religion, just like many Atheists.
Throughout Hitlers… “career”, he routinely called upon the christian god, and Jesus, to help him. He repeatedly claimed to be divinely inspired, and he was repeatedly backed by catholic bishops.
Against this mountain of evidence we come across a couple people who either make up quotes, or cherry pick them to say “Hitler was no true christian”
At best, you are furthering the no true Scotsman argument here, and at worst you are talking a load of nonsense.
If you think, that nearly 100 years after the event, you get to ignore all the writings of a man and instead get to use silly arguments like you did above (if he mentioned evolution, so what? the pope sponsored it! does that mean the pope is an atheist?)
Please go out, read some history, and then come back informed.
mental midget
And you just proved your mental capacity as you resort to insult to make your point.
Saying these things does in no way make him a christian tho.
I can also kill a man and claim it to be in the name of God, that does not make me a christian. It’s just abused by several people during history. Religion is being used by these men because the everyday man just happened to be mostly Christian. If the majority of the population we’re atheists in this era they would 100% NOT be saying these things, it has nothing to do with their own belief.
Bård, make it up or split hairs however you need to in order to make yourself feel better but, it will never make it true.
Hitler
Hitler’s made quite a lot of references to Christianity in his speeches. That doesn’t mean that he was actually Christian, but it does mean that many Christians followed his loony beliefs.
But as for Hitler himself, we may never know. Joseph Goebbels said that he is “deeply religious, but deeply anti-Christian. He regards Christianity as a symptom of decay.” Meaning that he was not actually a Christian but only used it as a political tool. But he was also not an Atheist either, seeing how he was deeply religious as well.
Hitler also has said: “The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”
I think the best conclusion is that Hitler himself was not Christian himself and while not an Atheist either, we may never know his true beliefs. But regardless of what he truly believed inside, he did use Christianity to manipulate the politics, which many Christians gladly followed, so Christians do have to take some blame too. What do you think?
If each of those you mentioned were hevily affected by religion, does that not destroy your own argument? You say that atheists have done many genocidal acts when you point to the religious sections of their lives, and that these atheists are striking against religion, are their acts not also because of religion? Due to your arguments, these acts are also done because of religion, making all three of their genocides annother nail in the coffin for religion, since these are three of the worst acts ever done by humanity unto itself; they are also essentialy more acts of “evil” done due to religion, just as those many wars. In other words, you have dug your own grave, and kicked down you ladder to boot.
Aslo, you mis-spelled *Joseph Stalin
^ To the Anonymous above me,
Yes, essentially their actions were a result of religion.
Essentially all religious wars start when one tries to dominate or eliminate the other. While Atheism is not a religion, it’s origins arise heavily as a backlash against religion – an anti-religion if you will – yet even so, monstrous acts were made by men who were Atheist in an attempt to eradicate religion – just as [b]all[/b] religious wars are made on that same basis against another – and as such, it can thereby be defined as an act of deliberate genocide in the intent of creating an Atheist nation.
We are not debating whether Atheism is a religion – it is not, at least not in the traditional spiritual/theist sense of the word – yet Stalin [i]forced[/i] Atheist ideals on people who might not normally have accepted them. That is no better than the any religion they pose to stand against. It does not justify the killing of millions, and to deny that these men (i.e. Stalin in particular) were not ‘true atheists’ because of their acts is the exact same argument I hear again and again from Christians in particular when Atheists point the finger at their religious atrocities: ‘They weren’t real Christians because A. B. and C.”
Geordie “monstrous acts were made by men who were Atheist in an attempt to eradicate religion”
Please name them because I’ve never heard of them. Nobody denies that Stalin wasn’t an atheist but, he didn’t kill in the name of atheism – that’s not why he did what he did. Same with Pol Pot – Hitler wasn’t an atheist; what Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot did had nothing to do with atheism. No matter how much theists would love to blame atheism it’s due to biases and discrimination not facts.
Hi – Why do you not tackle the problem of “nominal Christianity”? That is, the problem of those people who claim “Christianity” as a title only because it is somehow gainful or pragmatically useful to them (ie – Hitler), not because they have actually been born again or have trusted Christ as their Savior.
There have been and are plenty of false Christians, just like their are plenty of counterfeit bills in circulation.
(Where their are counterfeits, however, there is also the real deal.) Useful to parse the two. Why do you not address this?
Who are you talking to? If you’re referring to me, I address whatever needs to be addressed.
The bottom line is that Christianity is based on a manmade agenda and mythology made over. It matters not, therefore, who may be considered a “real Christian.” I’m sure that Hitler’s followers believe he was a real Christian.
You are simply redefining what is a Christian in order not to be offended by the fact that Hitler was also considered a Christian.
There are others, however, who will define a Christian based on their following of passages such as:
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Matthew 10:34
response
Stalin was clearly an atheist. Why did they forcibly close churches through Russia, kill thousands of priests, monks, etc.?
Hitler — same as above. His ‘religion’ and ‘Christianity’ were nothing more than New Age nonsense. Mysticism is not what he believed in. Much more into esotericism. Please do more research on this. You need to read more primary documents. Do you read German? If not, you should learn and go to the primary documents.
Pol Pot — clearly an atheist. Over 300,000 Vietnamese Catholics killed by atheists in the last 300 years. I know he was not Vietnamese, but the communist movement in SE Asia was all one and the same. Kill the people of faith to move into the Brave New World.
Haven’t even mentioned abortion — Russia and Vietnam — the most atheistic countries that kill more of their own children than any countries in the world.
You may actually want to read the post before commenting. All three were raised in a religious background. Stalin was abused by religious people, yet he wanted to become a priest. He embraced the concept of “God” in his later years, according to biographers.
Pol Pot was raised a Catholic and Buddhist. Again, read the original post.
Stalin REBUILT the churches, thousands of them during the 40s and 50s. Some estimates are as high as 25,000 rebuilt/reopened churches.
You were saying, typical lying christard?
Here is an example of someone who uses their atheistic beliefs to be antagonistic, even hostil. You will find remarks like this all over the net. My guess is this has to do with many evils that are associated with religion, so talking down to these “evil doers” is warranted. The scary part is what else is warranted if these assumptions are to be held as fact? Or if atheism is considered a panacea?
I think many of the statements I see show that many proclaimed atheists look at theists as something less then human. This points to a culture of dehumanization that lead to attrocities. I seems a no brainer that dehumanizing people with religious convictions is to be judged as worse then having religious convictions.
Nurturing other people is more important then a facad of philosophy that we dress ourselves up with. This includes educating people, but being gentle with them. And ohhh, one more really important thing, give them a chance to educate you.
Who are you talking to? I don’t declare myself an atheist; nor is this site representative of atheism, per se. Nor is anyone here advocating atheism. I personally have repeatedly stated that it is none of my business what you do within the privacy of your own mind, so long as it doesn’t spill out deleteriously onto others. Such a view is the opposite of “dehumanization.”
We are simply discussing whether or not these world leaders in reality were atheists and whether atheism fosters violence. The FACTS demonstrate otherwise, and facts are not “antagonistic” or “hostile.”
You are projecting your own hostility and assorted other antagonistic thoughts on us. We have not criticized you personally at all – we do not even know you. We are critiquing the mentality that has led to countless instances of violence worldwide.
This sort of dissection should be done by everyone with a conscience. The blatant dehumanization of religious dogma itself has led to an abhorrent amount of atrocities worldwide for thousands of years. There simply is no excuse for such ideologies.
I’m sorry. I can’t help but have a good lauph, because apparently I did not hit the reply button. I can see why you would be offended. This was not about the arcticle.
I will find an appropriate recipient.
I found the recipient, and copied the post.
I agree having a discussion about these things is extremely important. Thanks for maintaining the forum. Sorry again.
You’re a fine one to talk, with your hateful, dishonest filth vomited up here. You fill people’s heads with lies and genocidal hate. You teach EXCLUSION that there are people who deserved to be tortured, forever, for having the sense not to want anything to do with the genocidal filth you willingly adhere to.
And you have the utter gall to preach about gentleness when you belong to a hateful genocidal torture cult that you do?
I find you as dangerous as I do disgusting.
Well said.
Thank you, but it doesn’t sound as if you actually read the article before deciding that I hadn’t researched this subject.
You have simply regurgitated the same arguments that I am already addressing in the original article. If I am addressing these arguments, I obviously know what they are, which means I have researched the subject.
It is “ridiculous” to know that these leaders were steeped in religion as they grew up – even abused by it, which obviously caused resentment – and then to insist that they were “atheists” who just sprang up out of nowhere and were uninfluenced by religion.
Perhaps you might to want visit an ex-religious fundamentalist forum to see how much these apostates detest the religion, sect or cult they were abused by, in order to comprehend how anti-religious behaviors stem significantly from religious abuse. The correspondence is not difficult to see or comprehend.
In order to accept the paradigm you are promulgating, we would need to be ignorant of the religious background of these men. This factor of these men having been raised in a religious setting is rarely examined in any depth in their biographies – and that is the real lack of research, a void I am briefly filling here. Nothing to be disappointed about knowing this important information that most others are ignoring.
Really disappointed with the articles lack of rese
Stalin and Pole Pot killed and persecuted religious people because like Lenin that they believed that religion was an opiate that needed to be removed in order to create the ideal communist society.
Communism in an inherently anti-religious ideology because one of the driving tenants of communism is that there is no higher power than the state and is the reason why communist societies persecuted religious people.
This is why the idea that Stalin and Pole Pot killed people because of their upbringing is ridiculous because they would have to have become atheists in order to embrace communism.
Now as for Hitler while it is true that Hitler was raised a roman catholic the religion of the Nazi Party was Positive Christianity in which they promoted that Jesus was a non-jew of German or Nordic Descent was a organiser and fighter of the jews as opposed to what the Catholic’s taught which was that Jesus was a pacifistic Jew.
Also it is well know that one of major motivations for Hitler’s extermination of the Jews was because he believed that Germany had become weak due to the corruption of infusion of degenerate elements in it’s blood stream and that through the use of racial hygience and eugenics the german state could become strong again.
Hitler regarded the Jews as an inferior race. Hitler’s view on eugenics are well evidenced by the fact that one of the first laws that Hitler passed Law of Prevention of Heriditarily Diseased Offspring and as a result of this law of 400,000 intellectually and physically disabled people were sterilized by the end of his regime.
Now this isn’t to say that Stalin and Pole Pot killed people because they were atheists but one of the reasons they persecuted religious people is because they believed the world would be better off without them
I am dreadfully disappointed after reading your article because you would expect much better research from an author writing an article on a website named free thought nation.
Resources :
Third Reich in Power by Richard J Evans
A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory and Practice, and the Believer by Dimitry V Pospielovsky.
No, they didn’t kill them over that.
You’re so pathetically ill-educated, probably because you preferred stuffing your tiny excuse of a brain with genocidal filth, that you don’t know that the FIRST people Stalin and Pol Pot murdered were the ATHEISTS!
They saved their most gruesome tortures and executions for the ATHEISTS!
Pol Pot sent the intellectuals to the camps and to be worked to death or shot first. Do you have any idea whatsoever of how many of those people were ATHEISTS?
Stalin sent people around the world to murder ATHEISTS who might have threatened his hold on power in the least, like Leon Trotsky–stabbed through the EYE with an icepick and lingering for days after his assasination attempt in excruciating pain. And my ex’s grandfather, a defector from the Soviet navy. We have no idea what happened to him. We only know that he never came back, and his family still in Russia ‘disappeared’. Which usually means that all of them–atheists, all–were murdered.
Pol Pot and Stalin didn’t kill over religion. They killed over POWER.
Stop being so stupid that you’re dishonest.
No it is not ridiculous to know that these leaders were steeped in religion but your statement that them being steeped in religion was supposedly the cause of their mass murders in the name of communism flies against the facts that we know about Stalin, Pole Pot.
It is not something that most historians have looked into because their isn’t conclusive evidence that these murders were the cause of religious abuse or being steeped in religion for that matter.
For instance the there is no records that i know of Pol Pot being abused by religious people and really trying to state that Pol Pot didn’t live in vacuum and that he possibly would have absorbed his ideas from religion which is the reason why he persecuted other religious is ridiculous because as far as we know prior to the 21st century there are almost no examples of attempted religious genocide in Indonesia prior to Communism showing up their and if his immersion in Buddhism was what caused him to start murdering people well Buddhism has existed for over 1000 years but strangely enough before the 21st century there are no examples of attempted religious genocide in Indonesia.
Now if Buddhism was responsible then surely you would expect there to other examples of attempted religious genocide in Indonesian history prior to 21st century but oddly enough none that we know off.
In fact Buddhists have a track record of being quite peaceful so this is the reason why you can probably see why most historians don’t look into too deeply because the facts don’t add up.
Now as for Stalin being abused by religion well surely he isn’t only one who was abused by religious figures in Russia but oddly enough once again before the 21st century there are no examples of attempted religious genocide before communism.
So once again why are there no examples to the 21st century and prior to Marx’s ideology.
If abuse was the cause then surely then must have been examples of attempted religious genocide of all religious people in a state prior to the 21st century because there must have been people all around the world who were abused for instance take into the shrine prostitutes of rome and ancient greece who were little children whose sole purpose was to be prostitutes for the sex cults leaders and politicians and this was an epidemic but yet do you see attempted religious genocide popping up there. Nope.
This is why it is ridiculous and why most historians discount it because the facts don’t add up. If religious abuse or what your stating were true then there would be prior example of attempted religious genocide which is a group completely trying to eradicate religion and all religious regardless of particular religion but prior to Marx’s ideology there are none.
Like Stalin have been abused by an Georgian Orthodox Priest but he wasn’t abused by a Buddhist and yet he tried to wipe them out as well.
It’s stunning to me just how ignorant people are about history or current events.
The Buddhists had willful savagery early in their history. Someone mentioned the marriage of violence with Buddhism in Japan, but have none of you heard of Asoka? After his conversion to Buddhism, he allegedly had more than 15,000 members of the Ajivika sect wiped out for one of them painting a sacrilegious painting of Buddha bowing before their deity.
In the 1600s, Tibet’s Dalai Lama of that time had the Mongol army wipe out thousands of members of a rival Buddhist sect, including orders to kill the children by bashing them like “eggs against rocks”. In the late 1700s, there was more violence directed at this particular sect at the new Dalai Lama’s command. This internecine conflict would carry over into the Tibetan Civil War, with the monks of both traditions adding fuel to an already blazing bonfire of rage–yes, they were participating in the conflict.
Former Tibetans have alleged that the current Dalai Lama’s Tibet had legal punishments of flogging, limb amputation and mutilation. Peasant boys were definitely snatched from their families and forced to become monks, against their will. Several of these former monks report that sexual molestation was rampant in the Buddhist monasteries. China apparently gave all monks the right to quit their Tibetan orders, if they wished, at any time. Thousands took them up on this opportunity.
Today, Chinese officials have claimed that the Dalai Lama has been promoting violent upheaval to his followers in Tibet, and the PRC has reported finding huge caches of weapons in Tibetan monasteries in support of that effort. Granted, the PRC isn’t the most reliable source about anything Tibet, but the history of Tibetan Buddhist monks and rulers being less than humane, and even murderous and violent, is decidedly accurate.
Buddhists in Myanmar and Sri Lanka are carrying out terrorism of Muslims in their country in the here and now, and that terrorism has included murder. Sri Lanka also has had violent classes with Tamil Hindus since at least the 70s. The death toll in India between Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims is 50,000 or more. And rising.
In addition to the recent bloody clashes with Muslims, Buddhist-dominated Myanmar has been one of the most repressive, violent nations on earth for several centuries. How about some human sacrifice? Over a hundred people were murdered in the name of sanctifying Mandalay with Buddhist good juju when the Burmese government moved into new digs there, until the British put a stop to the bloody mess.
In the 1850s.
The modern (1960s and beyond) Burmese government has had many clashes with “intellectuals”, deadly in more than one case, and today many human rights organizations believe that ethnic cleansing is taking place in the country as we speak. Myanmar is also notorious for their child soldiers–in the national military, and the local insurgent armies do the same thing. What–y’all didn’t know that Myanmar has been waging a low-level civil war for decades now? And this is in a nation with Buddhism as its official state religion!
The majority of Viet Cong, including those running the POW camps, were Buddhists.
In the late 90s, thousands of South Korean Buddhist monks of the Chagoye order were fighting each other violently, for weeks–fists, clubs, rocks, fire-bombs–all was fair. The cause? A power vacuum in the order after the death of a leader.
Seriously.
Thailand has a militant sect of Buddhism that was especially active in calling for the murder of Communists in the 70s. Things settled down when the Soviet Union unraveled in the late 80s/early 90s; however, now the Thai militant strain is back, and has, like Sri Lanka and Myanmar, been going after Muslims. Unfortunately, Muslims have started fighting back there. The Thai government has imposed martial law on the southern part of the country, which is where most of the country’s Muslims live. The government is possibly funding Buddhist vigilante groups, as well. What could possibly go wrong?
Buddhism may promote non-violence, but it doesn’t always succeed.
You are conflating the issues and raising straw men. I never claimed that Pol Pot was abused by Buddhism, although a case could probably be made, because, contrary to Western delusions, Buddhism isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be ([url]http://www.truthbeknown.com/buddhism.htm[/url]). Nor did I say that Stalin’s abuse by Orthodox Christianity caused him to hate Buddhists.
Historians in general haven’t made a big deal out of the religious abuse of Stalin (and Hitler) because they haven’t thought to explore Stalin’s dislike for religion, which obviously would occur after being abused by it. Historians are generally not experts on religion or human psychology.
These same historians are not saying that Stalin’s atheism made him kill either. I have not read that Stalin declared his murderous ways to be driven by a desire to spread atheism and to stamp out religious people. If that’s the case, please provide the documentation, and I will update this blog.
The notion that Stalin’s alleged atheism led him to murder, just for the sake of atheism, is much more speculative than that his rage at religious abuse caused him to be aggressive against religion.
Um i read your article on Buddhism and one important note is that Zen Buddhism is Chinese not Japanese in origin and really wasn’t relevant to historical context of my rebuttal.
Now as for me making straw man and conflating issues I did no such thing and you actually didn’t answer my question all in the slightest, in fact you seem to have to deflected away from it.
You have stated that Stalin carried out those murders because of the religious abuse and i pointed out the fact that prior to Marxist ideology there were no records of people attempting to carry out religious genocide and provided examples of religious abuse prior to 21st century.
So simply put your theory in Stalin’s case is:
religious abuse = attempted religious genocide
That’s the idea that your proposing now if this was the case then we would expect to see examples of attempted religious genocide prior to Marxism but fortunately there are none in Russia so if religious abuse was the cause and religion has existed for thousands of years then surely there must be other cases of attempted religious genocide but there aren’t so from a factual perspective it can’t simply be as you propose or at least the facts don’t add up because you don’t know whether or not Stalin’s abuse led to his hatred of religion because there are no examples prior to marxism to offer a conclusive chain of evidence of your theory being put into practice.
Now as for Pol Pot I didn’t say that you said Pol Pot was abused and there’s no record of Pol Pot and yet even though Pol Pot wasn’t abused he also attempted to carry out religious genocide which kind of goes against your theory about Stalin about religious abuse being the cause of his attempted religious genocide.
Now in your original article you stated “Pol Pot also was not raised an atheist in a vacuum devoid of religion but was obviously affected and motivated by it.”
Now in rebuttal I simple stated a fact which is that prior to Marx ideology and prior to the 21 st century there are no examples of attempted religious genocide and if religion was the motivation well religion in indonesia has existed for over a thousand years and there aren’t examples prior to Pol Pot and Marxist ideologies of attempted religious genocide in indonesia so logically it follows that religion was not the cause because if it had been the cause and was what motivated Pol Pot to carry out his religious genocide then since religion in indonesia is over 1000 years old then there must have been other examples but there are not so your story doesn’t make sense now does it.
In fact the only common attribute between attempted religious genocide and the people who carried it out is marxism because prior to marxist ideologies there are no examples of attempted religious genocide in russia and indonesia.
So logically if religious abuse or religion was the cause of religious genocide then there would other historical examples of attempted religious genocide but there are none and since religion has existed for over a 1000 years then it’s logical to conclude religion was the cause.
What i have stated is a fact that there are no prior examples prior to marxism of attempted religious genocide in Russia and Indonesia and that fact speaks for itself and this is why you have deflected and not answered that question at all and instead resorted to the straw man argument excuse. Because the facts say your wrong.
I have already answered you repeatedly, and I have no more time to waste on bickering about this subject. My point is clear: There is no evidence that these men were acting [i]in the name of atheism[/i], and the evidence points to their motives in shutting down religion to whatever extent they did because [i]they didn’t like religion[/i]. And why didn’t they like religion? Why did Stalin and Pol Pot work to shut down religion? That’s the question you keep trying to deflect off.
That’s what is being answered here, and my suggestion that they hated religion because it abused them – and humanity as a whole – still stands, regardless of all the distractions.
Why are you promulgating Christian apologist arguments here, trying to claim that atheism caused these men to be murderous?
The question remains, why were the founders of Communism and Marxism anti-religious, as it appears they were? Why did they feel the need to get rid of it? In the case of the Jews who were at the basis of much of this Marxist ideology, one can understand that the centuries of ABUSE by Catholicism and Christianity, including the torture and slaughter of hundreds of thousands, would make someone react in the opposite direction, to declare religious fanaticism an evil.
Again, it’s not difficult to understand who their hatred of religious abuse drove them to get rid of religion. It makes no sense to argue about this subject.
Also I just wanted to add that you giving me an article a Buddhist doctrine when i talking from a historical context is a straw man argument because i refer to the fact that prior to marxist ideology when have no examples of religious genocide prior to marxist ideology in indonesia and russia which is strange since religion has existed for over 1000 years in both respective countries so referring to Buddhist texts is indeed a straw man argument and it doesn’t change the fact that even if there are buddhist texts which state the prince actually trying to force people to accept that he is Buddha it doesn’t change the fact that you still can’t make the statement that religion motivated Pol Pot to attempt religious genocide because religion has existed in Indonesia for over 1000 years and we have no examples prior to marxism existing.
You continue to miss the point, and I have no time for this back and forth.
The point is: Why were Pol Pot and Stalin against religion? Hitler certainly was not “anti-religious,” to the same extent, so we can leave him out of it, except that his example proves my point, because he was NOT anti-religious based on some monstrous atheism that drove him to behave badly.
Why was Marxism anti-religious? Evidently because it viewed religious fanaticism as abusive and bad. Again, it’s not hard to understand. That’s the same reason many atheists today are atheists – they were abused by religion, they’ve read the gore in the Bible, and they’ve studied religious history to know how many people have been slaughtered because of religious fanaticism. They know that priests have been raping children, that they hold a giant bogeyman over everyone’s heads in order to terrorize them, and all the rest of the priestly shenanigans. THAT’S significantly why they’re atheists!
There’s a reason this movement followed on the heels of the Inquisition and the rest of the mayhem and murder in the name of Christ ([url]http://www.truthbeknown.com/victims.htm[/url]).
If your talking about Karl Marx’s Marxism then your incorrect in stating it was because of religious fanaticism as his version was about creating a stateless classless society as while he believed that religion had been used by the ruling classes to provide false hope to the working class he also saw it as a form of protest by the working class so your incorrect in stating that it was a result of religious fanaticism as while he did reject religion and did believe that religious leaders were basically robbing the poor and they should be removed (killed if necessary) and replaced by the state and his theory was far more about economics and politics.
Stalin and lenin’s version of marxism was quite different but it was because like Marx he considered religion an opiate for society not because of fanaticism as religious fanaticism at the time wasn’t really the big thing that it is today with Al Qaeda, Taliban etc,
I also read the article on Christianity which pointed to all the atrocities but you can’t just take all the different Christian groups and lump them in the same category and call it Christian atrocities because that is historically inaccurate.
In the article it pointed to the persecution of the pagans at 315 when Christianity became legal but there is back story that wasn’t illustrated or even mentioned in the article at all.
Originally in the beginning of Christianity the early Christians where radically egalitarian and you had several different groups but the two main ones where the gnostics and what you would call orthodox(before the catholic and orthodox churches split) now the gnostics were quite different to the orthodox for instance the gnostics had both female and male priests and priestesses and also they didn’t believe in fixed ideas of faith where as the orthodox believed in having only male priest (their argument being that all the apostles were male even) and were all about believing that there way was the better way.
Now the gnostics also rejected the authority of the church because they believed that everyone had the capacity to connect with God so to speak and didn’t see the need for a religious bureaucracy and because of that belief that were persecuted by the orthodox originally by being denounced as heretics and eventually led to the burning of the libraries of alexandria where the majority of the gnostic texts where and in the 4th century being a gnostic meant a death penalty.
This illustrates that it wasn’t just pagans who were persecuted by the early church as they persecuted everyone who didn’t agree with them including other Christians that questioned the authority of the church.
Unfortunately the church in around 3rd century turned into a tyrannical organisation that attempted to convert everyone and those who didn’t convert were killed but it is important to recognize that the roman empire was a tyrannical governmental regime even before Christianity became it’s state religion it shouldn’t be a surprise that once the church became a part of roman state of what it turned into but even then that is no excuse but the article left out that one of the reasons that pagans were persecuted like the Gnostics was because Rome wanted a unified state religion and the Gnostics were seen as a threat to their religious authority as well as the religious authority of the church(that would become the catholic church).
Now in that article almost all the examples were by Catholics which further illustrates the point as the Catholic church being a tyrannical organisation and the following examples show how they used religion as a control structure as do the following examples:
1. The Catholic church preaching Sacerdotalism which is the belief that you need a priest in order to get rid of your sin (opposed by the gnostics and Martin Luther).
2. In medieval europe the bible were not translated into common languages until Martin Luther as they were often translated into Latin so the average Christian could not read the bible and relied on the priest interpreting the bible for them another way of controlling people.
These examples and the history of the catholic church clearly show that they were a tyrannical organisation and it wasn’t until the protestant reformation that things started to change.
Martin Luther was not trying to create another religion he was protesting against the religious bureaucracy of the catholic church. Protestant comes from the world protest so that 30 years war between the Protestants and the Catholics was a war against oppression and the corruption of the Catholic church and disagreeing with the Popes control over the secular sphere of government not a religious one.
And though a Protestant Church in England may have been created years later that had nothing to do with Martin Luther.
Just because one group happens to be protestants and another happens to be Catholics does’t automatically make it a religious and most wars in history are carried out for political and financial reasons not religious and the 30 years war can’t be classified as a religious war.
You wouldn’t call the American War of Independence a religious war between deists and protestants because the founding fathers were deists and Christians or a war between Christians and Christians.
It’s unfortunate what happened with the original church and then the catholic church but you can’t use that to blame christians any more that you can blame atheism on communist regime.
A tyranical government is a tyranical government irregardless of whether it’s religious or not.
Ah ok so Stalin was an atheist because priests were raping little children and so to retaliate he murder who bunch of innocent people and his soldiers went around raping german women after world war 2.
By the way those may be your beliefs in religion but you can’t equate those to stalins beliefs. As for priest raping children that’s the catholic church which has had a long problem with corruption and has nothing to do with the orthodox or protestant churches.
As for the gore in the bible you might want to refer to Hebrews 8:7-13 and Hebrews 12: 18-24 that illustrate that those gorey rules aren’t meant to be followed. See you have the covenant of Able, and lastly the covenant of Jesus.
Anyways this will be my last post as I can see now that your bias was the reason for my disappointment in your article but at least you were civil enough and didn’t block my posts so cudo’s to you.
Regardless of their upbringing
They acted God-less. To me that speaks of atheism despite the empty rhetoric.
aaron “They acted God-less. To me that speaks of atheism despite the empty rhetoric.”
That’s just patently false on its face. Hitler was very religious. Pol Pot was against education. What they did was never in the name of atheism and that is a significant difference.
I see example after example of devotees of the so-called three “Great Religions” Judaism, Christianity and Islam acting quite godless, including scriptures in their own holy texts. So, I reject that comment by aaron.
No, they acted just like the genocidal filth in the sky and his torture-loving zombie brat that YOU worship, christer.
It takes some seriously messed up evil to support torture, and especially to support ETERNAL torture.
You worship the most evil idea ever vomited onto humanity, and you’re too stupid to know it.
“In the name of Atheism”
…is a disingenious phrase. As many Atheists claim, there are no tenents, dogma or statements that Atheists lay claim to by calling themselves “atheists”. This is basically a way for them to absolve themselves/their viewpoint of any blame for any atrocity/crime/etc… that is committed.
The issue that arises in places like Stalin’s Russia or Pol Pot’s Cambodia (Hitler was more of a mystic; neither an Atheist nor a Christian), where Atheism is the “official” viewpoint of the rulers, is “what restraint does Atheism place upon the rulers?” The answer is “none”. One can almost hear Ivan Karamazov standing in Red Square stating “If God does not exist, everything is permitted!” The Stalinist regime took this dogmatic Atheism to heart; it was the foundation of everything they did. Atheism is a license for ruthlessness; it appeals to the ruthless.
It is notable that it does not *require* that a person commit evil (however you might define it) but neither does it in any way restrain it or *require* that it not be done or is not justifiable. Pretty much every religion includes limitations, restraints, requirements against excess, brutatlity, abuse and the like. Atheism lacks anything of the sort, essentially absolving its adherant(s) from blame as long as *they* wish to define their actions as good. It is this *lack* that it is judged by.
KhMer Rouge banned all religion
The Khmer Rouge banned all religion. Nice trying to spin him into a catholic buddhist…
There is no “spin” in exposing the facts that he was raised a Buddhist and Catholic. That’s important information that some would apparently like to excise from his biography.
If we are going to discuss possible influences on the man’s mind, we certainly must include two of the ideologies he was most familiar with. Our analysis would hardly be complete without those facts.
Stalin and Pol Pot did not kill for atheism, nitwit. They killed for POWER.
Care to explain why arch-atheists like Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, Lev Kamenev, and Grigor Zinoviev were all murdered by Stalin, cabbage with legs?
Care to explain why Pol Pot went after the intellectuals first, when they’re –notorious for having high numbers of atheists?
Well, you’d know why they were killing if you hadn’t wasted what little of a brain you have stuffing it with genocidal filth.
The question was so simple. After 1000 words of ranting, where is the answer? were they atheists?
Who spent 1,000 words “ranting?” My article with FACTS was quite simple to understand and answered the question.
What part of it did you not understand? Or did you simply not read it to begin with?
Hitler–No.
Pol Pot–Maybe.
Stalin–No. Once he wiped out those pesky idealistic atheists like Trotsky, he rebuilt the genocide temples–er churches and had frequent and very long meetings with Orthodox priests at the Kremlin, having friendly chats about how much they had in common. Like being lovers of genocide.
Which you are if you belong to the genocidal hate cult of christery.
Thank you.
Speaking of the Jews, the gospel of John (8:44 ([url]http://www.blueletterbible.org/Bible.cfm?b=Jhn&c=8&t=RSV#s=1005044[/url])) also states:
[quote]You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.[/quote]
Hitler repeatedly used the New Testament to justify his hatred and abuse of Jews, as did millions of Christians over the centuries in the numerous pogroms against Jews as “Christ-killers.”
Hitler was behaving perfectly in line with the Church’s centuries-long anti-Semitism. Even the yellow stars ([url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_badge#Medieval_Catholic_Europe[/url]) the Nazis marked Jews with are from the Catholic Church’s abuse of Jews.
The history of the stars goes further back, actually.
During the late 13th/early 14th centuries, the Albigensian Crusade wiped out up to a million Cathars in Southern France. They were the reason the first Inquisition was formed, and the remaining Cathars who still refused to give up their faith were forced to wear yellow torture devices–er crucifixes, on their clothes at all times, so that they could be brutalized openly by “good” christers.
The yellow stars for Jews came from this as well.
Furthermore, Hitler was known to be obsessed with the Albigensian Crusade.
What makes a person a TRUE CHRISTIAN?
What makes a person a TRUE CHRISTIAN?
1 John 4:20 Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen
Does Hitler loved Jews?
…the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
HITLER did not love JEWS. Actually he murdered 6 millions of them, which is enough EVIDENCE that he did not LOVE people as the Christian doctrine commands.
Hitler fails as christian believer even if he declared to be: his deeds speak more than his words.
No True Scotsman doesn’t fly with your intellectual betters. Just because Hitler exposes your hate cult for the evil it is, and he’s not the kind of christard you want him to be doesn’t mean he wasn’t a member of your genocidal torture cult.
He most definitely was one of you, and so were the vast majority of the people who voted for him and carried out his evil.
Deal with it.
Andrew
For those who saying that Staling and his comrades were kind of Christians, I would suggest to learn what it mean for Christians of those day. 25 years of prison for brining your own kids to church or preaching Gospel.
Bull. Stalin put the churches right back in power.
You were put in jail if you spoke out against Stalin, for any reason , not if you were religious in and of itself, liar.
What you ultimately fail to realize is the nature of a pre-requisite. “God is a pre-requisite for doing evil,” you’re basically saying. But what you fail to realize is that an atheist who does terrible things has just as much a pre-requisite for doing the things he does as someone who believes in God–since every human being has an authority in their mind and it would not have mattered had Mao or Stalin been atheists or theists, they still believed their actions were justified by whatever authority they believed in. All you’ve tried to do is create an ideology that can’t be falsified, as in “Atheists have no pre-requisite for doing evil.” It’s like reffing a basketball game with no rules, there’s no system to attack.
Marx was a DEVOUT atheist, apparently you’ve never heard of The Communist Manifesto (“Religion is the opium of the masses”). The fact that you throw in that he was converted at 6 just shows how much confirmation bias is needed for you to get your point across.
Since I’m discussing Marx in the context of whether or not he was an atheist, I obviously have heard of the Communist Manifesto, and the snide remarks fail to address the issue.
The fact that Marx was raised a Christian is relevant to the discussion, not part of a “confirmation bias.” I never said that “God is a pre-requisite for doing evil,” so that’s a straw man.
I don’t call myself a theist or atheist, so I don’t really have a “dog” in this fight, so to speak. I do object to people running around pretending that religion had no influence on the founders of these movements.
Nothing you’ve said refutes the fact that none of these men was raised in an atheist vacuum, instilled with murderous atheistic notions or acting with the goal of atheism in mind. The contrary cannot be said about religious fanatics, as they have slaughtered their way around the world in the name of their various gods.
I said that you “basically” said (I should have said “implied,” sorry) God (or Christianity, or whatever spiritual authority we’re using here) is a pre-requisite for moral evil because, based on the opening lines about the “You too” argument, it seems that that is what you are seeking to address, listing historical data to counter that argument. If that is not the point of the article then what is? That these historical accounts are just facts and figures with no point to get across?
Not to be presumptuous, but I don’t think you understood my point about a per-requisite for moral action when you say “atheists aren’t running around killing people in the name of atheism.” Here’s something to consider: When the Crusades took back Jerusalem from the Muslims, it wasn’t, “God told us to take back the city, and we don’t know why, but we’re gonna do it anyway.” It was, “We want the city back (geo-political concern) and we are going to use God to justify that action.”
Religion was almost never the intention of a war, only the justification.
Is God as the justification of something more wrong than another justification? When Mao (who said “Religion is poison” and desired to exterminate religion) committed his atrocities, he didn’t think to himself “Gee, I’m an atheist, let me go ahead and kill tons of people because there’s no God,” but in his mind, HE WAS God. He was the justification. God, in this case, is simply an interchangeable word for people’s differing ideology.
And lastly, let’s consider one thing: IF Hitler had quoted Attila the Hun or Ghengis Khan all the time, what would his reception have been? People would’ve reviled at him. So, naturally, making this statement a priori, it seems logical to conclude that he used the teachings of Jesus to further his personal agenda by getting people to look at him in a good light. If I were a tyrant, would I SERIOUSLY invoke another tyrant’s words into my political agenda? No. That is the point. he abused a good thing to justify a bad thing. How else would he have risen to power.
So, basically all you’ve got is “Hitler wasn’t a real Christian” arguments? He was raised a Christian, declared his devotion, and built upon centuries of violent Christian behaviors. His supposed “final solution” was the end result of almost 2,000 years of Christian hatred and persecution of Jews based on Bible verses.
It should be clarified that I’m not pushing atheism – I could not care less what one does within the privacy of one’s own mind. The fact will remain, however, that the same sort of argument could be made that “Hitler wasn’t a real atheist.”
I am going by the man’s own words and what motivated his followers, rather than speculating and deflecting. From the past behaviors of Christians during hundreds if not thousands of pogroms against Jews, it is easy to see why Hitler would choose that ideology, regardless of whether or not he himself was a “real Christian.” Choosing to invoke Genghis Khan or another ideology (other than Islam) would be meaningless and fail to provoke the same reaction against Jews, which pretty much proves the point that it is Christianity, not necessarily Hitler, that led to the events of WWII in question.
You ignore the large portion of my argument merely to kick at my last point. But that’s ok. I’ll adjust.
First of all, Hitler fought in WWI, got wounded badly, his country got stripped of everything and was forced to pay for the expenses of the war, and yet you say that “Christianity led to the events of WWII in question.” No smart historian, secular or religious, has ever told me something even to that effect.
This is a quote by Hitler in 1933: “It is through the peasantry that we shall really be able to destroy Christianity because there is in them a true religion rooted in nature and blood.” According to historian Paul Johnson, Hitler said to Hermann Raushnig that he desired to “stamp out Christianity root and branch.” This was 1933, after he’d risen to power. According to the Catholic League in the New York Times, Hitler said, “Antiquity is better than modern times, because it didn’t know Christianity and syphilis.” As I was saying, Christianity and the cute little things he said about it were necessary for his rise to power, NECESSARY for his opposition of the Jews, but when Hitler came into power, the real man came out. I encourage you to look up all of these quotes. They are real. If you can’t find them I will give you the links, gladly.
According to your logic, if I write a book about loving people (don’t lie…did Jesus REALLY preach for us to hate each other?), and that book makes a worldwide impact on people, then some demented tyrant uses my book as a means to get to power and destroy the world in 2050…my book is what’s bad, not the tyrant. that’s what you’re implying when you say Christianity was at fault for WWII and “not necessarily Hitler.”
I don’t mean to sound cruel, but these kinds of fraudulent articles/arguments should be banned from getting published anywhere on the internet or anything because it causes atheists to view us Christians as inhuman, deluded cavemen who hate everyone. I speak from experience.
I stand by what I’ve said, and it is asinine to reach for what amounts to “blasphemy laws” to prevent people from criticizing Christianity and the past behaviors of Christian fanatics. Perhaps people calling for such blatant censorship of real history by labeling it “fraudulent” should be banned from getting published anywhere on the internet? This is the same sort of disgusting tactic used by Islamic fanatics trying to shut up criticism of that violent and bigoted ideology. Why not call me a “racist Christianophobe?”
Shame on you. Not only are you trying to cover up horrible sins in the name of Christianity, but you are playing the victim card. Moreover, you are adhering to a violent cult that has been shown time and again not only to be dangerous, contributing to a horrendous amount of violence and bloodshed, which is truly a reprehensible stance to take.
I was raised a Christian. When I discovered how false were its doctrines and how ghastly its history, I became an apostate, because I have integrity.
Move along now and quit with the New Inquisition. It would be best if you left the Christian cult rather than trying to bully others into censorship, but thanks for proving my point of how dangerous is the Christian conditioning. What’s next, witch burnings?
For others who may be reading this thread, please see the lengthy list of Christian violence at the following link:
Victims of Christianity
As I’ve stated repeatedly here, Hitler was only building upon centuries of abusive behavior by Christian fanatics. No amount of fallacious argumentation will negate that fact.
Your deities are evil. That makes them pre-requisites for doing evil.
Your Genocidal sky daddy wipes out thousans of peoples, for mostly stupid reasons. He condones rape and slavery.
His horrifying zombie brat endorses permanent torture for anyone who doesn’t kiss his sadistic ass.
There is nothing more evil than eternal torture. There is NEVER any justification for it that isn’t genocidal filth.
NOT ONE THING justifies evil like that.
When you worship evil, it’s not a surprise when so many of you end up committing it.
It’s entirely expected.
This is all very easy to say, you know, just simply saying I’m in a cult and I’ve been conditioned, etc., but it doesn’t make any difference in a debate (let’s be honest). I say you are spreading lies, you say “what next, witch burnings?” Now I ask, who is imposing the more extremist view on the other?
But, I stand by what I’ve said.
1) I gave you an argument showing that atheist/humanist leaders have just as much a pre-requisite in mind for justifying their actions, which you did not address on the grounds that you “don’t know their private minds, you’re just presenting historical facts and figures”…yet you said earlier that atheists have not been running around with atheism in mind…as if you knew their private minds.
2) I gave you a series of quotes BY Hitler AGAINST Christianity and how he planned to destroy it and hated it (WHEN he came to power, which says a lot about what he really had in mind over what he merely wanted in campaigning), and you did not refute those or provide evidence against them. If you can refute those I will leave you alone.
I am not BACKING religious warfare, of course Christians have made mistakes, I was merely showing you that atheist leaders can be/have been just as dangerous. Show me one example where I said “Christians were right in doing this atrocity. Just one. Only one.
Address my two arguments and DON’T just cite me as an example of brainwashing…that was cute and clever but it was cruel and lessens my chance of ever becoming an atheist. Address those two points. That is all I ask. Address them properly and I will leave you alone.
I’m sorry, but you are impossible to have a discussion with. I’ve already stated I don’t care whether or not someone is an atheist, so I don’t care if anything I’ve said here will turn you off to atheism. You continuously argue straw men and make insulting smears like saying that my writing is “lying,” when I’ve stated FACTS – there’s nothing “cruel” about my stating facts.
Here’s a straw man: “don’t know their private minds, you’re just presenting historical facts and figures” That is certainly not a direct quote from me.
I already addressed the argument of whether or not Hitler was a “real” or “good” Christian – it is irrelevant, as he was adhering to centuries of Christian behaviors and doctrines, which is the heart of the matter. You are the one ignoring that fact, as you continue to defend a false and violent ideology. You thrive on unfounded beliefs that bias your views of reality, while I am presenting facts that do not require belief or defense of beliefs.
As I’ve stated previously, if other readers are interested in the appalling history of Christianity, they can read about it here:
Victims of Christianity
Anyone who would defend such a legacy should be ashamed and embarrassed. One is fortunate to have any response from me under such circumstances.
Since you have already made disgraceful comments essentially trying to ban all discussion of Christianity’s violent past, I am not interested in entertaining your views any further, as they are a waste of time.
Remarkable! Its in fact amazing piece of writing,
I have got much clear idea on the topic of from this paragraph.
So basically, it is because of religion that these tyrants did what they did and that gives Atheism a free pass? I think not! All the time people want to throw the Crusades and the like in the face of believers. And they accept that fact. (for the most part. I’m sure that there are some who are in denial) But use the facts that Stalin was an Atheist and I’ll get all kinds of excuses for it. This article is another example and a new one at that. It’s time that people accept things for what they are and learn from it. There is no belief system that gets a free pass. No! Not even Atheism!
Actually many people deny the history of the Crusades
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/10/the-crusades-were-great-actually.html
Atheism doesn’t have commandments to kill like how a religion does, it’s just not believing in a god, you can’t blame atheism on anything not anymore than you can blame a non-belief in fairies. Go learn a thing or two about Lysenkoism and Class Struggle to see what Communism was actually about
Stalin was never an atheist, religious people play the same game with Hitler despite clearly not being an atheist. Infact many even shamelessly blame atheism on Japanese WW2 atrocitites despite their religious motivations, they even have a phrase for blaming atheism on stuff that they don’t like to see in religious people, it’s called “practical atheism”, there’s nothing atheists don’t get blamed for. But anyway:
“we need not believe one later Soviet claim that he read The Origin of Species at the age of thirteen while still at Gori, and told a fellow pupil that it proved the nonexistence of God. The story fails on several obvious accounts, including Stalin’s remaining religious, even pious, for some years longer.”
Stalin: Breaker of Nations by Robert Conquest
page 20
And Communism isn’t atheistic, here’s a nice read: http://www.nobeliefs.com/facts.htm#anchor199422
Here’s some more:
Soviet Fiction Since Stalin: Science, Politics and Literature by Rosalind J. Marshþ page 132
“Influenced by his years in an Orthodox seminary, Stalin resurrected the vocabulary and symbolism of religion to make his ruthless social engineering more palatable to the masses”
Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth Century Revolutionary Patriotism By Erik van Ree
“Senokosov, 1989: 502. In May 1940, Stalin had reproached his officers that they had shown less concern for the well-being of their men in the Finnish war than Count Kutuzov, who visited his soldiers to see how they were doing and what they had to eat(Malyshev, 1997: 110) But soldiers could not avoid suffering. As Stalin noted in 1952: “Jesus Christ also suffered, and even carried his cross, and then he rose up to heaven. You, then, have to suffer too, in order to rise up to heaven””
Funny how atheists get blamed for Stalin when he gets so much religious support, even to this day:
http://religiousleftexposed.com/home/2014/01/russian-orthodox-church-publishes-stalin-calendar.html
http://babkin-mikhail.livejournal.com/92774.html#comment
Atheists love to point to evil acts by men who identify themselves as theists. But when the tables are turned atheists are quick to argue that “the bad guy was not a practicing atheists”. Sorry…I don’t buy that argument. If you try to make the case that “religion is bad” rather than arguing that “men are bad” you have to accept that “atheism is bad” because some atheists have committed crimes.
Christianity and Islam among other religions have commandments to kill, atheism doesn’t. Ideologies have consequences, that’s why religious atrocities get mentioned, but merely not believing in fairies is not an ideology to kill and die
Lysenkoism and Class Struggle is what should be dealt with when discussing Communist crimes. Otherwise it’s just the “Hitler ate Sugar” argument, indeed, this is just the age old argument that atheists can’t be moral, they’re really not concerned about how religion influenced people to do bad or what really caused the crimes of Nazism an Communism
Stalin was never an atheist
“we need not believe one later Soviet claim that he read The Origin of Species at the age of thirteen while still at Gori, and told a fellow pupil that it proved the nonexistence of God. The story fails on several obvious accounts, including Stalin’s remaining religious, even pious, for some years longer.”
Stalin: Breaker of Nations by Robert Conquest
page 20
And Communism isn’t atheistic, here’s a nice read: http://www.nobeliefs.com/facts.htm#anchor199422
Here’s some more:
Soviet Fiction Since Stalin: Science, Politics and Literature by Rosalind J. Marshþ page 132
“Influenced by his years in an Orthodox seminary, Stalin resurrected the vocabulary and symbolism of religion to make his ruthless social engineering more palatable to the masses”
Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth Century Revolutionary Patriotism By Erik van Ree
“Senokosov, 1989: 502. In May 1940, Stalin had reproached his officers that they had shown less concern for the well-being of their men in the Finnish war than Count Kutuzov, who visited his soldiers to see how they were doing and what they had to eat(Malyshev, 1997: 110) But soldiers could not avoid suffering. As Stalin noted in 1952: “Jesus Christ also suffered, and even carried his cross, and then he rose up to heaven. You, then, have to suffer too, in order to rise up to heaven””
Funny how atheists get blamed for Stalin when he gets so much religious support, even to this day:
http://religiousleftexposed.com/home/2014/01/russian-orthodox-church-publishes-stalin-calendar.html
http://babkin-mikhail.livejournal.com/92774.html#comment
Although the article didn’t mention Mao, it should:
The Baker Pocket Guide to World Religions by Gerald R.McDermott
“Mao Zedong…seems to have believed privately in a realm beyond the grave. In 1957 he wrote a poem addressed to Li, a woman who lost her husband Liu(which literally means “willow”) Mao’s own wife was Yang(literally, “Poplar”). The thoughts expressed are reminiscent of a religious Daoist cosmos
“Long have I lost my Yang, the brave Poplar tree
And Liu, your spreading Willow, is now cut down
But silken haired Poplar seeds and willow wisps
Float up, as did they, to the ninth heaven
Passing the moon, they tarried, and…
Were given to drink of gold cassia wine
And the goddess of the moon honored these
Loyal souls, which her sleeves spread, dancing for them
All through the boundless spaces of the sky””
Usually the only quote people give that Mao was atheist comes from the Dalai Lama, he claims Mao said “religion is poison”, however:
Recast All under Heaven: Revolution, War, Diplomacy, and Frontier China in the 20th century by Xiaoyuan Liu
“Mao told the tibetan leader that religion was poison. Mao’s remark cannot be found anywhere in relevant publications in China. When recalling this incident on different occasions, the Dalai Lama has offered several versions of his reaction on the spot”
Mao Zedong’s China by Kathlyn Gay page 122
“tourists have come to Shaoshan to learn more about Mao. Some still idolize him. As one elderly man explained, “I worship Mao as a god. He didn’t just found our nation. He established our system of morality.”
Tourists who go to Shaoshan each year may pray before his statue and buy “protection cards” that are said to bear Mao’s spirit and to assume safety while traveling. In other parts of the nation, “Mao is revered…in much the same way as the Virgin Mary is viewed by many Christians as a guardian and protector,” according to a report in the Taipei(Taiwan) Times. “Drivers dangle his picture in their cars, people make incense offerings to his statue in their homes.”
…Chinese make the pilgrimage to Shaoshan each year because they view Mao Zedong as a god”
Pol Pot: An Anatomy of a Nightmare by Philip Short
Page 299
“Mao quoted Kumarajiva as saying ‘if you copy everything I do, it will be a fatal mistake’ ”
Note: Kumarajiva was a Buddhist monk, scholar, and translator of Buddhist texts
There are:
“Taoist elements in the thought of Mao Zedong”
Choosing a faith by Ninian Smart 1995
“Buddhism follows to some degree that cultured emptiness in the mind that is characteristic of Lao-Tzu, the guru of Taoism, and Mao Zedong who became the greatest disciple of it”
Roots in Universal History
“Mao Tse-Tung who has been profoundly influenced by Taoism”
Mao Tse-Tung and his China
Here’s more:
http://ericsworld.org/?p=2340
http://taoism21cen.com/Englishchat/maoandtaoism.html
China is not officially atheist. Nowhere does the Chinese constitution identify it as such. Infact the government in China officially sanctions several different religions. “State Atheist” or “Officially Atheist” is nowadays just a stupid slander that refers to anti-clericalism, but every country that went through secularization went through anti-clericalism, and it was usually a violent process, there’s hardly anything atheistic about being anti-clerical, many people even today claim that the church is corrupt and seeks only money and power
Here’s the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China: http://english.people.com.cn/constitution/constitution.html
But to save you the trouble, the words “atheist” or “atheism” don’t show up even once in China’s constitution
Although the article didn’t mention Mao, it should, as they also try to blame atheists for Mao’s China despite the fact that it was also fairly religious:
“The Practice of Chinese Buddhism, 1900-1950” by Holmes Welch
“90 percent of the population occasionally resorted to Buddhist rites or temples and 99 percent were affected by Buddhist contributions to Chinese thought and behaviour.”
The Baker Pocket Guide to World Religions by Gerald R.McDermott
“Mao Zedong…seems to have believed privately in a realm beyond the grave. In 1957 he wrote a poem addressed to Li, a woman who lost her husband Liu(which literally means “willow”) Mao’s own wife was Yang(literally, “Poplar”). The thoughts expressed are reminiscent of a religious Daoist cosmos
“Long have I lost my Yang, the brave Poplar tree
And Liu, your spreading Willow, is now cut down
But silken haired Poplar seeds and willow wisps
Float up, as did they, to the ninth heaven
Passing the moon, they tarried, and…
Were given to drink of gold cassia wine
And the goddess of the moon honored these
Loyal souls, which her sleeves spread, dancing for them
All through the boundless spaces of the sky””
Usually the only quote people give that Mao was atheist comes from the Dalai Lama, he claims Mao said “religion is poison”, however:
Recast All under Heaven: Revolution, War, Diplomacy, and Frontier China in the 20th century by Xiaoyuan Liu
“Mao told the tibetan leader that religion was poison. Mao’s remark cannot be found anywhere in relevant publications in China. When recalling this incident on different occasions, the Dalai Lama has offered several versions of his reaction on the spot”
http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90882/6610660.html
“The late Chairman Mao Zedong said when he received delegations from Peru in 1964 that “it is wrong to tell people to be against religion.”
He said that if China did so, “religious people would oppose us… believing in a certain religion doesn’t mean people don’t oppose imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism.””
Mao Zedong’s China by Kathlyn Gay page 122
“tourists have come to Shaoshan to learn more about Mao. Some still idolize him. As one elderly man explained, “I worship Mao as a god. He didn’t just found our nation. He established our system of morality.”
Tourists who go to Shaoshan each year may pray before his statue and buy “protection cards” that are said to bear Mao’s spirit and to assume safety while traveling. In other parts of the nation, “Mao is revered…in much the same way as the Virgin Mary is viewed by many Christians as a guardian and protector,” according to a report in the Taipei(Taiwan) Times. “Drivers dangle his picture in their cars, people make incense offerings to his statue in their homes.”
…Chinese make the pilgrimage to Shaoshan each year because they view Mao Zedong as a god”
There are:
“Taoist elements in the thought of Mao Zedong”
Choosing a faith by Ninian Smart 1995
“Buddhism follows to some degree that cultured emptiness in the mind that is characteristic of Lao-Tzu, the guru of Taoism, and Mao Zedong who became the greatest disciple of it”
Roots in Universal History
“Mao Tse-Tung who has been profoundly influenced by Taoism”
Mao Tse-Tung and his China
Here’s more:
http://ericsworld.org/?p=2340
http://taoism21cen.com/Englishchat/maoandtaoism.html
Despite being claimed as such, China is not officially atheist. Nowhere does the Chinese constitution identify it as such. Infact the government in China officially sanctions several different religions, interestingly enough they don’t define Confucianism as such, but it is indeed a religion, and it’s a religion that’s highly involved in the government both in the past and today, for most of China’s history you had to pass a test in Confucianism if you wanted to work as a government official. “State Atheist” or “Officially Atheist” is nowadays just a stupid slander that refers to anti-clericalism, but every country that went through secularization went through anti-clericalism, and it was usually a violent process, there’s hardly anything atheistic about being anti-clerical, many people even today claim that the church is corrupt and seeks only money and power
Here’s the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China: http://english.people.com.cn/constitution/constitution.html
But to save you the trouble, the words “atheist” or “atheism” don’t show up even once in China’s constitution
Be careful regarding high figures of atheism in China they have many problems, including cross-cultural problems, and are not very useful for estimating atheists, here are some problems that these studies tend to have: nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/mar/24/chinese-atheists-pew-gets-wrong/
“Estimates of high degrees of atheism in China are most likely gross over-exaggerations”. Source: Overmyer, D.L. ,editor. 2003. Religion in China Today. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
The word “Religious” also has cross-cultural problems, as it means different things in different contexts. In Thailand, “religious” might refer to the piety and practices of monks, and thus a Thai individual may describe him or herself as “not religious” even though he or she holds deep personal religious beliefs
According to Peter Tze Ming, 95% of China is religious. At lowest, China is still at least 80% religious, which is still higher than modern day U.S
http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/
Portfolio Investment Opportunities in China
By David M. Darst
“A broader question in another poll showed that 85 percent of the population believes in religion of the supernatural
In 2007, then-President Hu Jintao endorsed charities and their usefulness in solving social problems. The central government has also sponsored international conferences on Buddhism and Taoism”
Here are a couple talking points regarding the general religiosity of Cambodia and Pol Pot’s regime. Al of the below are taken from:
Pol Pot: An Anatomy of a Nightmare by Philip Short
Page 19
“mired in superstition…in this sense Cambodia was, and to some extent is still, a medieval country where even the King takes no important decision without first consulting the court astrologer. The resemblance to Africa is again overwhelming. Every village has its witch, or app, and its K’ruu, or healer…In the countryside, more murders are attributed to sorcery than any other single cause. Cambodian officials, university-educated men, still sometimes justify the beating to death of a suspected witch by a mob by saying: ‘The powers of those persons are too terrible. What else can the peasants do?’ ”
Page 20
“Sar…spend a year at the Wat Botum Vaddei, a large Buddhist Monastery”
Page 65
” Khmer students…Like communists everywhere, they interpreted Marxism through the prism of national culture, in their case an intensely normative form of Buddhism”
Page 80
“Most intriguing was his emphasis on Buddhism. Enlightened monks, he claimed, had ‘always understood very well the nature of monarchy’ and had written folk-tales like the Thmenh Chey(whose hero, one of the best-loved rogues in Khmer literature, famously outwitted the King), in order to show the people that they should not believe in royalty. The Buddha-“Our Great Master”- had abandoned princely life, he went on in order to become ‘a friend of the people; he had been the first to preach the virtues of democratic system alone that could defend Buddhism’s ‘profound values’. As a member of the Cercle Marxiste, Sar would not have been expected to write in such terms. Ieng Sary or Thiounn Mumm certainly would not have done so…Sihanouk, Sar wrote, had undermined the Buddhist faith by introducing ranks into the monkhood”
Page 84
“Sihanouk reged ‘I have to grab the monks by the throat. Me! The most religious man in the kingdom’ ”
Page 100
“Sar’s Buddhist upbringing”
Page 118
“Sar…Ponnary…marry they did, at three-day long ceremony, conducted by Buddhist monks, chanting and swinging censers of incense”
Page 150
“In the 1960’s even more than today, religious belief provided the primary value-system of ordinary people throughout South-East Asia. Sar himself had been a Buddhist novice. The first communists, like Tou Samouth and Son Ngoc Minh, had studied at the Higher Pali Institute. So had younger leaders like Siet Chne and Mok. Both within the Party leadership and among the rank and file, the grammar of Theravada Buddhism permeated Khmer communist thought, just as Confucian notions helped to fashion Maoism…Sihanouk had called his policy ‘Buddhist socialism’, and his doctrine of neutrality, the Buddhist ‘middle path’…just as Mao had sinified Marxism, Sar gave it a Buddhist tincture”
Page 155
“Sihanouk gloated that ‘our enemies have departed one after the other…Now they are all going to meet in hell…The gods punish all the enemies of peaceful and neutral Cambodia.’ ”
Page 197
“Lon Nol prevaricated. Everything he had achieved in his life had been due to Sihanouk’s patronage. He knew the Prince trusted him. But he was ambitious and profoundly influenced by esoteric Buddhism. The mystics and seers he frequented had persuaded him that his fate was to restore the glories of the ancient Khmer-Mon empire by waging war against the thmil, the hated ‘unbelievers’ from Communist Vietnam”
Page 208
“Lon Nol made a radio broadcast announcing the start of a chiliastic religious war against the Vietnamese communists. They were ‘the enemies of Buddha’ he declared”
Page 232
“the overriding, if unstated, objective of Khmer Rouge policy from 1972 on was to refashion the whole Cambodian society in the image of this authentic, autochthonous peasantry, unsullied by the outside world. But there was another purpose, too, both Khmer and communist, underlying the Party’s emphasis on social and economic levelling to force everyone into the same poor-peasant mould: the eternal Buddhist goal of demolishing the individual, but this time in new garb – not as a path to Nirvana(nothingness), but to remove what was seen as the biggest obstacle to the establishment of a collectivised state: the innate and essential egoism”
Page 313
“The Roman Catholic Cathedral was demolished, not so much as an anti-Christian or even anti-foreign gesture, but because its French missionary founders, with typical nineteenth-century arrogance, had built it directly opposite Wat Phnom, which in Khmer tradition is sacred ground…the Khmer Rouges preserved the most important Cambodian historical monuments. The Buddha’s Tooth Stupa in front the Phnom Penh railway station survived Khmer Rouge rule unscathed, as did the Royal Palace and the National Museum. So did all the major Buddhist monasteries in Phon Penh and in most provincial towns. So, too, did Angkor Wat and the other Angkorian sites”
Page 317
“The Cambodian communists would go where none had gone before. ‘Zero for him, Zero for you – that is communism,’ Khieu Samphan had said. The idea that property is baneful is rooted in the Buddhist creation myth, which depicts a golden age, when rice grew in abundance and men ate as they wished, before greed for private possessions perverted the primeval commonwealth”
Page 318
“The destruction of ‘material and spiritual private property’ was Buddhist detachment in revolutionary clothes; the demolition of the personality was {Continuing to Page 319} the achievement of non-being. ‘The only true freedom,’ a study document proclaimed, ‘lies in following what Angkar says, what it does.’ Like the Buddha, Angkar was always right; questioning its wisdom was always a mistake”
Page 323
” ‘Proletarian consciousness’ was an ideal, to be achieved through ‘illumination’…the Cambodian used it literally in its original Buddhist sense”
Page 341
“Pol…when he spoke to Khmer audiences, he usually carried a fan, emblematic of the monkhood”
Page 442
“Pol…died peacefully in his sleep…Three days afterwards Pol’s widow and his daughter carried out the Buddhist rites. Then his body was cremated on a pile of rubbish”
Page 448
“Pol Pot was the supreme architect of his country’s desolation. But he and his colleagues did not act alone. In the words of the Buddhist leader Yos Hut Khemcaro, ‘Millions of Cambodians, including Buddhist clergy, worked with [them]’ ”
There’s no doubt that Pol Pot was a Buddhist. And no, Buddhism is not atheistic for those gullible enough to believe that. Check the Adi-Buddha for one. The only reason why Buddhism is legal in Indonesia is because Indonesian Buddhists officially decided that he was the only god. The Adi-Buddha is the “Primordial Buddha” that existed before anything else did, and he’s the originator of all things
Although most Buddhists actually tend to be polytheists. Check Deva, Bodhisattva, Tennyo, Saman, Maitreya, Brahmā (Buddhism). Although many of these(not all) are restricted to the Mahayana sect of Buddhism, which wasn’t the sect Pol Pot belonged to. But suffice to say, Buddhism can be just as superstitious as any other religion. Some Buddhist sub-sects are indeed atheists, but then again, some Hindu sects and Christian sects (Nontheist Friends) are also atheistic, doesn’t mean that the religion itself is atheistic though, you have to throw away much of Buddhism to make it atheistic. Here’s an interesting article on the issue: http://www.atheistnexus.org/profiles/blogs/buddhism-as-an-atheistic-religion-a-western-fantasy