"The Innocence of Muslims"

[loveboof]

but the Church has often been a rallying point against imperialism, against dictators, against oppression.

Well with the two examples you gave, I don't think they have discounted the fact that a non-religious person could have done the same. (It's impossible to measure their hypothetical success in relation to the priests)

The part of your comment I have quoted I find fairly ironic because religion has a some stage attempted all of them... lol

There is no 'church of atheism'. We are not an organised, collected, tax reductible, unified cult. There are no atheist leaders who determine what the truth is. For these reasons alone, it is ridiculous to point to occassions of secular violence as some counter point to the many horrific massacres religion is responsible for.

Atheism is not responsible for the lives lost under Stalin. Atheism is simply the rejection of religion & the belief in a deity. Those murders had other motives and were part of wider shemes completely outside of the realms of atheism.

One atheist is not responsible for the actions of another atheist, and it is the same on an individual basis for religious people. But religious people do need to own up to the accountability of their (massively profitable) organisations.

[Stavros]

If we can agree that politics is about power, and that, for example, the violence in the USSR and China was shaped by the need of the ruling Party to monopolise power at the expense of all other parties, you can then attach to the 1930s Terror, the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution, etc all sorts of labels -protecting the fatherland from saboteurs and spies, getting rid of capitalist roaders in the party and so on. How many dictators have made it illegal to insult them, say by defacing a poster of them -is it because they are sort-of divine, or because the totalitarian mind-set cannot allow a single mark of opposition to be registered?

The USA has an open political culture -look at it as a union of 50 countries- where the political culture in other countries is wholly different. But is the UK as liberal as the US? Even here before the Olympics Johnny Rotten in an interview became defensive over the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen (rumours that it would be played in the opening ceremony) insisting it was an ironic questioning of the monarchy not an attack on it. For obvious reasons, diaplying Nazi symbols in Germany is illegal, free speech doesn't come into it.

Not sure I can wholly endorse Prospero on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hizbullah or Hamas -in all cases they exploited the absence of the state to provide the social welfare poor people needed -after earthquakes in Egypt, during the civil war in Lebanon, the siege in Gaza (although there was a demonstration recently against Hamaz in Gaza) -thus in the face of failed politics, religion was the modus vivendi whereby social groups could be reached and given food, shelter, and so on: and a voice, as long as the voices were all singing from the same hymn sheet, as it were...Politics and Religion thus combined: organising people to achieve a particular end: power.

But if the people then evaluate the exercise of that power critically, politico-religious administrations fight against criticism as if it were an attack on the faith -it is if anything an attack on them, not the religion- and thus they risk an opposition movement re-asserting its rights through politics by demolishing, or sidelining the faith altogether-the fate of many ideologies of the past.

Here for example, is a quote from today's Telegraph article by Colin Freeman (link below)
Indeed, while Iran, being mainly Persian, is not part of the Arab world, some of the book's most vivid writing comes from there, courtesy of a young Iranian who, after reading George Orwell's 1984 and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, realises he is living in his very own religious dystopia. It is, he says, a "perennially self-righteous society", allowing its rulers to justify extraordinary acts of brutality. "While you (in the West) are fighting for the rights of pandas over there, people are still being stoned to death in my country." He writes that many Iranians are now so fed up of religious rule that if the regime ever falls, “Iran will form the biggest community of atheists on the planet."

The danger of using religion to infuse political movements, is that one or either, or both run the risk over the long term of being discredited. I was in Prague recently, where the Hussite rebellion against the Catholic Church caused thousands of deaths, all over the identity of Christianity in Bohemia and Moravia and the wider Slavic world (1420-1434) -add in the deaths and misery caused by Communism and together, the obsessions of religion and autocracy and their effects, have created a space for unifying ideologies in the Czech Republic that is still vacant -people are not religious, but not inspired by dramatic narratives of politics either -as if exhausted by the demands of extreme observance by both. Perhaps there is a strain of irreligious feeling in the Middle East, but with the veil of faith so tightly drawn, expressing it is still dangerous, and because, after all, most people in that region do still believe.

Telegraph article here:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/co...-arab-writing/

[Prospero]

I do find it odd that I am being perceived as a defender of faith - which I am not. I am more someone who wishes to challenge the idea that ALL religion is, per se, bad. Indeed it is the root of much of the evil in the world.

Equally I am not a defender of Hizbollah or the Muslim brotherhood - and Stavros is right to identify other motives in their organisation of social action in the wake of disasters or conflict. But nevertheless they did organise and help where the state and other organisations were unable to do so.

Also I am not in any way an apologist for the regime in Iran.

But what i do argue is that the utopian notion of a world free from religions is simply that. It is not achievable. And we all have to find ways to live alongside faiths and indeed cultures which we find disagreeable - while naturally campaigning to see change. Sometimes even actively supporting it (as in Libya last year).

[hippifried]

I do find it odd that I am being perceived as a defender of faith - which I am not. I am more someone who wishes to challenge the idea that ALL religion is, per se, bad. Indeed it is the root of much of the evil in the world.

Oh c'mon! We all know that you're really one of those Satanic, Muslim, atheists; worshiping at the altar of Wiccan secular humanism. There's a stake in the ground, ready to start the bonfire as soon as we catch you & get you tied down.

[jake9jake9]

No Prospero. That is actually quite disingenuous of you. Do you believe that those millions who were killed under Stalin & Hitler (et al) were killed to further the message of atheism? Do you honestly believe it is accurate (and not at all misleading) to suggest those atrocities were committed in 'the name of atheism'?

You know better!

[edit: And as for the positive role religion plays in the developing world, again, that is questionable. Do you think the Roman Catholic position on condoms has helped the AIDS pandemic for example? Is there a single beneficial thing religion has done which could not have been otherwise committed by secular society?]

So why did Stalin target people with religious beliefs then? Or Albania close down religious places of worship and forbid its practice? Or even China today, with its oppression?

I would look up the term "state Atheism". I mean, it's pretty clear these people weren't fans of anyone with beliefs of any Deity, especially when they themselves endorsed a Atheist-communist belief set.

[Stavros]

So why did Stalin target people with religious beliefs then? Or Albania close down religious places of worship and forbid its practice? Or even China today, with its oppression?

I would look up the term "state Atheism". I mean, it's pretty clear these people weren't fans of anyone with beliefs of any Deity, especially when they themselves endorsed a Atheist-communist belief set.

I believe -not absolutely sure about it- that religion has been more successful in reviving its fortunes in Russia than in Albania where the assault on belief was probably more ferocious than in Russia, and maybe more effective in a smaller country. Why this should be I don't know, maybe worshipping in secret was taking place in Russia, maybe the attempt to replace the Party in Russia needed a strong authority such as the Church, which also had resonance for those for whom 1991 was an oportunity to restore what they think was lost. By contrast, I understand that after the disastrous attempt by Biafra to secede from Nigeria and the grim reaper that visited Eastern Nigeria from 1967 into the 1970s, many people became born-again Christians, as if they needed something that had been endowed by something other than mankind, to offer them meaning in life. As Prospero so soberly puts it, religion isn't going away, so we have to find a way to live with it, just as religion must accommodate disbelief without getting Stalinist about it....

[trish]

Churches are and have always been organized political institutions (usually on the community level); i.e. social centers and sources of political guidance insofar as moral, ethical and spiritual guidance intersects with political guidance. Old, established, organized, political institutions are an anathema to socio-poltico revolutions.

Moreover Marx saw religion as antithetical to his philosophical materialism.

So there are two reasons Stalin specifically targeted religious belief. It's not so much that Marx or Stalin wanted to spread the word of atheism (there is no such word as loveboof rightly points out) but rather Stalin saw religion as an obstacle to the success of the communist revolution. Pretty much the same is true about the communist revolution in China and their continued oppression of religion. I'll take a pass on Albania, pleading complete ignorance. The goal of the communist revolution was not to establish a new atheist religion or even primarily to eradicate religion, but to achieve a political goal and a new paradigm of economic structure (to which religion, in their view, was by happenstance an impediment).

This is not in any way the same thing as sending Christian missionaries throughout the new world to convert "heathens" and save their souls. Actually it's more like (but not exactly) sending conquistadors throughout the new world to conquer and/or decimate populations of non-believing "heathens," to acquire the subservience of the survivors, their labors and more importantly their treasure. The Inca Priesthood, for an example, was a political impediment to the goals of Spain.

[martin48]

Here's a good analysis of religion - from one of the most thoughtful of Americans

"Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbour as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven. .... The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste."

Mark Twain "The Lowest Animal"

[jake9jake9]

For anyone wondering about "state Atheism", then...

State atheism is the official promotion of atheism by a government, sometimes combined with active suppression of religious freedom and practice.[1] In contrast, a secular state purports to be officially neutral in matters of religion, supporting neither religion nor irreligion.[2]
State atheism may refer to a government's anti-clericalism, which opposes religious institutional power and influence in all aspects of public and political life, including the involvement of religion in the everyday life of the citizen.[3] State promotion of atheism as a public norm was first practiced during a brief period in Revolutionary France. Since then, such a policy was repeated only in Revolutionary Mexico and some communist states. The Soviet Union had a long history of state atheism,[4] in which social success largely required individuals to profess atheism, stay away from churches and even vandalize them; this attitude was especially militant during the middle Stalinist era from 1929-1939.[5][6][7] The Soviet Union attempted to suppress public religious expression over wide areas of its influence, including places such as central Asia.[8]

State atheism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I just think we should try to be objective here, especially when people play the typical "blame religion" game.

[hippifried]

Methinks there's a huge difference between actual besiefs & power grabs.