Once again to use atheism as a tool, I don’t think it’s enough to simply say the church is bad or the church was part of the problem when Stalin wanted to get them out of the way because I think the traditional response form the masses would be to either “clean house” but still keep the church or maybe replace with a new church. Using the idea of atheism, Stalin could say that no, we simply don’t need ANY church.

Personally, I think the scorecard thing isn’t satisfactory because even if religion’s overall score is higher on the good side, there are bad spikes that I don’t feel are worth it regardless.

I believe we need to make an effort to exclude the obvious outlying data points. They are the easy targets for us to use, but they’re just as easy to defend against. If there is someone that is clearly a non-believer in their religion and is just manipulating people, I can’t see how you can argue the faults in that religion. It’s really just like when everyone points to stalin and we try to explain it away.

What Hitchens points out and PhillyChief you also brought up a bit (but then muddled the idea in your final paragraph) is the idea of consistency. One great example mentioned in your post is the witch trials or another mentioned by Hitchens is slavery in the USA. Both cases show a consistent action by the church as a whole to support the issue and not denounce it. Only when the tide of popular opinion was changing did the church change its stance, but they clearly were never “leading the way” for their congregations.

These are the examples I think we should be using and not some isolated example of human misconduct. They can refute an isolated case as an individual’s weakness, but consistent year after year of church action or non-action is impossible to not attribute to the religion itself.

I agree and have a few issues with
Blogger. That’s certainly one of them. Also, for those of you who also use it, does it bother you that when composing, we don’t have the option to cut and paste? You can paste something from other material, but if you simply want to cut a sentence you wrote in the middle of a paragraph and move it to the top, you can’t!

Maybe we should compile a list of complaints and send them in.

Sorry, PhillyChief. I just suddenly needed to vent on that!

I’ll expand on this a little bit, and counter that Atheism can be used as a “tool”. And answer the main gist of PhillyChief’s article.

There have been people that say if they didn’t believe in God they would go around killing and raping. That might be true, although I don’t want to meet them, God or not. That’s different from, if they didn’t believe in God, they *should* go around killing and raping.

Sure, if you believe in God, and that God likes churches and clergy, you might not want to burn them both. That doesn’t mean the reverse is true. No god doesn’t mean burnt clergy.

Stalin wouldn’t have said, “there is no God, so we must take down the church”. He would have said “We must take down the church because they’re enemies of the people, in allegiance with the bourgeoisie! Come comrades, lets see what the insides of a Bishop looks like”. It’s not a justification, it would be irrational.

The counter-argument that moderate theists make about extremists, that they’re misguided, isn’t valid. They’re using the same justification of “faith”, irrational belief. They think the extremists are wrong because they read scripture differently or follow another prophet, it’s not in relation to rational ethics, what is good, bad, extreme, or moderate.

So not only does the theist’s counter to bringing up extremists, that atheists do bad things because of atheism, isn’t true. More importantly, they’re missing the point of the argument. Religion produces extremism, dangerous ideas and beliefs, that can only be countered by rationalism, which argues against moderate religion as much as extremism equally for being irrational.

The better counter-argument would be for them (I think PhillyChief mentioned it), a utilitarian one. Religion makes people do good things, more than religion makes people do bad things, therefore it is good. Jefferson and many Deists thought this, even if they didn’t think the religion was true. I think Dennett isn’t decided on this, compared to other popular atheist authors.

I’d disagree with this idea, that religion is needed to do good, people doing good in the church would do it out of the church. I’d also point out that religion’s goal isn’t for the good, so if it happens to be, it wouldn’t have to be in the future. And finally, truth is important, to work out what’s good, to work out ways to make things better, for the good.

Steven Weinberg:
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

I wish there was an edit button.

It isn’t an ideology. It’s not feasible that someone would do *anything* in the “name” of atheism. I do not understand how a lack of belief could be a tool

That was sort of one of the points in my original post, that it isn’t an ideology, but the mere concept could be used as a tool to further a different agenda. One says they are doing it because atheism is right, but have the ulterior motive of destroying dissenters to their new economic system.

But actually, I have a problem with the whole outcome based analysis that we seem to be doing here. I don’t really care whether atheism or theism results in good or bad things, in the end. At least, that’s not where I want to start the analysis. Sure, you can find a million examples going either way, but if you really look at them, in most cases the good could have been done without religion, but the bad needed religion to shield the perpetrator from scorn. On the atheism side, neither good nor bad can be done in the name of, or because of, a nonexistent ideology, as Andrew correctly notes.

The problem is that you HAVE to tally a scorecard to make a proper determination, and that’s practically impossible.

What I care about, personally, and what I think is far more important, is the truth value of the proposition “God exists”, not the outcome of individual actions of people who believe or disbelieve. It seems to me that if god does not exist, then that’s the end of the question. You need to take personal responsibility for your bad things, and you need to take more credit for the good things you cause. Otherwise, we are running this world based on a belief in a fantasy, which is irrational, and one irrationality allows us to be irrational in everything.

It simply makes no sense to me to believe in something that doesn’t exist, and then base your whole life on it. If we run the world because a belief in god has good outcomes, then why don’t we encourage people to continue believing in Santa Claus until they die? Then everybody will be good, unless they want a lump of coal in the their stockings every Christmas.

Santa Claus keeps coming up as a viable analogy to this issue between theism and atheism, because it really starts the same way (via indoctrination at an early age) for much the same reason as religion (to try to motivate people to be good) and eventually is discouraged (because it’s not true). I touched on it in a very early post of mine (lo, all those many months ago – ummmm…April.)