Reply #46: That's like asking for substantiation that Bill Clinton was president in the 90s [View All]

[HamdenRice]

What part of this common fact do you need substantiated? That Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot killed people? That they were the leaders of the country? That the states they led were officially atheist? That they suppressed religion?

Dag, just go to Wiki if you're that uninformed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_Soviet_Union

The Soviet Union was an atheist state from 1928-1939, in which religion was largely discouraged and heavily persecuted,...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=214x174720

The program of our Party says:

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union is guided by the conviction that only the conscious and deliberate planning of all the social and economic activities of the masses will cause religious prejudices to die out completely. The Party stands for the complete dissolution of the ties between the exploiting classes and organized religious propaganda, and facilitates the real emancipation of the working masses from religious prejudices by organizing the widest possible scientific, educational, and antireligious propaganda.

Thus religious beliefs will be destroyed not primarily by anti­religious propaganda, but by the conscious and deliberate planning of all the social and economic activities of the masses.

This does not imply that the Party should or does ignore the use of antireligious propaganda, which helps to form the new atheist conceptions of the broad toiling masses.

http://indonesia.faithfreedom.org/forum/kamboja-genosida-cham-muslim-oleh-khmer-merah-t31781/

The Bangkok Post
May 3, 2005

Scholars Michael Vickery, David Chandler and Serge Thion all claim the Khmer Rouge never intended the destruction of particular groups of people. Mr Chandler, for example, considered the high death toll under the Khmer Rouge as an unintended consequence of a utopian revolution and Serge Thion sees no evidence for claiming the persecution of the Cham Muslims was based on race or ethnicity. They were, he states, "victims of an attempt to eradicate religion, as a matter of general policy" that included the suppression of Christianity and Buddhism.
<HR: In other words the genocide of the Cham Muslims was not because of ethnicity but because of religion.>

<end quote>

I know, I know. Just because they claimed to be atheists, just because their official party line required the suppression of religion, and just because they killed millions of religious people in order to suppress religion, in the eyes of an atheist fundamentalist, that doesn't prove that their atheism caused them to suppress religion and kill religious people. They just had to have some other motive.

:sarcasm:

That's why I don't provide "substantiation" to people who make arguments like yours. You're too fixated in a kind of fundamentalist way, on the counter-factual idea that atheists who kill to suppress religion cannot be doing what they are doing for the reasons they say they are doing it.

On edit: To clarify this, all you are doing is engaging in a version of the logical fallacy called "No True Scotsman"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

"No true Scotsman is a logical fallacy where the meaning of a term is ad hoc redefined to make a desired assertion about it true. It is a type of self-sealing argument."

You define "atheist" as someone who would never kill to suppress religion, and therefore all the atheists who engaged in mass murder to suppress religion, weren't "real atheists", but were killing for some other reason.

Using that tactic (error of logic), I could "prove" that no Christian or Muslim regime has ever killed or persecuted any non-believers or believers of another faith, because if they did so, then they weren't being good Christians or good Muslims.

Because you relentlessly make that logical error it seems futile to discuss the evidence -- which is overwhelming -- with you.