"Atheists Killed >140 millions" is Fallacious

[Veritas Aequitas]

Marx called the critique of religion "the first critique." Without Atheism, Marxism was an absolute no-go, and he knew it. Thus, the Reds in Russia, the Maoists, the Cubans, the Venezuelans, the Zimbabweans, the Congolese, the Khymer Rouge, the North Vietnamese and the North Koreans, the Romanians, Bulgarians, the Albanians, and all the other similar homicidal regimes throughout the last century that have been Communist were Atheistic, and could be nothing else.

140 million is thus a very charitable figure to cite. It was almost certainly more.

Sorry VA...whether you like the facts or not, that what your boys have done.

Your skull must be very thick in not understanding the 9 fallacies in the OP that explained your bad thinking.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

Let's talk about likelihood...

Joe thinks man, any man (including himself) is nuthin' but meat. He's certain life, the universe, and everything is an amoral, rudderless event.

Stan thinks man, every man (including himself) is sumthin' more than meat. He's certain life, the universe, and everything is meaningful, purposeful, intended.

Of the two, who's more likely to kill cuz it's convenient?

I didn't know you were into cannibalism. Wouldn't a better question be: Harold has the power to kill lots of people at a whim. Fred doesn't. Which one is more likely to be a mass murderer?

[henry quirk]

I didn't know you were into cannibalism.

I'm not. I think man, every man, is sumthin' more than meat, and I think life, the universe, and everything is meaningful, purposeful, intended.

Harold has the power to kill lots of people at a whim. Fred doesn't. Which one is more likely to be a mass murderer?

If Harry believes as I do: the masses likely have nuthin' to worry about.

If Fred thinks human life is cheap: the masses might better watch out.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

I didn't know you were into cannibalism.

I'm not. I think man, every man, is sumthin' more than meat, and I think life, the universe, and everything is meaningful, purposeful, intended.

Harold has the power to kill lots of people at a whim. Fred doesn't. Which one is more likely to be a mass murderer?

If Harry believes as I do: the masses likely have nuthin' to worry about.

If Fred thinks human life is cheap: the masses might better watch out.

Ridiculous. And meat is food. Are you suggesting that the non-superstitious are all cannibals?

[Immanuel Can]

Marx called the critique of religion "the first critique." Without Atheism, Marxism was an absolute no-go, and he knew it. Thus, the Reds in Russia, the Maoists, the Cubans, the Venezuelans, the Zimbabweans, the Congolese, the Khymer Rouge, the North Vietnamese and the North Koreans, the Romanians, Bulgarians, the Albanians, and all the other similar homicidal regimes throughout the last century that have been Communist were Atheistic, and could be nothing else.

140 million is thus a very charitable figure to cite. It was almost certainly more.

Sorry VA...whether you like the facts or not, that what your boys have done.

Your skull must be very thick in not understanding the 9 fallacies in the OP that explained your bad thinking.

Quoting definitions is not the same thing as proving the argument has them. In point of fact, the record of Atheist regimes is so deplorable, that I don't wonder that you'd rather not account for it.

[Dubious]

I think man, every man, is sumthin' more than meat, and I think life, the universe, and everything is meaningful, purposeful, intended.

Think as you like, but man is nothing more than a piece of meat just like any other piece of meat which once occupied the planet. What makes him unique rather than special is that singular piece of meat pored into his cranium. Once dead, he's not one iota more special than any of his so-called lesser compatriots whose existential value has never been less than his own.

[nemos]

There are people with so-called critical thinking, there are those who are lazy to think. If they are the first to join a movement, whether communist or religious, then it is quite likely that they will try to develop these ideas. If the others join, then most likely not to develop something, but to get some benefit from it, and as much as they are too lazy to think about, then they will completely freely twist any idea, adapting it to the greed and needs of this person (I will not kill you, but help you to be reborn, I am so good that I do it). So unless you use something like red terror, the greedy majority will suppress and distort any idea you have. I believe only in evolution, people must be ripe for change and only then it becomes possible, otherwise only the mechanism of power will work. But power is something you can fight for, to get it for yourself, and again everything from the beginning - greed is the axis around which everything revolves.

[Sculptor]

There are people with so-called critical thinking, there are those who are lazy to think. If they are the first to join a movement, whether communist or religious, then it is quite likely that they will try to develop these ideas. If the others join, then most likely not to develop something, but to get some benefit from it, and as much as they are too lazy to think about, then they will completely freely twist any idea, adapting it to the greed and needs of this person (I will not kill you, but help you to be reborn, I am so good that I do it). So unless you use something like red terror, the greedy majority will suppress and distort any idea you have. I believe only in evolution, people must be ripe for change and only then it becomes possible, otherwise only the mechanism of power will work. But power is something you can fight for, to get it for yourself, and again everything from the beginning - greed is the axis around which everything revolves.

Immanuel Can is the perfect example of this.

[henry quirk]

meat is food.

If man is the soulless, amoral event a person like this...

man is nothing more than a piece of meat just like any other piece of meat which once occupied the planet. What makes him unique rather than special is that singular piece of meat pored into his cranium. Once dead, he's not one iota more special than any of his so-called lesser compatriots whose existential value has never been less than his own.

...insists he is, then, yeah, Man, every man, is food, a commodity.

Are you suggesting that the non-superstitious are all cannibals?

No. I'm flat out sayin' anyone who thinks man, any man (including himself) is nuthin' but meat is more likely to kill cuz it's convenient.

And I'm flat out sayin' someone who sees every man (including himself) as sumthin' more than meat is more likely to not kill simply becuz it's convenient.

By definition the atheist is materialist and man is a meat machine. Man's value is measurable and he is easily commodified.

The God believer by definition is not materialist and Man is not a meat machine. Man's value is not measurable and he cannot rightfully be commoditized.

Note: I'm not sayin' all atheists are shits and all God believers are saints. I'm talkin' likelihoods here, probabilities.

[nemos]

By definition the atheist is materialist and man is a meat machine. Man's value is measurable and he is easily commodified.

And what solution do you see for that? Forced conversion to the right faith and thought control?

I am not sure whether I am an atheist, but I am definitely not a theist, rather a pagan, because I believe in nature, but I value human life, and not only human life, but life in general, because I believe in nature.

At the same time, theists completely subordinate the value of man to God - without God there is no man and there is no value of him either, so it is not a sin to sacrifice even millions in the name of God, not to mention the soulless, lower forms of life. Only man was created by god in his own likeness - where does this belief come from, that god looked exactly like that, and that only man, I mean the rightly believing man, is entitled to be the bearer of the only truth?

[Peter Kropotkin]

ok, I disagree with the notion that Atheists killed 140 million people,
but, let us think about this...

I can't work out how you even got this number of 140 million...

Okay, Peter. Let's say you can't. I think you could, but as a Communist yourself, you're bound not to want to. In your shoes, I wouldn't want to know about what Communism has done, either. So I'd do all I can to try to make excuses for what those regimes had done, because they've turned every single place where Communism has been implemented into starving Hell-holes of human-rights abuses and economic disaster, like Venezuela, Ukraine, Cuba, Cambodia, Albania...and on, and on, and on.

But let's play along with that game. So let's ask, "What would the RIGHT number be?" You hope it's not at least 140 million. Okay, let's pretend it's not. Let's go with 100 million. That would still be vast orders of magnitude above all the "religious" disasters in history.

So let's say that's too high. Let's say we're off by half. What about only 70 million? The same remains true: still orders of magnitude worse than anything else.

How about we say even that's too high? Let's say that only Mao was a REAL Communist, and Stalin wasn't, and Pol Pot wasn't, and Castro wasn't, and Maduro wasn't, and the Kim Jongs weren't, and Mugabe wasn't, and so on. (They might protest, and they might well insist that theirs was true Communism. But let's tell them to shut up and take it: Communists always want to argue that everybody else "wasn't real Communism" anyway, so let's keep playing that game, right along with the Communist apologists.)

Then what's the case? Well, Mao alone killed over 40 million of his own people -- that we know of -- in his Cultural Revolution. So the misery and death caused by Communism is still orders of magnitude greater than that done by any religion ever, or by all put together.

There's no escaping it: Communism is simply the biggest force for evil in the history of the human race, bar none, with no rivals even close. And every Communist regime, by Marx's own account, is Atheist.

QED.

K: ok, a couple of things, ONE: I am not a communist... I have
attacked communism in several different ways and in several
different threads and posts..

TWO: you seem to be changing the goal post.. your original thread
was about Atheists...at no point in your original thread did you mention
communism... so, are we talking about communism or Atheism?

THREE: I was questioning the methodology for arriving at your numbers...
how do you get your number of 140 million people?

FOUR: you suddenly start to reduce your numbers...
which I believe to come from your realization that your own number
of 140 million dead from Atheists.. is quite false.. but that still
leaves us with some sort of number who had died from Atheists....
and that number is....????????????

FIVE: you haven't sorted out the leadership being communism
and the rank and file of that country being something else...
in other words, we can have leadership being Atheists,
and the vast amount of the rest of the country being religious...
both China and Russia are examples of this.. so, is the country
Atheist or is the country religious?

those are questions that popped into my mind while reading your post...
and before the cold medicine kicks in...

Kropotkin

[Immanuel Can]

...are we talking about communism or Atheism?

Well, Atheism is the big category, and Communism the subcategory. There could be other Atheisms, such as Nihilism (like Nietzscheanism), or Libertarian forms, or "Objectivist" ones, like Rand.

But Communism is ALWAYS Atheistic, according to Marx. As I pointed out earlier, he pegged the critique of religion as absolutely "the first critique" that had to happen in order for Communism to go forward. So we can believe him on that.

how do you get your number of 140 million people?

Very straightforwardly. Just by adding up the total of people known to be killed by Communist regimes.

FOUR: you suddenly start to reduce your numbers...

No, I wasn't. The 140 million is still the right sort of number, though it is probably higher than that in actuality. I was just pointing out that even IF I were to play the game your way, it would STILL issue in Atheism having caused far more deaths than any religion or all religions combined throughout history. In other words, there's a ton of work for you to do to show that religions have caused anything remotely close to the amount of misery, torture, poverty, starvation, and death that Communism has caused, and even with everything on your side, you'd be nowhere close to getting that job done reasonably.

FIVE: you haven't sorted out the leadership being communism
and the rank and file of that country being something else...

That's a red-herring objection. It doesn't change the two important factors: namely, the number of dead, and the cause of their deaths.

If Atheist regimes made people who were, say, Buddhists, kill other people, as they did in Cambodia, for example, the ultimate responsibility for that falls on Atheism, not Buddhism. For we can well imagine that the Buddhists would not, of their own will, have done it...in many places, Buddhism exists with relative peace. But the Atheists would, and would make others do it, too. That, we know; for they have always done it, in every regime where they have ruled. And the Atheists were in charge in Cambodia.

[promethean75]

"But Communism is ALWAYS Atheistic, according to Marx"

Also, according to marx, marxism does not exist unless the working class owns and controls the means of production. In none of the 'communisms' you've ever named have the workers owned and controlled the means of production... and yet u call them marxist societies.

Do u do this on purpose (while twisting your christian mustache) or do u not realize u do it? If the former, shame on u! If the ladder, this explains why u sound like a broken record and why I don't respond to that nonsense anymore.

[henry quirk]

And what solution do you see for that?

Defend yourself.

Forced conversion to the right faith and thought control?

Lord no.

[FlashDangerpants]

I'm flat out sayin' someone who sees every man (including himself) as sumthin' more than meat is more likely to not kill simply becuz it's convenient.

Anyone who sees it otherwise and attributes some special religious or spiritual woo that elevates man above the meat and beasts will of course simply declare that God, or Crom, or the spirits of his dead pets tell him all his own beliefs are justified, and he is more likely to kill becuz someone else doesn't agree with him about something.