The Religion of Atheism

I think your overemphasis on this makes a pretty good point for atheists.
Importantly, the soviets didn't advocate atheism. What they did was discourage and suppress religion. They didn't kill people because they weren't atheist, they killed them because they were religious. In other words, they didn't want anything to get in the way of dedication to the state and party and leaders. Religion was something, they wanted nothing.

 

huh?
stalin murdered his political enemies, the churches were destroyed and the bishops thrown in prison as enemies of the state and then he executed the enemies of state.
That part is true, they forced the state upon you as god.
Same thing in the UK and US ssdd but now they do it with boilerplate contracts.

I'd really like to know which trash can you people pull your history books out of?

 

So, the silly nonsense aside, the point is that they wanted 'no' religion. They wanted a 'lack' of religion so the state could take over.

 

lack of religion, are you trying to be a comedian? They wanted lack of every religion but their religion, the god state.

They wanted to wipe out any group that could possibly criticize the god state.

Stalin called "to bring to completion the liquidation of the reactionary clergy in our country".[42] Stalin called for an "atheist five year plan" from 1932–1937, led by the LMG, in order to completely eliminate all religious expression in the USSR.[43] It was declared that the concept of God would disappear from the Soviet Union.[43]
Just like the board atheists pray for every night!
Some of the tactics that had been used early on and discarded in the 1920s due to their crude nature or providing too much offense to the feelings of believers. Included in these tactics were the anti-Christmases and anti-Easters that were organized by groups such as the Komsomol.

There had initially been great resistance by religious associations against the beginning of the attack in 1929-1930 and large volumes of petitions to the government.[44]

After 1929 and through the 1930s, the closing of churches, mass arrests of the clergy and religiously active laity, and persecution of people for attending church reached unprecedented proportions.[19][43][45] For example, in the central Russian region of Bezhetsk, 100 of the surviving 308 churches were shut in 1929 (only twelve were closed in this region between 1918–1929) and in Tula diocese 200 out of the 700 churches were closed in 1929.[30] This campaign began to intensify first in the rural areas[44] before it came to the cities after the liquidation of monasteries in 1932.

Much of this was carried out on secret unpublished instructions from the Central Committee, while confusingly the same Committee would publicly call for an end to the practice of shutting churches.[46] In relation to this, the terror campaign of the 1930s was conducted in an atmosphere of absolute secrecy after very bad international publicity that initially followed the campaign run from 1929–1930.[47]

Party members that were found to have religious affiliation were purged.[48] Party members that were found to have insufficiently detached themselves from religious affiliations (e.g. if they continued to be friends with the local priest) were expelled and purged.[49]

In 1929 the Soviet press claimed that an espionage organization serving the Polish intelligence service was uncovered in the Baptist community. It was supposedly headed by the Baptist leader Shevchuk and employed a hundred secret agents that were collecting Soviet military secrets. These claims were doubtful, however, and the accusation followed a decision by the Baptist church to allow its membership to serve in the armed forces, which thereby deprived Soviet propaganda of its ability to make accusations, as it had earlier, that the Baptists were irresponsible pacifists who parasitically enjoyed the security provided by their fellow citizens who shed their blood in that nation's defense.[50] Other accusations of this sort were leveled against the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, students at the Leningrad Theological Institute and a number of top engineers and scientists, who were accused of doing espionage for foreign powers and the Vatican, or subversion; this led to trials, imprisonments and executions of numerous individuals. The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was essentially shut down in 1930 through this means, and in the remainder of the decade most of its bishops were killed as well as many of its followers.[37][50] A number of Protestant and Roman Catholic dignitaries were "exposed" as foreign spies in 1929–1930. Charges of espionage were commonly used against religious believers in order to arrest them.

There were even accusations that clergy were cooperating with Trotskyites and Zonvievites against the state, although Leon Trotsky was an energetic and militantly atheistic communist leader. In the same theme, Nikolai Bukharin was accused of promoting extreme attacks against believers in order to strengthen the religious convictions of believers and demoralize the atheists.

Church icons and religious architecture were destroyed.[45] The People's Commissariat for Education reduced the list of protected churches from 7000 to 1000, thus leaving 6000 churches to destruction. There were public burnings of thousands of religious icons. The built religious cultural heritage of the country was largely destroyed.[45]

A lull in the active persecution was experienced in 1930–33 following Stalin's 1930 article "Diziness From Success"; however, it swept back in fervor again afterwards.[51]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USSR_anti-religious_campaign_(1928–1941)

I cant imagine anyone apologizing for that, well except of course neoatheist inc.

 

Exactly. They wanted all the faith to be put in the state, not a religion. So remove faith in a religion, and put it towards the state.

 

most of its bishops were killed as well as many of its followers.[37][50]

 

Oh... good argument....

 

It seems to me Kokomojojo's argument is that by the definition of cult, atheism was a cult all along, no changing required. As such, there'd be no losing, we'd just identify the word to be broader than if we had identified it differently. Your argument seems to rely on a previous definition (the natural numbers in your example) whereas I don't think Kokomojojo acknowledges such a definition.

 

So, you mean to define the natural numbers such that it already includes negative integers?

My point is simply that sure, we could do this, given that language is not a mathematically precise framework. I was essentially proposing that one way to look at a debate around the definitions of words is how much information that word contains with and without including the object we are discussing. However, I think maybe it's just a roundabout and complicated way of saying that atheism doesn't really share any of the traits that cults have, at least not the traits that set them apart from other ontologies. In other words, if atheism is a cult, then so is every world view.

 

incorrect, no state can make extensive rules without being religious. America was intended to be as close as one could get to an anarchy and today they even tell you how long you have to mow your grass. They wanted a state religion. Today you get more 'freedom' in russia than you do the us.

where people apparently including yourself are easily deceived, is that the state makes their conclusions based upon their faith and their beliefs, then pass it down to you as secular law.

Many people are unaware these states operate by subterfuge waving their magic wands then claim their religious views are now magically secular and you had better believe it of you will be fined jailed or shot.

How to establish a state religion 101.

 

lol, ok I get it. The illuminati.

Let me ask you this. Can you name something that doesn't require any faith?

 

And that is you proof that secular humanism is a religion. Don't bother to take an IQ test. Nor does it say anything about a religion needing or not needing a god. Basically it is irrelevent to any of your positions. IF that is the best you can do it is clear you have no evidence to support your position.

Instead of banging your head against a wall ( and I note that your head is so hard it sustains no damage) why not just post an actual court decision that says secular humanism is a religion.

 

Really? how do you know death exists?

 

I've witnessed it many times.

 

How do you know what you witnessed? That requires faith.

 

That is just ignorant, and not worth arguing aboult.

 

No it's not. Everything requires some degree of faith. It's just that some require more than others.

 

LOL
In most cases the death happened before I knew about it.
It needed no faith from me.

It seems to me you invented an answer, or got it from someone else who invented it, and are now trying to validate it.

 

Not really, no. Being an atheist just minimizes faith. But it takes some level of faith to believe you even exist.

 

LOL

No, I'm afraid I exist without any faith.

Look, I am not interested in some mindless discussion.

I existed from the day I was born, by some estimates, when I was conceived, and had no consciousness of anything, much less faith, in any stretch of the word.

 

No, it only exchanges faiths, that is the faith in the existence of God, for faith in the nonexistence of God.

That said, one might suffer the illusion they somehow removed or reduced their levels of religious faith.

You dont think as an agnostic being forced to admit I am religious came easy do you? I went through the same growing pains.

 

If you understood how to read court cases and how they come to the decisions they make it would be perfectly clear to you that it means they ruled atheism is a religion.

You cant get religious protection if your claim is philosophical, and as I said before just because you fail to comprehend the language and meaning of the court changes nothing but does give us a perfect demonstration that you lack the background to properly assess legal matters direct from a case.

In leego language he would not have had standing and it would have been thrown out of court for that reason.


LAW OF THE LAND
Court rules atheism a religion
Decides 1st Amendment protects prison inmate's right to start study group
Published: 08/20/2005 at 1:00 AM

A federal court of appeals ruled yesterday Wisconsin prison officials violated an inmate’s rights because they did not treat atheism as a religion.

“Atheism is [the inmate’s] religion, and the group that he wanted to start was religious in nature even though it expressly rejects a belief in a supreme being,” the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals said.

The court decided the inmate’s First Amendment rights were violated because the prison refused to allow him to create a study group for atheists.

Brian Fahling, senior trial attorney for the American Family Association Center for Law & Policy, called the court’s ruling “a sort of Alice in Wonderland jurisprudence.”


“Up is down, and atheism, the antithesis of religion, is religion,” said Fahling.

The Supreme Court has said a religion need not be based on a belief in the existence of a supreme being. In the 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins, the court described “secular humanism” as a religion.

Fahling said today’s ruling was “further evidence of the incoherence of Establishment Clause jurisprudence.”

as we can see this guy above is pissed off about it for that reason.

The court ruled correctly, based upon the 'substance', that is they looked at the ingredients of the matter and realized it is a religion.

Claiming the practice of atheism is not a religion when examining the ingredients is as ridiculous as claiming water is not water despite is has all the ingredients of water, H2o.

 

Definition of religion
1 a : the state of a religious

• a nun in her 20th year of religion

b (1) : the service and worship of God or the supernatural
(2) : commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance
2 : a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices
3 archaic : scrupulous conformity : conscientiousness
4 : a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith

This is exactly what Atheism is not.

And, how does one practice atheisn, it is simply a non-belief.
I'm sure a fanatic can make a big deal out of it, but a normal atheist never even thinks about it.
Like practicing unicorns.