How did you become an atheist? - Page 16

On April 30 2013 13:49 sc2superfan101 wrote:

You said the Christianity as an institution has done nothing but stifle progress. Clearly you meant excluding the Catholic Church being the world's largest charitable organization, all the Christian scientists who cited their belief as the reason for their practicing science, the millions of doctors who cite their belief as being the primary motivator for their research and healing, the creation of empires, the cultural morality of the West, and all those other examples of Christianity as an institution being a force of progress.

You can have problems with the way certain Christians have acted, and have problems with the way the institutions of Christianity have acted without resorting to such completely ridiculous hyperbole. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find any institution that had as positive effect on progress as the Christian institutions.

On April 30 2013 13:55 wherebugsgo wrote:


Killing and persecuting people for not being Christian does not make up for the minimal charity Christians do.

In fact, most of the "charity" that Christians do in third world countries nowadays is nothing more than "join us, or starve."

What do you think missionaries do?

Secular organizations such as the Red Cross

I can make the same arguments for Muslim giving that you have for the Christian side. If you are Christian, I would bet a lot of money you don't actually think of Islam the same way you think of Christianity, despite the fact that their charitable contributions are almost wholly the same.

On April 30 2013 14:05 sc2superfan101 wrote:

And thus, you betray your ignorance. I don't think a person who gives $100 a year and donates blood twice is in a very good position to cast negative judgement upon people who have given up their entire lives to go live with fucking lepers. And if you an find a single instance of a Christian missionary saying anything even closely resembling "join us or starve" than I will show you ten thousand instances of the exact opposite occurring.

On April 30 2013 14:05 sc2superfan101 wrote:

They give more to charity than:



and only ask to be allowed to preach a little while they are doing it. Oh no! Boo hoo! The guy handing you food wants you to listen to him for a while. Name one instance of Catholic missionaries withholding food and aid unless the people converted and you MIGHT have a point. Go ahead. One instance. Shouldn't be too hard for you.

On April 30 2013 14:05 sc2superfan101 wrote:
As for the asinine justification that all the bad things done in the past outweigh the good... I say two things:

1. You cannot individualize the good and collectivize the bad. You're basically saying: all the bad they do is general and belongs to Christianity as a whole, while the good they do is local and belongs only to the person doing the good.

On April 30 2013 14:05 sc2superfan101 wrote:
2. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Find me a single organization that existed in the 1200s that did even 1/100th of what the Catholic Church did for the poor. Secular charity is a modern invention buddy, shit only gets better for Christians the further you go back.

On April 30 2013 14:05 sc2superfan101 wrote:
Furthermore, you neglected to explain the countless examples of progress, even excluding charity, that Christianity as an institution is responsible for.

On April 30 2013 14:05 sc2superfan101 wrote:
Your only answer was to radically shift the goalposts by saying "Okay, they've done all that, but that doesn't make up for..." Your original statement was that there was not even one instance of Christianity as an institution doing anything but stifle progress.

On April 30 2013 14:05 sc2superfan101 wrote:

...BWAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHAHA! Really? Show me some evidence.

On April 30 2013 14:05 koreasilver wrote:
It's great when someone doesn't actually read. Not that I'm surprised or anything - we are on tl.net anyhow. As long as the general public in the West don't understand that secularism and humanism as a whole is still fundamentally a Protestant product, we'll all continue to Christians.

On April 30 2013 14:05 koreasilver wrote:
The new atheists of our generation comically tout the pretense that they don't believe without evidence, but they're just repeating the exact same mistake that the logical positivists made in the 20th century. If we don't learn our history this is the shit that happens. We get half-baked figures putting out half-baked ideas to mislead an entire generation of half-baked youth and it works pretty much purely because it quenches their thirst to oppose their boogeyman. It's a showcase of failure of a culture.

On April 30 2013 14:05 koreasilver wrote:
It's not about religion vs atheism (which is a false dichotomy to begin with), but the inability or refusal to examine the structures and grounds of thought that's the main issue with our Anglo nations.

On April 30 2013 14:05 koreasilver wrote:
The Christianity of America and the nations to which their fundamentalists exported to (various African nations and South Korea) is rotten to the core and deserves all the disdain and scorn that they receive from anyone. The counterproduct that came out against it, our beautifully juvenile new atheism, is similarly full of hot air and intellectually empty.

On April 30 2013 14:14 LuckyFool wrote:
don't evacuate koreasilver, you're the most interesting regular in this thread.

past couple days I've been watching and listening to shittons of amazing theological and philosophical debates and stuff thanks to this thread lol.

On May 02 2013 13:10 Feartheguru wrote:
Somehow, every single post sc2superfan makes in any thread makes me want to facepalm.

On May 02 2013 13:10 Feartheguru wrote:
Somehow, every single post sc2superfan makes in any thread makes me want to facepalm.

On April 30 2013 14:05 sc2superfan101 wrote:
2. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Find me a single organization that existed in the 1200s that did even 1/100th of what the Catholic Church did for the poor. Secular charity is a modern invention buddy, shit only gets better for Christians the further you go back.

On May 02 2013 19:10 Aylear wrote:


People like you are the reason I no longer post on TeamLiquid. Arrogance, ignorance, contempt for others, and aggressive speech of this level is obscene, to say nothing of the fact that the argument itself is not only nonsensical, but also insulting. It actually hurts me to know that you are making this argument so abrasively and with complete sincerity, and without any repercussions from the moderators. You are antithetical to a good conversation.

To quickly refute the argument: Of course secular charity is a modern invention -- secularism itself is, because if it was tried earlier you would have imprisoned and killed us in the name of God.

Screw it. Can't be arsed -- I'm bailing, too.

shit only gets better for Christians the further you go back.

Rwanda Massacres
In 1994 in the small African country of Rwanda in just a few months several hundred thousand civilians were butchered, apparently a conflict of the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups.
For quite some time I heard only rumors about Catholic clergy actively involved in the 1994 Rwanda massacres. Odd denials of involvement were printed in Catholic church journals, before even anybody had openly accused members of the church.
Then, 10/10/96, in the newscast of S2 Aktuell, Germany - a station not at all critical to Christianity - the following was stated:

"Anglican as well as Catholic priests and nuns are suspect of having actively participated in murders. Especially the conduct of a certain Catholic priest has been occupying the public mind in Rwanda's capital Kigali for months. He was minister of the church of the Holy Family and allegedly murdered Tutsis in the most brutal manner. He is reported to have accompanied marauding Hutu militia with a gun in his cowl. In fact there has been a bloody slaughter of Tutsis seeking shelter in his parish. Even two years after the massacres many Catholics refuse to set foot on the threshold of their church, because to them the participation of a certain part of the clergy in the slaughter is well established. There is almost no church in Rwanda that has not seen refugees - women, children, old - being brutally butchered facing the crucifix.
According to eyewitnesses clergymen gave away hiding Tutsis and turned them over to the machetes of the Hutu militia.
In connection with these events again and again two Benedictine nuns are mentioned, both of whom have fled into a Belgian monastery in the meantime to avoid prosecution. According to survivors one of them called the
Hutu killers and led them to several thousand people who had sought shelter in her monastery. By force the doomed were driven out of the churchyard and were murdered in the presence of the nun right in front of the gate. The other one is also reported to have directly cooperated with the murderers of the Hutu militia. In her case again witnesses report that she watched the slaughtering of people in cold blood and without showing response. She is even accused of having procured some petrol used by the killers to set on
fire and burn their victims alive..." [S2]

More recently the BBC aired:

Priests get death sentence for Rwandan genocide
BBC NEWS April 19, 1998

A court in Rwanda has sentenced two Roman Catholic priests to death for their role in the genocide of 1994, in which up to a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed. Pope John Paul said the priests must be made to account for their actions. Different sections of the Rwandan church have been widely accused of playing an active role in the genocide of 1994...

Catholic terror in Vietnam
In 1954 Vietnamese freedom fighters; the Viet Minh; - had finally defeated the French colonial government in North Vietnam, which by then had been supported by U.S. funds amounting to more than $2 billion. Although the victorious assured religious freedom to all (most non-Buddhist Vietnamese were Catholics), due to huge anticommunist propaganda campaigns many Catholics fled to the South. With the help of Catholic lobbies in Washington and Cardinal Spellman, the Vatican's spokesman in U.S. politics, who later on would call the U.S. forces in Vietnam "Soldiers of Christ", a scheme was concocted to prevent democratic elections which could have brought the communist Viet Minh to power in the South as well, and the fanatic Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem was made president of South Vietnam. [MW16ff]
Diem saw to it that U.S. aid, food, technical and general assistance was given to Catholics alone, Buddhist individuals and villages were ignored or had to pay for the food aids which were given to Catholics for free. The only religious denomination to be supported was Roman Catholicism. The Vietnamese McCarthyism turned even more vicious than its American counterpart. By 1956 Diem promulgated a presidential order which read:

"Individuals considered dangerous to the national defense and common security may be confined by executive order, to a concentration camp."

Supposedly to fight communism, thousands of Buddhist protesters and monks were imprisoned in "detention camps." Out of protest dozens of Buddhist teachers - male and female - and monks poured gasoline over themselves and burned themselves. (Note that Buddhists burned themselves: in comparison Christians tend to burn others). Meanwhile some of the prison camps, which in the meantime were filled with Protestant and even Catholic protesters as well, had turned into no-nonsense death camps. It is estimated that during this period of terror (1955-1960) at least 24,000 were wounded - ; mostly in street riots ; - 80,000 people were executed, 275,000 had been detained or tortured, and about 500,000 were sent to concentration or detention camps. [MW76-89].
To support this kind of government in the next decade thousands of American GI's lost their life.

Catholic extermination camps
Surprisingly few know that Nazi extermination camps in World War II were by no means the only ones in Europe at the time. In the years 1942-1943 also in Croatia existed numerous extermination camps, run by Catholic Ustasha under their dictator Ante Paveli�, a practicing Catholic and regular visitor to the then pope. There were even concentration camps exclusively for children! In these camps - the most notorious was Jasenovac, headed by a Franciscan friar - orthodox-Christian Serbians (and a substantial number of Jews) were murdered. Like the Nazis the Catholic Ustasha burned their victims in kilns, alive (the Nazis had victims gassed first). But most of the victims were simply stabbed, slain or shot to death, the number of them being estimated between 300,000 and 600,000, in a rather tiny country. Many of the killers were Franciscan friars. The atrocities were appalling enough to induce bystanders of the Nazi "Sicherheitsdienst der SS", watching, to complain about them to Hitler (who did not listen). The pope knew about these events and did
nothing to prevent them. [MV]

On May 02 2013 21:06 Birdie wrote:
There's a reason there are a lot of Protestant Christian churches and denominations who don't consider Catholics to be Christians. I think you'll find the VAST majority of atrocities committed by "Christians" are committed by Catholics/Anglicans/Orthodox churches, which are considered to be heretical by many Christians. They may have been good a LONG time ago when they started but they are far different today and have been for hundreds of years.

ABC News conducted a jailhouse interview with Arias in which she said, "I didn’t hurt Travis. I would never hurt Travis.... I would be shaking in my boots right now if I had to answer to God for such a heinous crime."

Over Super Bowl weekend, CBS analyst Shannon Sharpe asked Lewis if he had a message for the families of the slain men.

“It’s simple,” Lewis said. “God has never made a mistake. That’s just who he is, you see. And if our system – it’s the sad thing about our system – if our system took the time to really investigate what happened 13 years ago, maybe they would have got to the bottom line truth. But the saddest thing ever was that a man looked me in my face and told me, ‘We know you didn’t do this, but you’re going down for it anyway.’ To the family, if you knew, if you really knew the way God works, he don’t use people who commits anything like that for his glory. No way. It’s the total opposite.”