Attention Atheists : comments [benlehman]

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Who would say that Atheism was a faith? (http://wickedthought.livejournal.com/740631.html)

Who indeed?

Your argument is semantic. I don't care whether Atheism is a faith, or a non-faith ideological construct.

To make me happy is simple. Just either:

1) Don't say "Atheists never massacre people / go to war / use suicide tactics / go on paranoid inquisitions in the name of Atheism."

or

2) Read a book about the Cultural Revolution. For extra credit, study the Tamil Tigers, the anti-Rightist purge, and the Great Leap Forward. For extra extra credit, read the 1973 promulgation of the Chinese constitutions, rights and duties of citizens header, or the modern Chinese party constitution.

yrs--
--Ben

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Don't say "Atheists never massacre people / go to war / use suicide tactics / go on paranoid inquisitions in the name of Atheism."

I've never said that, I don't believe it. You said atheism was a religion. I disagreed. Now, you're backpeddling.

Read a book about the Cultural Revolution...

I've read many books on the Cultural Revolution. I know who the Tamil Tigers are, the anti Rightist purge and all ther rest. You're assuming I have knowledge you don't have because I disagree with your definiton.

I have no problem agreeing with you that people commit crimes. I want to know why they commit crimes. You cannot--CANNOT--say that religion was not a primary motivation for the Inquisition, 9/11 and the other things you listed above. If you remove religion, you remove the motivation.

Saying "I don't believe in any gods" is not a religion. Saying "I believe in a god" is not a religion. It's the philosophies we build on those statements that leads to religion or philosophy.

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I don't care whether or not Atheism is classified as a religion. I really, seriously, honest-to-goodness don't care. You seem to believe that this is and important distinction (and apparently, in the last week, you changed your mind about it, which is cool, but I'd love to hear more of the thought process around that.) If you look at the above statement and see "Atheism is a religion" as the central point, you're a very puzzling human being.

As for otherwise: do you think that people *shouldn't* read a book about the cultural revolution? Do you think that's a bad idea? If you don't, I can't really understand your basic bone to pick with the first statement.

yrs--
--Ben

P.S. You cannot--CANNOT--say that religion was not a primary motivation for the Inquisition, 9/11 and the other things you listed above. If you remove religion, you remove the motivation.

I can, I do, and a large number of people (including a large number of atheists) agree with me that the primary motives were economic, racist, and political.

In other words: I believe that theism motivated these actions exactly as much as atheism motivated, say, the great leap forward. Which is basically not at all.

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I'm sorry you could not see the irony in my post. Perhaps I could have been more explicit.

I've never called atheism a religion or a faith. The post you linked to was meant to illustrate how misunderstood the entire concept of atheism is--both intentional and unintentional.

Your original post said--very explicitly:

"Attention atheists who say 'atheists don't do horrible things in the name of their religion.'

Are you now clarifying that you do not qualfiy atheism as a religion?

The men who flew planes into buildings were not suffering political, racial or economic disadvantage. They were all well-educated men. Men with PHDs, MDs, and higher education degrees. They were professionals who were at the top of the economic ladder in those countries. They also happened to belong to a faith that taught them suicide would be rewarded in the afterlife.

Please show me how politics, racism or economics reward someone for killing themselves.

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Suicide attacks are unrelated to religious extremism. (The Tamil Tigers, for instance, are atheists, but make heavy use of suicide bombing. The Japanese kamikaze had no particular afterlife belief.) They are related to occupation of a homeland by foreign powers. In the case of the 9/11 hijackers, this was Saudi Arabia, occupied by the US.

Are you familiar with Robert Pape's (http://political-science.uchicago.edu/faculty/pape.shtml) work on this? here (http://books.google.com/books?id=abebAAAACAAJ&dq=Robert+Anthony+Pape&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.com/search?q=robert+pape&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&sa=X&oi=print&ct=result&cd=2&cad=author-navigational) It's basically one of the only systematic studies of suicide attacks ever performed.

It's preliminary (like with any analytical theory, if you do a google search you will find people who have bones to pick with him) but it's also quite compelling, and stands as a pretty comprehensive study.

yrs--
--Ben

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Just to be clear, did you mean to type "There are suicide attacks that are unrelated to religious extremism?" Because I think that first sentence is a typo.

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Allow me to clarify:

The presence or absence of religious extremism does not appear to be correlated to the presence or absence of suicide attacks.

Happy?

yrs--
--Ben

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Yeah. :)

All of this is stuff we can talk about, but my primary concern about your post was qualifying atheism as a religion. I'm glad we sorted that out. We should talk more at GenCon (this kind of format really isn't appropriate for this kind of discussion--as evidenced by the 40 or so posts we went through to clear up a single semantic point).

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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

I'm sorry. What did you just say about the Japanese Kamikaze? The Japanese were NEVER occupied until AFTER they signed the surrender.

We bombed the hell out of them, both conventionally and otherwise, but they killed themselves because of a misguided faith in their Emperor and his ministers, their commanders. They believed, like good Shinto/Buddhists do that they would be reborn and rewarded for their sacrifice to their nation. Sometimes their rational brains won out over their irrational beliefs, but not always.

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State Shinto, the primary religion during WW2-era Japan, didn't have reincarnation. Shinto in general doesn't really spend a lot of time on the afterlife, really. And the major forms of Japanese Buddhism, such as Zen and Pure Land Buddhism, also don't have any reincarnation. So I don't think the kamikaze pilots thought they were going to be reborn and rewarded. I would guess that they thought they were defending their homeland from the threat of foreign invasion, especially given that they were named after the "divine wind" (kamikaze) that wiped out the Mongol fleets when they tried to invade Japan.

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Well of course they thought that, but you're thinking in an exclusionary mindset that most of us Westerners use when we think about religion. Many people in Asia who are Buddhists are also other things. This has not always been the case, but in some places, especially in Japan there are well known temples that contain Shinto Shrines and Buddhist shrines.

I have a friend who was born and raised in Korea who, until he went to college, had a combination of religions that his family observed, one of them being Buddhism.

So I'm not arguing that the Shinto actually believed in reincarnation, or that the Jodo sect of Buddhism focused on reincarnation, but they didn't discount it.

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Also, if you had a hardcore Jodo Buddhist you could make the same argument that many Wahabi extremists clerics make to their suicide bombers, and that their act of protecting their homeland makes them pure and they will go to the Pure Land and never have to be reincarnated, or go to Hell.

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Ugh, I wish I would have all this in just one reply. While Jodo, and I don't know enough about Zen in the particulars regarding the afterlife, doesn't focus on reincarnation, it definitely has it. Like Christianity, they see Buddha as a savior that will take you to Heaven so that you will escape Hell, if you're devout enough (say enough chants/Hail Mary's), but they do believe you'll get another chance after you've spent a long time in Hell, just like the other forms of Buddhism.

The ENTIRE idea of Pure Land is to escape the cycle of Death and Re-birth. They see it as a bad thing, not a learning process. They see Buddha as a 'Get out of Jail Free' card, if they follow his twelve step program.

So while they aren't keen on it entirely, they do believe in reincarnation.

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I don't care if Atheism is classified as a religion or not. If it makes you more comfortable to amend the above to "Atheists who say 'Atheists don't do horrible things in the name of Atheism'" I'm totally okay with that. As far as I can tell, my meaning is unchanged.

yrs--
--Ben

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Actually, that changes your meaning quite a bit. Religion is a statement of faith (belief without evidence). As far as I can tell, atheists do not come to the conclusion of atheism from faith, but from looking at evidence.

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Regarding your argument that Atheism was a faith. I agree with John. How can I when in the link you posted seems to contradict that very argument?

Because in that link I was joking how one could co-opt a belief set (I don't believe in religions of any sort) and convert it into a full-on dogmatic religion that is just as wicked and limiting as the original belief was not. I found the irony of that rather delicious.

Btw, we're not here to make you happy. We're here to make you think.

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May