I guess this falls under Freedom of Religion, right?

[Eyeball Chambers]

Christian groups around the country raise millions,  will they counteract this with a campaign of their own? 

[MCWAY]

  Hitler, Mao and Stalin didn't kill people because they didn't believe in God; they killed people because they had ideologies that diminished the value of the individual Human Being and aggrandized the collective - society and the state that repesents it in the case of the communists and race in the case of the Nazis. To such ideologies, abstract ideas take precedence over people and their survival as individuals. Most of the wars throughout Human history were either caused or endorsed by religion in one way or the other. People have been killing each other in the Middle East for thousands of years over religion.

You just contradicted yourself, with this statement. "Aggrandizing the collective" is precisely the point. Therefore, whoever runs the collective is the top dog. Plus, in order to establish this collective, what is the ONE thing they all had to eliminate: FAITH IN GOD. That's why Hitler proclaimed that to establish his collective, Christianity had to be stamped out "root and branch".

They not only didn't believe in God, they wanted to supplant Him as the object of worship among their people. Hitler wanted people to look to the swatiska, not the cross, for their salvation.

The kings of medieval Europe invoked God before going into battle and slaugtering thousands of people. The emperors in ancient Rome made offers to Mars, the god of war, asking him to vanquish all their enemies and rape all their women. People have killed in the name of God or gods throughout history, but no one has ever killed because they don't believe in God. It was a mere coincidence that the dictators of the 20th century who killed millions were atheists. They could have been very well like Richard the Lionhearted, who slaughtered a million Arabs, including women and children, in the name of God. If they were monsters because they were atheists, then they should be monsters for evryone equally, but they weren't. Hitler, for instance, valued the lives of Aryans immensely, and even in 1944 when Germany was on the brink of defeat and food was scarce, he never ceased from giving German children milk at schools. He despised only the Human lives of certain categories of Humans, and he did it because of ideology and not because of atheism. If it were because of atheism, then he should have despised the lives of all Humans equally and not only non-Aryans, because if you are only moral if they is a God and you believe there is none, then you should be equally immoral towards everyone.

SUCKMYMUSCLE

Hitler was gracious towards Aryans, because (as mentioned earlier) he wanted people to look to HIM as their salvation. Had they not adopted HIS values and his ideology, Hitler would have destroyed them (Aryan or not) just the same.

The ideology here that he, Mao, and Stalin employed was that there is no God and that their government was the "deity" to be worshipped. That is why I've repeatedly stated that atheism, in practice, is simply man worshipping himself.

As for the war stuff, again, the Crusades can't even come close to racking up the bodies that Hitler or Mao or Stalin amassed during their regimes.

[MCWAY]

  Even if Christianity did all these things, you are basically saying that the only way people can be moral is if they fear a fictional deity that willpunish them if they misbehave. Why can't people be moral to each other without resorting to the fear of punishment? Sure, psychopaths will only act ethically if they fear punishment since they are unable to empathize, but good people don't need religion to act ehtically. The most ethical people in the World are atheists, exactly because they know there is no afterlife, so they are extremely averse to murder and aggression towards others since they know that homicide is a final act that completely annihilates a person. Compare this to Christians who killed hundreds of thousands of people during the inquisitions because they believed that it was the will of God and that killing them was not a bad thing because they would find redemption in Heaven.

Again, see those aforementioned regimes of Mao, Stalin, and Hitler. They amassed millions of corpses (far, FAR more than those resulting from the Inquisitions), thinking that no one would hold them accountable for their actions.

  But let's assume that Christianity does make people more moral and decreases crime. Even then, I would still want to live in a secular society because theistic societies don't offer a good trade-off for the higher morality of the population. Would you like to live in Saudi Arabia? They have very low crime, yes, but their life is extremely restrictive. I wouldn't want to live in such a society despite the lower crime rates. And besides, it is debatable whether the low crime rate in Saudi Arabia is due to them being God-fearing or due to the extremely harsh sentences the Qu'ram gives to those who committ crimes. Maybe if they were lenient towards crime, their crime rate would be extremely high despite the religiosity. So the solution to decrease violence is by better police and harsher jurisprudence and not by establishing a state religion. I and other rational Humans certanly don't require religion to act morally, but if most people do(debatable. I think most people with the exception of psychopaths don't need to fear punishment to be nice to others) need religion to be moral, then instead of establishing a state religion and restriction the freedom of the nice people who don't believe in fictional deities, let's try to restrict crime by making people fear a different kind of punishment than that provided by a fictional deity(the law).

SUCKMYMUSCLE

Once again, who defines whether or not you are acting "morally"? That question has yet to be answered here. The atheists running those ads, claim to be "good without God". But, without some standard, how do they make the claim that they are being "good"?

Again, WHO is making the rules, defining right and wrong?

[Necrosis]

You just contradicted yourself, with this statement. "Aggrandizing the collective" is precisely the point. Therefore, whoever runs the collective is the top dog. Plus, in order to establish this collective, what is the ONE thing they all had to eliminate: FAITH IN GOD. That's why Hitler proclaimed that to establish his collective, Christianity had to be stamped out "root and branch".

They not only didn't believe in God, they wanted to supplant Him as the object of worship among their people. Hitler wanted people to look to the swatiska, not the cross, for their salvation.

Hitler was gracious towards Aryans, because (as mentioned earlier) he wanted people to look to HIM as their salvation. Had they not adopted HIS values and his ideology, Hitler would have destroyed them (Caucasian or not) just the same.

The ideology here that he, Mao, and Stalin employed was that there is no God and that their government was the "deity" to be worshipped. That is why I've repeatedly stated that atheism, in practice, is simply man worshipping himself.

As for the war stuff, again, the Crusades can't even come close to racking up the bodies that Hitler or Mao or Stalin amassed during their regimes.

Mao and stalin did not say anythign of the sort, they didnt do anything in the name of atheism unlike those who do, do stuff in the name of their god. Hitler was not atheist, stop lying, we had this argument, i quoted mein kampf, his book. Throughout the book he references god, talks about his upbrining, christianity.

[loco]

"(It is a law of nature that scientists must bring up the Crusades within five minutes of mention of religion.)

In any case, the argument goes, atheists are as ethical as any believer, and religion needn’t be kept about for purely moral reasons. But Gould again argues that this claim misses the historical fact that the Church was a secular and not merely religious institution. When the Church was a powerful state, it, not surprisingly, acted like a powerful state.

It is also worth noting (and Gould doesn’t) that when avowedly atheist governments called the shots their ethical track record was less than awe-inspiring. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot are not, so far as I know, in line for sainthood. The point isn’t that godless commies are bad. The point is that it is dishonest to pretend that the Crusades count against theism but that Stalin doesn’t count against atheism."
- H. Allen Orr

Gould on God Can religion and science be happily reconciled? in the Boston Review
http://bostonreview.net/BR24.5/orr.html

Professor Orr is an evolutionary geneticist whose research focuses on the genetics of speciation and the genetics of adaptation.

[loco]

Christian groups around the country raise millions,  will they counteract this with a campaign of their own? 

Christian groups put their money to much better use both domestically and in foreign countries, helping victims of disaster, feeding the hungry, clothing and providing shelter to those in need, providing them with free health care, education, hope, etc.  Look at the Salvation Army, Habitat for Humanity, Compassion International, Score International, etc.

Faith does breed charity

"We atheists have to accept that most believers are better human beings"

Roy Hattersley
The Guardian, Monday 12 September 2005

Hurricane Katrina did not stay on the front pages for long. Yesterday's Red Cross appeal for an extra 40,000 volunteer workers was virtually ignored.

The disaster will return to the headlines when one sort of newspaper reports a particularly gruesome discovery or another finds additional evidence of President Bush's negligence. But month after month of unremitting suffering is not news. Nor is the monotonous performance of the unpleasant tasks that relieve the pain and anguish of the old, the sick and the homeless - the tasks in which the Salvation Army specialise.

The Salvation Army has been given a special status as provider-in-chief of American disaster relief. But its work is being augmented by all sorts of other groups. Almost all of them have a religious origin and character.

Notable by their absence are teams from rationalist societies, free thinkers' clubs and atheists' associations - the sort of people who not only scoff at religion's intellectual absurdity but also regard it as a positive force for evil.

The arguments against religion are well known and persuasive. Faith schools, as they are now called, have left sectarian scars on Northern Ireland. Stem-cell research is forbidden because an imaginary God - who is not enough of a philosopher to realise that the ingenuity of a scientist is just as natural as the instinct of Rousseau's noble savage - condemns what he does not understand and the churches that follow his teaching forbid their members to pursue cures for lethal diseases.

Yet men and women who believe that the Pope is the devil incarnate, or (conversely) regard his ex cathedra pronouncements as holy writ, are the people most likely to take the risks and make the sacrifices involved in helping others. Last week a middle-ranking officer of the Salvation Army, who gave up a well-paid job to devote his life to the poor, attempted to convince me that homosexuality is a mortal sin.

Late at night, on the streets of one of our great cities, that man offers friendship as well as help to the most degraded and (to those of a censorious turn of mind) degenerate human beings who exist just outside the boundaries of our society. And he does what he believes to be his Christian duty without the slightest suggestion of disapproval. Yet, for much of his time, he is meeting needs that result from conduct he regards as intrinsically wicked.

Civilised people do not believe that drug addiction and male prostitution offend against divine ordinance. But those who do are the men and women most willing to change the fetid bandages, replace the sodden sleeping bags and - probably most difficult of all - argue, without a trace of impatience, that the time has come for some serious medical treatment. Good works, John Wesley insisted, are no guarantee of a place in heaven. But they are most likely to be performed by people who believe that heaven exists.

The correlation is so clear that it is impossible to doubt that faith and charity go hand in hand. The close relationship may have something to do with the belief that we are all God's children, or it may be the result of a primitive conviction that, although helping others is no guarantee of salvation, it is prudent to be recorded in a book of gold, like James Leigh Hunt's Abu Ben Adam, as "one who loves his fellow men". Whatever the reason, believers answer the call, and not just the Salvation Army. When I was a local councillor, the Little Sisters of the Poor - right at the other end of the theological spectrum - did the weekly washing for women in back-to-back houses who were too ill to scrub for themselves.

It ought to be possible to live a Christian life without being a Christian or, better still, to take Christianity à la carte. The Bible is so full of contradictions that we can accept or reject its moral advice according to taste. Yet men and women who, like me, cannot accept the mysteries and the miracles do not go out with the Salvation Army at night.

The only possible conclusion is that faith comes with a packet of moral imperatives that, while they do not condition the attitude of all believers, influence enough of them to make them morally superior to atheists like me. The truth may make us free. But it has not made us as admirable as the average captain in the Salvation Army.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/sep/12/religion.uk/print