Atheism's Twentieth Century Death Toll

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McCulloch
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Atheism's Twentieth Century Death Toll

Post #1

Post by McCulloch »

East of Eden wrote: You really want to play that numbers game, with atheism's 100,000,000 death toll last century?
Are there 100,000,000 deaths in the twentieth century attributable to atheism? Please list.
Examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good.
First Epistle to the Church of the Thessalonians
The truth will make you free.
Gospel of John

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Post #201

Post by micatala »

JohnPaul wrote: Jawohl, Herr Führer! As the defendants at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials often said, "Befehl ist Befehl."


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Post #202

Post by JohnPaul »

East of Eden wrote:
Huh? Where does it say Mary had sexual relations with an angel?
Sorry. I should have called the angel a procurer, rather than a pimp.

PROCURER = Someone (in this case, an angel) who obtains a woman as a prostitute for another person. In this case, for God.

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Post #203

Post by southern cross »

To the question posed by the title.

How can atheism cause anything? Atheism is a lack of belief in a deity, not a world view or doctrine or system of belief.
[center]How can ATHEISM cause anything at all?[/center]

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Post #204

Post by dianaiad »

JohnPaul wrote: East of Eden wrote:
Huh? Where does it say Mary had sexual relations with an angel?
Sorry. I should have called the angel a procurer, rather than a pimp.

PROCURER = Someone (in this case, an angel) who obtains a woman as a prostitute for another person. In this case, for God.
Sorry, no.

Unless you call every IVF clinic and surrogate mother program we have now 'brothels.'

JohnPaul, that's the thing about the VIRGIN birth. No sex...and prostitution is about SEX, not about procreation. If MEN had not, for hundreds of thousands of years, divorced the two (probably so that they could justify rape and getting their jollies without feeling responsible for the probable resulting offspring) perhaps it would be different, but it wasn't then, and it's not now.

Mary gave birth to the Son of God. She was not procured for sex.

Personally, I don't know what is sadder: that people separate the two, debase the sex and honor the birth (unless of course the birth comes from illicit sex, and then it's all HER fault), or that erudite, intelligent and usually civil people will 'go there.'

The thing is, if you want to be blunt (and it seems that you do), the angel was, at most, an intermediary for surrogate motherhood...something that nowadays we do NOT equate with procurers, pimps and prostitutes. In fact, no prostitute would be accepted into any program I know about.

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Post #205

Post by southern cross »

dianaiad wrote:
JohnPaul wrote: East of Eden wrote:
Huh? Where does it say Mary had sexual relations with an angel?
Sorry. I should have called the angel a procurer, rather than a pimp.

PROCURER = Someone (in this case, an angel) who obtains a woman as a prostitute for another person. In this case, for God.
Sorry, no.

Unless you call every IVF clinic and surrogate mother program we have now 'brothels.'

JohnPaul, that's the thing about the VIRGIN birth. No sex...and prostitution is about SEX, not about procreation. If MEN had not, for hundreds of thousands of years, divorced the two (probably so that they could justify rape and getting their jollies without feeling responsible for the probable resulting offspring) perhaps it would be different, but it wasn't then, and it's not now.

Mary gave birth to the Son of God. She was not procured for sex.

Personally, I don't know what is sadder: that people separate the two, debase the sex and honor the birth (unless of course the birth comes from illicit sex, and then it's all HER fault), or that erudite, intelligent and usually civil people will 'go there.'

The thing is, if you want to be blunt (and it seems that you do), the angel was, at most, an intermediary for surrogate motherhood...something that nowadays we do NOT equate with procurers, pimps and prostitutes. In fact, no prostitute would be accepted into any program I know about.
Except in third world countries where it is somewhat profitable for the woman and exceedingly profitable for the procurer.

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Post #206

Post by JohnPaul »

dianaiad wrote:
Mary gave birth to the Son of God. She was not procured for sex.
You are right again. I was guilty of a little exaggeration to call attention to a story which I see as silly, phony, unnecessarily unbelievable, beneath the dignity of a God, obviously tacked on after the fact by some of his followers who decided to make Jesus into a God by giving him the miraculous attributes expected of a God at the time.

Just a couple of questions for you. I have read in several sources that the word used to describe Mary in the Bible was not "virgin" in the modern sense, but simply meant a young unmarried woman. Surely you are not saying that all young unmarried women in Biblical times were virgins?

If no sex was involved and no witnesses were present, how can you (or Joseph) be sure that God was the father? If you simply take Mary's word for it, then there could be many thousands of little "sons of God" running around today.

I agree with most of your other comments, but I do suggest that if it wasn't for the male obsession with sex, the human race would soon die out.

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Post #207

Post by dianaiad »

JohnPaul wrote: dianaiad wrote:
Mary gave birth to the Son of God. She was not procured for sex.
You are right again. I was guilty of a little exaggeration to call attention to a story which I see as silly, phony, unnecessarily unbelievable, beneath the dignity of a God, obviously tacked on after the fact by some of his followers who decided to make Jesus into a God by giving him the miraculous attributes expected of a God at the time.

Just a couple of questions for you. I have read in several sources that the word used to describe Mary in the Bible was not "virgin" in the modern sense, but simply meant a young unmarried woman. Surely you are not saying that all young unmarried women in Biblical times were virgins?
Nope...and I have heard the same argument. The trouble is, whether you can make that argument biblically or not, *I* am stuck with the word 'virgin' in the modern sense. It's the Book of Mormon, y'see...IT uses the word 'virgin,' in the modern English sense of the word. So...while Christians as a whole might be able to wiggle around it a bit, I can't. ;)
JohnPaul wrote:If no sex was involved and no witnesses were present, how can you (or Joseph) be sure that God was the father? If you simply take Mary's word for it, then there could be many thousands of little "sons of God" running around today.
The story does go that Joseph had some problems with that. He got visited by an angel, too. I don't know about you, but that would settle the matter for ME. What anybody else thinks is, well irrelevant, wouldn't you say?
JohnPaul wrote:I agree with most of your other comments, but I do suggest that if it wasn't for the male obsession with sex, the human race would soon die out.
I dunno...I keep remembering old joke, which has a LOT more truth in it than men are comfortable with. It goes; if men and women had to take turns giving birth, couples might have two children, but nobody would have more than three, depending upon who had the first turn. ;)

I think that if male obsession could be turned down to thinking about sex once every half hour instead of every five minutes, we'd still procreate. ;)

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Post #208

Post by JohnPaul »

dianaiad wrote:
The story does go that Joseph had some problems with that. He got visited by an angel, too. I don't know about you, but that would settle the matter for ME. What anybody else thinks is, well irrelevant, wouldn't you say?
I would ask the angel for identification. It might be irrelevant to anyone today, but according to Jewish law (commanded by God) at the time, not being a virgin at her marriage would have required Mary to be stoned to death by the entire community, who probably would not have believed her "God" story. No wonder they ran off to Bethelem.

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Post #209

Post by dianaiad »

JohnPaul wrote: dianaiad wrote:
The story does go that Joseph had some problems with that. He got visited by an angel, too. I don't know about you, but that would settle the matter for ME. What anybody else thinks is, well irrelevant, wouldn't you say?
I would ask the angel for identification. It might be irrelevant to anyone today, but according to Jewish law (commanded by God) at the time, not being a virgin at her marriage would have required Mary to be stoned to death by the entire community, who probably would not have believed her "God" story. No wonder they ran off to Bethelem.
Uh, problem. Mary and Joseph were promised...'as good as' married. Mary getting pregnant wasn't a problem; that sort of thing happened. Joseph would have simply married her a bit early and nobody would have thought a thing about it. The problem was with Joseph, and Joseph only. If HE would not accuse her, then it wasn't anybody else's business.

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Post #210

Post by JohnPaul »

dianaiad wrote:
JohnPaul wrote: dianaiad wrote:
The story does go that Joseph had some problems with that. He got visited by an angel, too. I don't know about you, but that would settle the matter for ME. What anybody else thinks is, well irrelevant, wouldn't you say?
I would ask the angel for identification. It might be irrelevant to anyone today, but according to Jewish law (commanded by God) at the time, not being a virgin at her marriage would have required Mary to be stoned to death by the entire community, who probably would not have believed her "God" story. No wonder they ran off to Bethelem.
Uh, problem. Mary and Joseph were promised...'as good as' married. Mary getting pregnant wasn't a problem; that sort of thing happened. Joseph would have simply married her a bit early and nobody would have thought a thing about it. The problem was with Joseph, and Joseph only. If HE would not accuse her, then it wasn't anybody else's business.
OK O:) I have collected some stuff on the Virgin Birth which I won't bother to pursue here, since it is very far from the subject of this thread, except to say that the virgin birth was doubted or even unknown to many of the early Chistians, such as St. Paul, and was only made a required belief by more recent theologians. Apparently Christians today are more gullible than their early counterparts were. O:) Even many more modern Christians see it only as a myth. Here is an 1823 quote from Thomas Jefferson, who many Christians like to claim as a Christian founder of our country:
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."

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