* Posts by Richard Irvine

2 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2008

God makes you stupid, researchers claim

Richard Irvine

pro-god? pro-reading some history actually

@Ign R. Amis

I now see that the use of "stupid" in this debate (on both sides) is pretty much a catch all term for people who disagree with what you say. That disagreement is pretty galling when you haven't bothered to read what I say. Just to clarify, I have never claimed that atheists being bad people makes theism true, just as I would not claim that theists being bad people makes theism false. I'd argue that whether or not god exists is independent of these factors. So I never trotted out Stalin and Mao (I didn't even mention Mao!) as evidence for the evil of atheism. I just said that we should consider that bloodthirstiness is not restricted to those among us who are religious, and that people have been killed for their religion by those who were not religious.

You make an assumption that I am pro-god. Really I'm just pro reading some history books, which make it quite clear that in the 2 specific cases I stated, religious practice (i.e. continuing to state a belief in god and to perform rituals in accordance with those beliefs) led to a leader putting them to death for their faith.

That is not an argument 'pro-god', just an argument against some of the garbled thinking that connects religion to violence without thinking about whether the factors that lead to violence would exist with or without any god-concept.

Richard Irvine

I urge people to get their facts straight before saying things like "it does not happen"

To the most recent Anonymous poster: I'm not really interested in getting bogged down in a statistical argument about whether belief makes you more bloodthirsty, but before you say "IT DOES NOT HAPPEN" you might want to look up the anticlerical purges of President Plutarco Elias Calles of Mexico. You might also want to consider the 100 martyrs canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church in August 2000, who were representative of the approximately 100,000 Orthodox killed for their beliefs by the atheistic Soviet administration.

As I say, I am not going to make any claims about whether reading the Bible makes you more bloodthirsty than reading Dawkins ;) But I would say that blanket claims that atheists have not killed religious people for their beliefs are empirically false, and I would urge people to read up on their history before getting involved in this debate.