Attack on Christianity

Elijah Rowland said:

Many atheists will attack Christians online or in person.

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Some people just take faith propositions very personally, believing contrary to someone else in a situation like that is wrongly considered tantamount to a personal attack, a standing insult or an ongoing act of antagonism.

Christians aren’t intending to insult anybody on a personal level, we are simply trying to exercise our freedom to think and believe whatever we find convincing.

My advice is to avoid people who too often reduce themselves to the level of personal insults, that advice isn’t just for when you’re writing to belligerent atheists but to belligerent churchgoers too, indulging them in conversation while they personally attack you is a reward for their poor behaviour and a waste of your valuable time.

Never retard your growing in wisdom by exchanging with petty, angry people.

Elijah Rowland said:

If they truly believed Christianity was false, then why would they attack it so much?

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Probably because it's shoved in their faces through politics so much.

Happens allot here...also find it very hard to share with them on this site.

Just so its on the record, I think we do also need to consider that it was militant atheist communists in the Soviet Union and its satellites, the People’s Republic of China, North Korea and elsewhere who, together with Islamic states such as the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, or in more recent times, places like Saudi Arabia, the recent Islamic State caliphate, Afghanistan and the Islamic State, did commit the most widespread genocides and mass-martyrdoms of Christians over the course of the past 105 years.

So militant atheism, when it does set its sites on Christianity, does have the potential to be violent and to kill or persecute Christians for their faith.

This is not my experience. I have friends who are atheists, just as I have friends who are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Wiccan, etc. Perhaps this is a fundamentalist thing, because I have never had such people attack me or the Lutheran Church.

Archivist said:

This is not my experience. I have friends who are atheists, just as I have friends who are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Wiccan, etc. Perhaps this is a fundamentalist thing, because I have never had such people attack me or the Lutheran Church.

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The majority of atheists are reasonably polite and decent, as are indeed most Muslims. However, this does not remove from atheism the indelible stains of blood shed by Christian martyrs in the former Soviet Union and other communist states, just as the decency of most Muslims does not exclude the anti-Christian genocide in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, or the more recent attempted genocide in those regions of Iraq and Syria which fell under the control of the Islamic State.

Elijah Rowland said:

I didn’t know where to put this so I’ll put it here. Many atheists will attack Christians online or in person. They will say everything we believe is false and get so mad when we believe in it. They seek out Christians to mock. If they truly believed Christianity was false, then why would they attack it so much? I don’t believe in aliens, and I don’t go around attacking people that believe in them. (When I say attack I mean with words not physically.)

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Logically, being an atheist doesn't mean you go around attacking religions. However, people aren't just atheists. Most of them belong to the church of equality. And that flips the script - good is bad, and bad is good. Hence, they can't help but attack Christianity.

Matt5 said:

Logically, being an atheist doesn't mean you go around attacking religions. However, people aren't just atheists. Most of them belong to the church of equality...

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Can you please explain what you mean by the church of equality? I don't understand.

The Liturgist said:

The majority of atheists are reasonably polite and decent, as are indeed most Muslims. However, this does not remove from atheism the indelible stains of blood shed by Christian martyrs in the former Soviet Union and other communist states, just as the decency of most Muslims does not exclude the anti-Christian genocide in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, or the more recent attempted genocide in those regions of Iraq and Syria which fell under the control of the Islamic State.

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Or the stains upon Christians from the persecution and execution of thousands of Anabaptists in various parts of Europe between 1525 and 1660, or for the attacks by Christians on those falsely said to be witches in Europe and the Americas from the Middle Ages until the 1700s.

It's another instance of people fighting over religious differences. The hateful kind of Atheist will swear up and down that they can't be doing this, on the grounds that atheism isn't a religion. However, the fact remains that they're engaging in combative behavior over theological differences... much like the people that they criticize. The fact that they don't recognize this dynamic in themselves indicates a basic lack of self awareness.

On the other hand, there are many who don't feel compelled to attack others for having views that differ from their own. It's possible to disagree, to hold differing philosophical and theological views, while also remaining civil and respecting each others' intelligence and right to draw our own conclusions.

Elijah Rowland said:

I didn’t know where to put this so I’ll put it here. Many atheists will attack Christians online or in person. They will say everything we believe is false and get so mad when we believe in it. They seek out Christians to mock. If they truly believed Christianity was false, then why would they attack it so much? I don’t believe in aliens, and I don’t go around attacking people that believe in them. (When I say attack I mean with words not physically.)

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This isn't a good argument. If you mock any beliefs that are not your own, however ridiculous they are, then you have the same attitude towards them as many atheists do towards Christianity. If you don't do that personally, I know of many other people who do. People who mock Scientology or conspiracy theories about vaccines or 5G towers, or theories about extraterrestrials or a flat Earth, or the belief that men can have periods and become pregnant are not hard to find. And I'm not saying it's wrong to mock any of those ideas, or that any of them are true. But many atheists will treat God the same way, at least they claim to.

seeking.IAM said:

Can you please explain what you mean by the church of equality? I don't understand.

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I think he is talking about "equality of outcome". From his famous quote, the author of communism, Karl Marx is of this ilk:

From Wikipedia:
While liberation theology has sought to interpret the Christian call for justice in a way that is in harmony with this Marxist dictum, many have noted that Jesus' teaching in the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14–30) affirms only "TO each according to his ability" (Matt. 25:15), and not "FROM each according to his ability"

Elijah Rowland said:

I didn’t know where to put this so I’ll put it here. Many atheists will attack Christians online or in person. They will say everything we believe is false and get so mad when we believe in it. They seek out Christians to mock. If they truly believed Christianity was false, then why would they attack it so much? I don’t believe in aliens, and I don’t go around attacking people that believe in them. (When I say attack I mean with words not physically.)

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Must admit when atheists do this I consider them fair game for exhaustive deconstruction. Very few survive critical analysis and are shocked when they get a taste of their own medicine. They cannot prove their own position with the tools they use to critique ours and they violate their own personal codes of individual freedom by denying us the rights to our own beliefs are two good arguments in this situation.

seeking.IAM said:

Can you please explain what you mean by the church of equality? I don't understand.

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Listen closely to the people who push the ideas of equality. It is as if these ideas where handed down by god. They can never be questioned. Effectively, we are talking about religion here. It's the religion of equality. Other names for this are the church of woke or church of equality.

What is a religion?

If you ignore the god aspect of religion, then it is a set of ideas about good and bad, right and wrong. Christianity has these ideas. The church of equality is replacing the ideas of Christianity with its own standards of good and bad, right and wrong. This is also happening from within the Christian church as the ideas of equality eat Christianity from the inside out.

Archivist said:

This is not my experience. I have friends who are atheists, just as I have friends who are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Wiccan, etc. Perhaps this is a fundamentalist thing, because I have never had such people attack me or the Lutheran Church.

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I have friends and family who are atheists. I've managed never to talk physically to any of these vitriolic atheists (at least to my knowledge) but there are a LOT of them online. They like to make spurious claims about religion in general and Christianity in particular and really don't like it if you point out where they are wrong.

Take a look a the Aron Ra/Inspiring Philosophy debate and the Q&A afterwards. On the whole I think Ra did a better job than IP in his arguments... with one exception and it is one where Ra completely loses the plot and starts shouting. His point is that faith is belief without evidence. Both IP and a later questioner pointed out that this is not what faith means but Ra continually refers not to the meaning but to his experiences. His outburst is the sort of thing that I used to get continually online.

Jonathan Walkerin said:

It makes the point why it is wrong. Or do you feel it is any more acceptable because it happens rarely ?

Why should someone be allowed to deny critical care for their children because of their own faith ?

Why is this right then not universal ? If you do not cite your devotion and let your kid die you will be charged.

Why do the laws treat people unequally simply because of their chosen faith ?

How could that be right ?

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Except a lot what atheist do, are not fair criticism like that, they just go against God.

Silly Uncle Wayne said:

Take a look a the Aron Ra/Inspiring Philosophy debate and the Q&A afterwards.

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Aron Ra, misunderstanding the question “FOR TWENTY YEARS!”

Archivist said:

Or the stains upon Christians from the persecution and execution of thousands of Anabaptists in various parts of Europe between 1525 and 1660, or for the attacks by Christians on those falsely said to be witches in Europe and the Americas from the Middle Ages until the 1700s.

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You can’t compare the sectarian conflicts within Germany and the witch hunts in Northwestern Europe, or even the Spanish Inquisition (which is believed to have killed only 3,000 or so people) with the mass murder of Christians perpetrated by the Bolsheviks. The only things comparable to the Communist persecution of Christians are the genocides against Christians by Islamic states throughout history, but most especially the genocide targeting all Christians perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire in 1915, an event in which a majority of Armenians were killed and the remainder were pushed back into a small fraction of their former lands, not even having Mount Ararat, an event in which the majority of Pontic Greeks were killed and nearly all survivors, aside from a tiny minority in Constantinople, were forced to emigrate to Greece, thus accomplishing ethnic cleansing, and an event in which nearly all Syriac speaking Christians who had the misfortune of living in the Ottoman Empire were brutally murdered.

The communists did not have quite as much of a body count, but they did kill very large numbers of Christians. Even Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow was arrested, and would later die from, among other things, brutal mistreatment, in a Soviet prison. And Enver Hoxha simply killed off the clergy of the Albanian churches, so by the end of his government, there were, in the case of the Albanian Orthodox Church, only between 30 and 100 clergy who had survived, underground.

The Liturgist said:

You can’t compare the sectarian conflicts within Germany and the witch hunts in Northwestern Europe, or even the Spanish Inquisition (which is believed to have killed only 3,000 or so people) with the mass murder of Christians perpetrated by the Bolsheviks. The only things comparable to the Communist persecution of Christians are the genocides against Christians by Islamic states throughout history, but most especially the genocide targeting all Christians perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire in 1915, an event in which a majority of Armenians were killed and the remainder were pushed back into a small fraction of their former lands, not even having Mount Ararat, an event in which the majority of Pontic Greeks were killed and nearly all survivors, aside from a tiny minority in Constantinople, were forced to emigrate to Greece, thus accomplishing ethnic cleansing, and an event in which nearly all Syriac speaking Christians who had the misfortune of living in the Ottoman Empire were brutally murdered.

The communists did not have quite as much of a body count, but they did kill very large numbers of Christians. Even Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow was arrested, and would later die from, among other things, brutal mistreatment, in a Soviet prison. And Enver Hoxha simply killed off the clergy of the Albanian churches, so by the end of his government, there were, in the case of the Albanian Orthodox Church, only between 30 and 100 clergy who had survived, underground.

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Tell the approximately one million people who were accused of being witches and executed between 1200 and 1700 that their deaths can't compare with other body counts. That is just bull. And the numbers might have been higher--I've seen up to two million--but one million seems to be the most accurate toll. Yes, the numbers were smaller for the Anabaptists, but according to historian Justo Gonzalez, more Anabaptists were martyred at the hands of other Christians in the sixteenth century than there were Christians martyred by Roman pagans during the first three centuries of the church. The majority of those were killed by Protestants.

Don't try to make Christians look pure and white, claiming that we are not like those Muslims or Communists. The fact is, we have our own very sad history.

Archivist said:

Tell the approximately one million people who were accused of being witches and executed between 1200 and 1700 that their deaths can't compare with other body counts. That is just bull. And the numbers might have been higher--I've seen up to two million--but one million seems to be the most accurate toll. Yes, the numbers were smaller for the Anabaptists, but according to historian Justo Gonzalez, more Anabaptists were martyred at the hands of other Christians in the sixteenth century than there were Christians martyred by Roman pagans during the first three centuries of the church.

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Let me be clear: I am not sanctioning the internal persecution of Christians on sectarian lines. What I am saying is the systematic genocide of Christians under various Islamic regimes, especially those perpetrated by Tamerlane* and the Ottoman Empire*, and most recently under the Islamic State**, and under militant atheist regimes like the Soviet Union, especially in its early years (the persecution mellowed out during the WWII era), in Albania under Enver Hoxha, in Romania under Ceausescu and his dreaded Securitate, and in North Korea, was infinitely worse. Indeed, these genocides can really only be compared with the Holocaust in terms of scale and comprehensiveness.

Also the one million figure you cite on witches strikes me as being high; I will have to look into it; there is no denying however that there has been a horrible amount of violence between supposed Christians, and genocides, for example, the Crusaders who killed large numbers of Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Christians and did in some instances cannibalize them, before the Fourth or False Crusade, an event which so weakened the Byzantine Empire, that its collapse 243 years later became an inevitability. However, it is ultimately besides the point; my point is that militant atheists do have actual blood on their hands and a massive amount of it, as well. Communist atheist dictators I would argue have been the second worst external persecutors of Christians, after radical Muslims (primarily radical Sunni Muslims like Tamerlane or the Young Turks*** who seized power in the Ottoman Empire in 1909). The Roman persecutions, which only temporarily stopped under Constantine, before continuing into the reign of Theodosius, easily come in at no. 3.