chairman bill wrote:- Pol Pot: Nasty bastard, guilty of genocide. I've no idea of his beliefs. He did suppress religious organisations, and anything else that offered any alternative point of view to his own.

He used a lot of Theravadan Buddhism to justify his non-standard Marxism. Of course, some might say he was Not a Real Buddhist™, but people say that a lot when defending the ideology they think is Nu-Perfect.

Fallible wrote:

Ven. Kwan Tam Woo wrote:

carl wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:The Bible also says a lot of hateful, vicious, barbaric crap including techniques on how best to murder babies.

So based on your true and genuine concern for babies, I assume you're pro-life?

So based on your lame attempt at a red-herring, I take this as an admission on your part that the Bible is in fact pro-abortion?

It is indeed. Pro-late-late-late-term abortion, on en masse, when the 'foetuses' start behaving in ways God doesn't like.

Inanities, 4:36 - And lo the Lord did look down upon the Creation and He was vexed. And the mountains were shaken to their foundations as He did scream 'Oh noes, I done it wrong! They is having butt secks! Abort! Abort! Abort!'

That reminds me of the old line... the JGA (Jewish Grandmothers Association) has announced their stance on abortion: they don't consider a fetus to be a human being until it has graduated medical school.

I feel okay telling that joke, as my grandmother was President (and, I'm fairly sure, "Enforcer-In-Chief") of our local chapter of the JGA.

carl wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:... but cherrypicking the facts to distort history is awfully easy when you're only interested in generating hatred.

Please SPECIFICALLY clarify:
1) Which dictator above is not an atheist?
2) What SPECIFIC information about him did I distort?

That they killed in the name of atheism,

carl wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:The Bible also says a lot of hateful, vicious, barbaric crap including techniques on how best to murder babies.

So based on your true and genuine concern for babies, I assume you're pro-life?

Are you against capital punishment by any chance?

Thomas Eshuis wrote:

carl wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:The Bible also says a lot of hateful, vicious, barbaric crap including techniques on how best to murder babies.

So based on your true and genuine concern for babies, I assume you're pro-life?

Are you against capital punishment by any chance?

Just throwing this out here. I am pro-life and pro-capital punishment. I think babies deserve a chance, and people that have taken innocent life for no good reason do not. (Well, not really. I'm pro-life because I lost a potential sibling that way, and given the circumstances I was likely a hair's breadth away from the same fate. And I'm pro-CP because I know of at least one case where CP being bigger in the 40's saved the life of my great-grandmother.)

And spear-thrower, I was about to get out into argument mode until I actually read your post. Funny how you can take one bit of a comment out of context and get an entirely different impression its meaning, huh?

chairman bill wrote:

carl wrote:<snip 'misinformed bollocks'>

Let's take it from the top, shall we
- Karl Marx: Had nothing to do with the death of anyone

- Friedrich Nietzsche: Had nothing to do with the death of anyone

- Vladimir Lenin: The first country to legalise homosexuality & abortion, was Lenin's Soviet Union. He also introduced free universal health care, no-fault divorce, free education, land reform, and a general modernisation, and the establishment of a free market economy. All that in the midst or just after world war, invasion, and civil war. No genocide.

- Leon Trotsky: An anti-war socialist, and a Jew, who had a religious wedding. He didn't oversee genocide. Yes, there was starvation in Russia, but funnily enough, it was during war time. It was not policy.

- Benito Mussolini: Catholic. Baptized in 1927. Had Catholic clerics in the Fascist Party, and Pope Pius XI called Mussolini "the Man of Providence"

- Joseph Stalin: All-round nasty bastard, who had been in training for the priesthood. And yes, he declared himself an atheist, though atheism wasn't the reason for his murderousness.

- Margaret Sanger: Not actually responsible for the death of any living persons.

- Mao Zedong: It's true that his regime caused the deaths of 40 to 70 million people by starvation, torture, and executions. The Chinese population also grew by some 350 million, with education, free universal healthcare, and so on. Nobody died because of his atheism.

- Jim Jones: Mad man, with a range of weird beliefs, including that he was Ghandi reincarnated, that he was a reincarnation of Jesus, and Lenin, was God ... and he killed lots of people.

- Pol Pot: Nasty bastard, guilty of genocide. I've no idea of his beliefs. He did suppress religious organisations, and anything else that offered any alternative point of view to his own.

And the one you missed was Hitler, who was a Catholic.

Very nice summary in response to the utter bollocks posted in the OP.
Beer worthy I think.

Zadocfish2 wrote:

Thomas Eshuis wrote:

carl wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:The Bible also says a lot of hateful, vicious, barbaric crap including techniques on how best to murder babies.

So based on your true and genuine concern for babies, I assume you're pro-life?

Are you against capital punishment by any chance?

Just throwing this out here. I am pro-life and pro-capital punishment. I think babies deserve a chance, and people that have taken innocent life for no good reason do not. (Well, not really. I'm pro-life because I lost a potential sibling that way, and given the circumstances I was likely a hair's breadth away from the same fate. And I'm pro-CP because I know of at least one case where CP being bigger in the 40's saved the life of my great-grandmother.)

And spear-thrower, I was about to get out into argument mode until I actually read your post. Funny how you can take one bit of a comment out of context and get an entirely different impression its meaning, huh?

You're:
A. Begging the question that foetuses = babies.
B. Murderers reason about their killings before/during the act and have acces to full and uncompromised mental capacities.

Person holds logically inconsistent and emotionally driven opinions. News at 11.

I'm curious. If foetuses=babies and people who take a life don't deserve a chance, does that mean capital punishment for abortion doctors/women who abort?

Zadocfish2 wrote:

Just throwing this out here. I am pro-life and pro-capital punishment. I think babies deserve a chance, and people that have taken innocent life for no good reason do not.

What about the wrongly convicted people who've been put to death or are potentially on death row right now? Do they deserve a chance to clear their name? How would you be able to tell the difference between a genuine person who maintains his innocense and a disingenuous one? Shouldn't we abolish the death sentence altogether to make sure we don't make mistakes?

Animavore wrote:

Zadocfish2 wrote:

Just throwing this out here. I am pro-life and pro-capital punishment. I think babies deserve a chance, and people that have taken innocent life for no good reason do not.

What about the wrongly convicted people who've been put to death or are potentially on death row right now? Do they deserve a chance to clear their name? How would you be able to tell the difference between a genuine person who maintains his innocense and a disingenuous one? Shouldn't we abolish the death sentence altogether to make sure we don't make mistakes?

Better to let a guilty man walk free than put an innocent man to death.

I don't believe "babies" (we're talking about fetuses) are entitled to live off another human being who doesn't want them to be doing so! I think I'm pretty pro-life though, not into killing people, even if they're awful. Killing them serves no purpose.

Zadocfish2 wrote: And I'm pro-CP because I know of at least one case where CP being bigger in the 40's saved the life of my great-grandmother.)

How do you know this?

Animavore wrote:

Zadocfish2 wrote:

Just throwing this out here. I am pro-life and pro-capital punishment. I think babies deserve a chance, and people that have taken innocent life for no good reason do not.

What about the wrongly convicted people who've been put to death or are potentially on death row right now? Do they deserve a chance to clear their name? How would you be able to tell the difference between a genuine person who maintains his innocense and a disingenuous one? Shouldn't we abolish the death sentence altogether to make sure we don't make mistakes?

Well in America a few mistakes are allowed. "Just string 'em al up just in case".

Nicko wrote:To which I would add that the staggeringly huge numbers of people killed by people like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot is purely a function of technology and larger modern populations. If modern technology and populations were present during, say, the Protestant Reformation then a similar body count would have been observed.

Indeed this is a point I made some time ago during the old RDF days, that the only reason the Inquisition and other past religiously motivated mass murders didn't rack up a higher body count, is because they had to make do with spears, bow and arrows, and cavalry. If the Crusaders, for example, had somehow gained access to helicopter gunships, UAVs, modern main battle tanks and precision guided munitions, they would have exterminated the opposition wholesale, and succeeded in achieving this result in les than 14 days. Worse still, if the Crusaders had gained access to nuclear weapons, they would have turned vast stretches of the then extant Islamic world into radioactive lava fields without drawing breath. They would have regarded doing so as a "mission from God".

Nicko wrote:The common threads in most cases of genocide are things like ideology, dogma and fanatical tribalism. Certainly one can have these things in the absence of religious belief; the problem with religion is that it raises these things to the level of a virtue.

Well this is a central thesis of mine, that political ideologies and supernaturalist doctrines share essential common features. The principal shared feature being the treatment of one or more unsupported assertions, as purportedly constituting "axioms" about the world, which reality is purportedly required to conform to necessarily, regardless of whether reality actually does this. The only difference between them is the content of the assertions: supernaturalist doctrines are based upon assertions about mythological magic entities, whilst political ideologies are based upon assertions grounded in arbitrary dichotomies applied to human beings.

Nicko wrote:The secular regimes in the 20th Century that carried out these atrocities did so because they were behaving like religions, not out of any "excess" of free thought or rational inquiry.

Exactly. Moreover, the one feature of religions that they adopted with gusto, was that hideous innovation that was the invention of the Abrahamic religions, namely, ruthless enforcement of conformity to doctrine. Which the Abrahamic religions have been practising almost from the very beginning. The only reason they're not doing this now in the developed world, at least not to the same homicidal extent as in the past, is precisely because Enlightenment era Europeans recognised that supernaturalists couldn't be trusted with the political power they wielded, and therefore, the only way to stop them murdering each other, and for that matter anyone else they decided that they didn't like, was to take their power-political toys away, and force them to behave like mature, grown adults. All too often, the various mouths on sticks who rail against "secularism", or more correctly, their strawman caricatures thereof, are blissfully ignorant of the fact that the only reason they can rail in public like this, is because of the very secular institutions they rail against. The very same protection they enjoy from the hideous desires of rival supernaturalists, arising from secular insistence that they all behave themselves like proper, decent human beings, is what allows them to engage in self-indulgent, complacent posturing of the sort we see all too tiresomely often, allowing them to wallow in sad little fantasies about a return to the days of theocracy. Which, if ever that nightmare ever came to pass, would be accompanied by a very rude awakening for these people indeed.

But of course, the sort of people who indulge in theocratic fantasising, always think that they're going to be the ones on top, dishing out the torture and the murder to everyone else. None of them ever think they'll be on the receiving end. Secularism came about because those who were on the receiving end in the past, woke up pretty quickly to the need to restrain the vicious excesses of their oppressors. The sort of cosy navel gazing we see on the part of theocratic fantasists, only became possible because of secularism, and the protection from inquisitional mass murder that it provides.

Meanwhile, on this:

Sendraks wrote:Better to let a guilty man walk free than put an innocent man to death.

With the former option, you have the opportunity to correct the error. With the latter, you don't.

Calilasseia wrote:

Sendraks wrote:Better to let a guilty man walk free than put an innocent man to death.

With the former option, you have the opportunity to correct the error. With the latter, you don't.

Absolutely. So many in favour of capital punishment are utterly indifferent to the consequences of putting innocents to death. They only care about retribution and justice plays a distinct second fiddle to that.

What good is it supposed to do anyways? We know it doesn't prevent crime any better than life imprisonment. So does it just give vengeful people with a thirst for blood and gore boners or what?

Sendraks wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Sendraks wrote:Better to let a guilty man walk free than put an innocent man to death.

With the former option, you have the opportunity to correct the error. With the latter, you don't.

Absolutely. So many in favour of capital punishment are utterly indifferent to the consequences of putting innocents to death. They only care about retribution and justice plays a distinct second fiddle to that.

Personally, I'd oppose CP even if we could be 100% sure of people's guilt.

I just don't regard killing someone as something that can be justified on any grounds other than the defence of oneself or others from immanent death or serious harm.

Rachel Bronwyn wrote:What good is it supposed to do anyways? We know it doesn't prevent crime any better than life imprisonment. So does it just give vengeful people with a thirst for blood and gore boners or what?

I think it is the vengeful thing. I really don't see what good CP does, but then I feel the same way about life imprisonment. Just lands a massive bill in the public purse and, in many cases, lets someone who could be a productive member of society (with proper rehabilitation, education and support) just waste away.

I don't think I can be comfortable with a murderer walking the streets. Who is to know if it wasn't some brain abnormality that caused them to behave in such a manner and who is to say they won't do it again? The first responsibility has to be to the public.

I know there are a lot of flaws with this argument but what is the alternative?

Coastal wrote:

I know there are a lot of flaws with this argument but what is the alternative?

Help.
Support.
Treatment.
Rehabilitation.