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ecib  ·  4487 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The outrageous subsidies to religion in America

| Atheism affects the whole man, and as a result, society. Look at the Soviet Union. It was a state that was officially born out of atheism.|

You're making the mistake of correlating the abuses of the Stalinist dictatorship with tenets of atheism that don't exist. A glance at the various abusive theistic dictatorships throughout the world's history effortlessly reveals that not a single abusive attribute of Stalinist Russia is unique to its dictator's views on religion (aside from those very views themselves).

    Really? It's reasonable to force every living creature shaped by millions of years of diverse evolution into a box of conformity?

You can't be forced into a state in which you exist since your inception. Regarding conformity, I already said that you should be able to leave the society and community that you were born into should you choose, and go somewhere else.

    Thought experiment: replace "social creature" with "black people." Imagine it's being spoken by a white person of privilege, during slavery in America. It's the exact same language used to defend slavery. (And truly, we're all slaves to the state).

You're making an artificial and arbitrary distinction. It is a fact that humans are social creatures in the aggregate. Not up for debate. But to use your bad analogy, it doesn't matter WHICH community one is born into, -you're born into one. You use the collective resources of it for the duration of your time in it. You shouldn't be able to do that without contributing as it is theft, and if you don't like that arrangement, you should be able to exit of your own free will, whether you are black, white, American, Brazillian, -whatever.

    As an atheist, you don't even have any logical grounds for morality (a fact I will defend to the death). Yet you employ the language of morality to obfuscate unilateral mob violence against people.

This betrays a lack of understanding of atheism, which takes no stance on morality and has nothing to do with it. But on the topic, I will say that you don't need belief in a being that does not exist in order to act morally. Morality is defined culturally, and this is evidenced by the different moral codes that have, in reality, existed across different cultures throughout history and exist today. What was moral at one time may not be today and vise verse. Concepts of morality are taught, and are shaped and created by the people in the culture itself, with some concepts of morality likely having biological roots tied to out inherent self preservation instinct (near universal prohibitions on certain types of killing for instance, even though most cultures allow all sorts of killing to take place in certain situations). As horrifying as some absolutists view fear it is, history shows us that moral codes have been fluid across cultures. Additionally, many people rightly understand that certain types of religious affiliations (like Christianity) PREVENT you from being moral, due to their treatment of women and homosexuals. Now, you may not agree with this, but as morality is defined by culture and always has been, a large segment of culture deems these views as horribly immoral. In order to claim otherwise, -that morality stems from a creator, you must first prove that there is a creator, which has not been done.