Atheist's genocide.

[Lion IRC]

Interesting.
Got a quote/reference for that Scrumple? TIA

On July 12, 1939, a few months before the beginning of World War II in Europe, Szilárd and Wigner visited Einstein[73] and they explained the possibility of atomic bombs, to which pacifist Einstein replied: Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht ("I had not thought of that at all").

...from wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

Read about it in one of his numerous biography's hundreds of years ago now. There's more to it than meets the eye....I recall, don't think he was expecting the atom to be the proof of his equations....or some such, hard to fully recall what I read in my youth.

THX
Do you believe him?
I do - at least insofar as 1939 Einstein is concerned, but it's hard to believe that no scientist understood their own 'moral agency'.

[cronus]

THX
Do you believe him?
I do - at least insofar as 1939 Einstein is concerned, but it's hard to believe that no scientist understood their own 'moral agency'.

He did say it was a mistake pushing for atom bombs as he got older, not like he didn't realise later.

[Hermit]

...it's hard to believe that no scientist understood their own 'moral agency'.

It's even harder to believe that your god did not understand his own 'moral agency'. Also, nice of you to sidestep my earlier post. Neat trick. Is evasion a routine part of your posting style?

[pErvinalia]

Yep.

[JimC]

It's just a coincidence that the acceptability of atheism has come about at the same time as the increase in scale and efficiency of weapons.
Genocide is much easier to organise, and a lot less personal these days.

The genocides of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki were impersonal efficient affairs. The people who give the orders never get any blood on them, they don't ever leave their comfortable office.
I don't think they were atheists. I don't think religion came into it much. All you need is efficient technology to turn a war into a genocide.

Lawrence Krauss, a physicist, rails against biblical mass killing, but the dead children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki want to know, from a physicist, what moral monster invented the atom bomb?

It was developed by a team, many of whom were people of faith, in the US, not usually regard as an atheist nation...

The context of religious mass killings comes directly from what people perceive to be the urgings of their deity. The deaths from the atom bombs were part of the horror of the second world war as a whole, and were not the result of a single ideology.

Comparisons of this nature are rather pointless. The ethical dilemmas posed by war and nuclear weapons can be approached in many ways, religious and humanist. Neither has a monopoly on morality...

[Lion IRC]

...it's hard to believe that no scientist understood their own 'moral agency'.

It's even harder to believe that your god did not understand his own 'moral agency'. Also, nice of you to sidestep my earlier post. Neat trick. Is evasion a routine part of your posting style?

You mean this post?
Youre lucky I read the whole thing. I don't need an atheist to tell me what the bible says.

Which part of that post did you want to use to troll me? The bit about not believing God DOES anything because He doesn't exist?

You're doing the same as Krauss. Accusing God of end-justifies-the-means immorality but living in an age where people and their governments commit mass murder on a scale that dwarfs the slaughter of the Amalakites.

* Millions of abortions.
* Death from malnutrition in a world full of billionaires
* Capital punishment and State sanctioned executions.
* More people dead from war in the last 50 years than in the previous 500 years.

BTW - next time you think someone is evading your posts don't TELL them. That just makes you seem needy.

[JimC]

...it's hard to believe that no scientist understood their own 'moral agency'.

It's even harder to believe that your god did not understand his own 'moral agency'. Also, nice of you to sidestep my earlier post. Neat trick. Is evasion a routine part of your posting style?

You mean this post?
Youre lucky I read the whole thing. I don't need an atheist to tell me what the bible says.

Which part of that post did you want to use to troll me? The bit about not believing God DOES anything because He doesn't exist?

You're doing the same as Krauss. Accusing God of end-justifies-the-means immorality but living in an age where people and their governments commit mass murder on a scale that dwarfs the slaughter of the Amalakites.

* Millions of abortions.
* Death from malnutrition in a world full of billionaires
* Capital punishment and State sanctioned executions.
* More people dead from war in the last 50 years than in the previous 500 years.

BTW - next time you think someone is evading your posts don't TELL them. That just makes you seem needy.

There is a critical difference, which you seem to totally ignore. In the case of mass killings by religious fanatics, it was specifically their religious beliefs which drove them to it, often via a command from their god.

The best that any modern christian can do when faced with old testament evils is to weakly wave their hands, and say that we've moved on from that now, the vicar is a terribly nice chap and his wife makes a jolly good cup of tea...

All the modern ills (and indeed there are many) have multiple causes. People do indeed need to take a stand, parse the ethical issues and, where possible, act. But none of these ills have a cause that in any way could be seen as an atheist imperative to kill. In fact, I challenge anyone to come up with a substantial example of mass killings of religious people ordered because their beliefs were offensive to a powerful figure, who explicitly stated that the people deserved to die because they were not atheists (a very common explicit statement from faith fanatics of all kinds)

[Hermit]

...it's hard to believe that no scientist understood their own 'moral agency'.

It's even harder to believe that your god did not understand his own 'moral agency'. Also, nice of you to sidestep my earlier post. Neat trick. Is evasion a routine part of your posting style?

You mean this post?
Youre lucky I read the whole thing. I don't need an atheist to tell me what the bible says.

Which part of that post did you want to use to troll me? The bit about not believing God DOES anything because He doesn't exist?

The bits where believers in that God commands them to commit genocide and the son of god commands them to slay people before him. Are you in denial much, or just lack basic reading comprehension?

[Lion IRC]

I would never deny what is plainly written in the bible.
And God does certainly intervene in the course of human conflict.
The point here is that the bible writers don't apologize for the consequences of that divine prerogative. Why would they?

[Hermit]

So we have a report in the bible of a god commanding genocide, and another one of his son, who is also god, ordering all his enemies to be slain. Accepting the existence of these entities for the purposes of your argument, and that the inventors of the atom bomb were moral monsters, what exactly is the difference between the former lot and the latter?

[JimC]

I would never deny what is plainly written in the bible.
And God does certainly intervene in the course of human conflict.
The point here is that the bible writers don't apologize for the consequences of that divine prerogative. Why would they?

A biblical literalist, eh?

In this day and age, too...

Well I never!

[BarnettNewman]

Fat Man and Little Boy didn't start the war they ended it arguably reducing the number of lives lost in an extended battle in the pacific theatre. Additionally, how many wars since have been fought because of science? None?

[Jason]

America didn't drop the A bombs to 'save lives'. They dropped them to scare the shit out of Russia who they already saw as the next enemy.

[JimC]

America didn't drop the A bombs to 'save lives'. They dropped them to scare the shit out of Russia who they already saw as the next enemy.

Things don't have to happen for monolithic motives. Ending the war was a primary goal of the use of atomic weapons on Japan, a goal that succeeded well, but the side benefit of showing the rest of the world what they could do was a bonus...

[DaveDodo007]

It's just a coincidence that the acceptability of atheism has come about at the same time as the increase in scale and efficiency of weapons.
Genocide is much easier to organise, and a lot less personal these days.

The genocides of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki were impersonal efficient affairs. The people who give the orders never get any blood on them, they don't ever leave their comfortable office.
I don't think they were atheists. I don't think religion came into it much. All you need is efficient technology to turn a war into a genocide.

Lawrence Krauss, a physicist, rails against biblical mass killing, but the dead children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki want to know, from a physicist, what moral monster invented the atom bomb?

To be fair America was a Christian nation at the time (though secular in nature) not that knowing what I know now do I believe an atheist America would have behaved any differently. You Christians have to keep in check your fundamentalists just as we atheists need to keep in check our ideologues.