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[JDaveG]

(12-18-2011 02:05 PM)cooperbh Wrote:  Mao and Stalin did not commit their atrocities in the name of atheism.

The Crusades, the Inquisition, witch burning, abortion clinic bombings, the list goes on and on... all committed in name of Christianity.

Nobody is making assumptions. Christianity is directly responsible for millions of deaths and countless amounts of suffering throughout history. It's a statistical fact. I've never heard a single account of someone being killed or tortured because they rejected atheisim.

Then you should read more. The Holy Martyrs in Russia were absolutely killed precisely because of their Christian faith and precisely because they were not atheists. One of those Holy Martyrs is my eldest daughter's Patron Saint, Saint Elizabeth the New Martyr. Here is a snippet of her story dealing with her martyrdom:

Quote:In 1918, the Communist government exiled her to Yekaterinburg and then to Alapaevsk, where she was violently killed by the local Bolsheviks on July 18, 1918, along with Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich Romanov; the Princes Ioann Konstantinovich, Konstantin Konstantinovich, Igor Konstantinovich, and Vladimir Pavlovich Paley; Grand Duke Sergei's secretary, Fyodor Remez; and Nun Barbara Yakovleva, a sister from the Grand Duchess Elizabeth's convent. They were herded into the forest, pushed into an abandoned mineshaft, into which grenades were then hurled. An observer heard them singing Church hymns as they were pushed into the mineshaft. After the Bolsheviks left, he could still hear singing for some time. The last thing Elizabeth did as she lay dying in the mineshaft was to bandage the wounds of Prince Ioann with her handkerchief. Later the White Army briefly recaptured this area, and her relics were recovered and the account of the person who witnessed it recorded. Her relics were first taken by the White Army to Beijing and placed in the Church of St. Seraphim of Sarov, and then they were taken to Jerusalem and placed in the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, which she and her husband had helped to build.

http://orthodoxwiki.org/Elizabeth_the_New_Martyr

You want to pretend that didn't happen, and you make this false distinction (that in reality doesn't even exist) that this supposedly was not "in the name of" atheism. And yet atheism is a basic tenet of Communism, at least as it was practiced in the Soviet Union. The blood of the Holy Martyrs in Russia and other Communist states (which, for the record, account for over half of all the martyrs in Christian history) screams against your false distinction.

I would also point out that the Crusades and the Inquisition were hardly sanctioned by all of Christianity, so it is no defense that "all atheists didn't agree with the Bolsheviks." At the end of the day, Eastern Christians were victims of the Crusades, not perpetrators. So taking a portion of Christian believers and extrapolating that to all Christian believers as being "in the name of" Christianity is disingenuous. Particularly when the same arrow can be pointed at the Soviets and atheism.

This is just special pleading on your part (also known as a double standard). You should read some history before you speak further.