> > I have come across tolerant and intolerant Christians, and tolerant and
> > intolerant atheists. Not that I think tolerance arises from a wishy-washy
> > "it doesn't matter what you believe" kind of thing. But as a Christian
> KS>
> KS> I would otherwise agree with the statements. Unfortunately
> KS> Christianity has had its dark ages when the evangelism effort of the
> KS> good message had produced very aggressive and cruel actions. In other
> KS> words Christianity as any other mass movement systems relies on the
> KS> internal inertia, and sometimes this social force could mutate into
> KS> something that the original idea opposed.
>
>True indeed. But atheism has also had its dark ages. Just consider the last 70 years or so in the USSR, where some 20 million people perished because they failed to understand the only way to universal happiness.
>
>Of course you could say that that wasn't your brand of atheism, but I could equally well say that the other wasn't my brand of Christianity.
>
>The most we can say is that some people feel that it is necessary to hate, and whether they are Christians or atheists seems to make very little difference.
>
>Well, not quite. I don't think there's much difference in the quality of the hate or its effects, but it does make the Christians more hypocritical, because what they believe should make them see hate as wrong, whereas there is no _necessary_ connection between atheism and thinking that hatred is a good or a bad thing.
>
You're not talking about atheism here, you're talking about people
going out and killing in the name of some political ideology. Atheism
is just lack of belief in god(s). Period. End of sentence. It
doesn't tell you to go out and be nice to people; it doesn't tell you
to go out and kill people. "I'm going to kill the infidel because No
God told me to!"
So communism isn't a "brand" of atheism in the manner that Calvinsim
is a "brand" of Christianity. Karl Marx's ideology did not presume
God's existence, but to be an atheist does not mean you must accept
any part of his ideology, whereas most Christians I know would say
that to be a Christian there are some core beliefs, such as the
divinity of Christ, the Resurrection, etc, that one must accept.
The mistake you make here is to assume that atheism is a philosophy
all by itself. It isn't; at most, the assumption that God doesn't
exist is *one* of the tenets of whatever philosophy the individual
