Godblock: block violent, sexual, and psychologically harmful religious material
godblock.com
godblock.com
Notice anything missing from that list? A certain other major religion often associated with "fundamentalism" and bad stuff happening?
I found it a little strange given the premises of the "God blocking" folks; maybe it was an oversight, who knows...
You see, it is traditional to attack blindly (usually against strawmen) without regard to logic, and feel smugly self-righteous about one's obvious superiority while mocking religious types for exactly that same set of traits.
Also, I think it's intended as a joke. Or at least I can hope.
Also, you don't have to believe in religion to appreciate its cultural and historical importance and influence on societies' development. You wouldn't attempt a serious study of ancient Greece or Rome without also looking at their polytheistic religious institutions, but nor would you be likely to start worshiping Zeus/Jupiter as a result of doing so.
This is the sort of thing I would expect from a bunch of anti-theistic children a la reddit.com/r/atheism, not hackernews.
Just saying ... man seems to do rather poorly on his own when he departs from the love of God, and the love of his neighbor in view of God's love.
Blaming atheists for causing communism is sort of like blaming heterosexuals for causing the Holocaust.
Further, it is very difficult to find violence committed in the name of atheism (it seems to be almost a contradiction in terms). Violence committed in the name of God, on the other hand, has been cited in Internet Arguments so often that now it's almost a cliche.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism
^^ Go atheism, huzzah!
Seriously, let's learn the lessons from "God blocking", not repeat them.
Incidentally, I also think this argument is flawed on the merits. Apart from the lack of meaningful criteria for establishing which Bad Things can be ascribed to religious or atheistic fanatics, it also sidesteps the legitimate question of what Good Things can be ascribed to religious or humanist progress through time - a general problem in politics of course, because people treating each other decently doesn't make headlines.
There have been very many religiously motivated wars through the ages. Do you think that, had those wars taken place in a world with similar population and weapons technology as today, they would have been any less destructive than our own?
Or is your argument that everyone, including those who love God, try to kill people, and that the atheists are simply better at it due to technology?