Quote from: michellesofl on June 26, 2009, 02:35:57 PM
Atheists make for stable countries that don't tend to invade other countries unnecessarily
That explains the USSR invasion of Afghanistan and brutal crackdowns in Central Europe.
Or the Red Chinese sending ONE million men into S. Korea during the Korean War.
Yeah, systems that are officially atheist are so much better at respecting human rights as opposed to Western ones.
You are confusing state-idolatry with atheism. You are doing this deliberately.
Commie-style state-idolatry is just as much a religion as Taoism if not more-so.
Ahem. Furthermore, because of America's very Protestant background, the majority of our population tends to have a much more liberal attitude toward religion than countries that have comparable rates of religious observance. I had almost forgotten that liberal and moderate Christians have worked very hard in their own right to put religious extremism in the past. They don't get enough credit for this, and I will be more affirming of this in the future.
A possible explanation behind the greater levels of social prosperity in
Western countries that enjoy a low rate of religious observance is the fact that atheists are likely to be more receptive to the ideals that were generated during the Enlightenment and other periods of intellectual growth in Western history. Western philosophy has done more than any other force in history to transform our society for the better. It helped create the Scientific Revolution and other things that we tend to take for granted today.
