Christians and Mass Genocide

I got into a bit of a debate on Twitter tonight about Christianity (just for a change). My comments here. When I pointed out the long list of genocides committed under Christianity, they asked me where in the New Testament Jesus had preached genocide. So I told them – Matthew 13:50.

13:49 So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just,
13:50 And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Included in “the wicked” are people who don’t believe that Jesus is the Lord. That’s from John 3:18:

Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.

Now – if the Second Coming was tomorrow, the group of “the wicked” would be about 4 BILLION people.

Christians believe that the mass genocide of 4 billion people is entirely okay. Ninety7 said it’s okay because he’s not the one judging them. Apparently it’s okay to support mass genocide as long as you aren’t the one actually pulling the trigger.

That is why I say Christianity is a violent and intolerant philosophy.

How did these folks on Twitter respond?

Well Skydaddy told Ninety7 that I’m “off the deep end“. Then he went offline.

When I asked Ninety7 how he justified his belief that mass genocide was acceptable, he just shut down and stopped responding.

is there a Christian out there anywhere who can stand up to a rigorous debate about their religion?

Adolf Hitler Was A Christian

In the comments on my post about the Australian pastor who conned thousands of Christians into believing he had cancer, Matt wrote:

I would highly suggest for you, and any one else interested to read the book The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions by self-professed secular Jew and mathematics/philosophies teacher David Berlinski.
This tells the story of a Jew who was forced to dig his own grave prior to being shot by a German soldier. Prior to being shot, the old Jewish man advised the German that “God is watching what you are doing”. The Jewish gentleman pointed what i think is the real problem with atheism. If you have the time please check the book out.

Matt, I just read the review you linked to but obviously not the book yet. For the benefits of others, the end of that story about the Nazi and the Jew is:

“If there is no God to watch what you are doing, then why should you be circumspect in your behavior? Certainly the Germans at Auschwitz, who gassed Samuel Goldfein, did not believe that God was watching them. As Berlinski points out, that is the real problem with atheism.”

I’m going to point out a couple of flaws in that quote.

First of all – the Nazi regime was Christian! Adolf Hitler was a Christian. In Mein Kampf he wrote:

“Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

In a speech in 1922, he said:

“My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice… And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.”

Hitler could not have come into power without the support of the Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany at the time. So, for a start, the reviewer of the book is ignorant.

Read more about Hitler and his Christianity here.

Now, let’s address the other suggestion from the reviewer which, I assume comes from the book.

Personally, I find the concept that humans who don’t believe in imaginary beings will become murderers to be completely asinine and offensive to the extreme.

Perhaps religious people believe that they personally would become murderers without their imaginary god keeping them in check. Many of us, however, are quite comfortable trying hard to be decent human beings without having to imagine some kind of sky bully keeping an eye on us. We try to do good things because being good is a end in itself. It doesn’t require some kind of supernatural pay-off. Now, I’m certainly not perfect. I’m made lots of mistakes in my life and hurt people, but never intentionally. I’ve been an atheist since I was 8 years old and I have no desire to kill or rape or steal.

I will also point out that in the history of the human race over the last 2000 years, Christians have been responsible for way more violence than atheists. I wrote a post about this some time ago.

So this sky bully concept doesn’t seem to keep Christians from committing regular atrocities. I’ll point out that the USA seems to consider itself a Christian nation (at least that’s what I hear from time to time) and they are the most violent country on the planet at the moment, actively invading other countries and waging economic warfare on many others.

I would go so far as to say that, not only does religion not curb violence, it BREEDS violence. The core tenant of all religious belief is “those that don’t believe what we believe deserve eternity in hell”. That is the most intolerant and violent philosophy I can imagine.

Atheism, on the other hand, doesn’t have a code that preaches violence.

So… what say you to that?

The Biography Show #006 – Akhenaten vs Moses

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I don’t know how many of you listen to my Biography podcast, but the episode we recorded today is, I think, pretty interesting, so i hope you don’t mind me throwing it into this feed.

Today we tackle two subjects – Egyptian Pharoah Akhenaten (aka Amenhotep IV) and Moses. Originally we were going to do Moses but as he is (according to the majority of secular scholars) a mythological figure and not historical, I didn’t want to get into the same trouble we did when we talked about Helen of Troy.

And then I remembered Akhenaten. Like Moses, Akhenaten was the founder of a monotheistic religion. In fact, he is considered the first person to conceive of monotheism or, at least, to put it into practice on a wide scale. He pre-dated Moses (or at least when Moses would have lived had he actually existed) by 300 – 900 years, depending on where you posit the Moses stories. And, unlike Moses, we have proof Akhenaten lived. However, we only discovered his story in the 19th century, as the record of his reign and the reign of his successors, his wife Nefertiti and his son/step-son Tutenkhamen, were eradicted from the official records, possibly because of his attempts to usher in monotheism into Egypt.

You can read the rest of the shownotes here.

Stupid Christians Get Conned… Again.

An Australian evangelical pastor, Michael Guglielmucci, has apparently confessed to lying about having terminal cancer for the last couple of years.

The Australian Christian Churches told The Advertiser yesterday that it was auditing Mr Guglielmucci’s bank accounts, which included money donated from people touched by his hit song Healer.

Mr Guglielmucci confessed his two-year fraudulent cancer battle at a national executive meeting of the ACC on Saturday, and was stripped of his credentials.

The problem with this story, though, is it pretends that Guglielmucci is alone in being a fraud, when the entire Christian religion is based on lies, deception and fraud. As I’ve said many times before – there is ZERO evidence that Jesus even existed, let alone said or did the things that are attributed to him. There isn’t a single contemporary eyewitness account, Christian or non-Christian. He’s a myth, pure and simple.

None of this, however, has stopped a bunch of people over on the “Still Praying For Ps Mike Guglielmucci’s Wall” on Facebook to say things like

whether it is healing from cancer or healing from a mental illness, God is still the healer and Mike is still claiming that God is his healer…
He is still a wonderful guy, and an amazing person and we should continue to pray for him for healing now, just as we would have if he had cancer. He still is ill and still can and will be healed by our most loving Heavenly father. we cannot and will not condemn him, we have no right cos God never will condemn him either.

Which just goes to show that it doesn’t matter what evidence they are presented with, many Christians are just determined to believe in their fairy tales no matter what.

By the way, “Australian Christian Churches“, the collection of Pentecostal evangelical churches, is lead by Brian Houston, the founder of Hillsong, that scary bunch who also are behind Gloria Jean’s Coffee and Mercy Ministries.