[Cheese]

Originally Posted by kermitology

Pure communism rejects religion because it institutes a basis for a class system when there are religious leaders who preach to the masses and thereby control those masses. Of course communism in practice does the same thing, so it's kind of a relative argument.

Athiesm does not equate to the murder of civilians though. That's communism opressing the masses. Stalin in particular was a paranoid delusional (re: Great Purge) so don't be placing that on Athiests.

You're both wrong. Your fate at the end of your time in this world/reality is dependant upon your beliefs. Cheese.. you will simply cease to exist. CBA.. you will go to heaven for accepting Christ. Me.. I'm off to the next plane of reality and conciousness.

LOL...Thanks Kerm...that is a better explanation than CBAs...whos entire existence is based on the fear of hell. Satan as far as I'm concerned is a myth used by Christians as an excuse to silence their critics and terrorize others. The concept comes from Eastern religion and doesn't even exist in Judaism today. Christians seem to have gotten this from the Essenes and Gnostics.

The ancient Greeks invented concepts of reason, modern science, modern history, and democracy 2500 years ago. They knew the world wasn't flat and even touched on evolution knowing the world wasn't 6000 years old. Even the church fathers such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas figured out the earth was not only very old, but life also sprang from a common source. Even more shocking to many people in America today is the gifts the Arabs would transmit to the modern world. They would not only preserve the great discoveries of the Greeks, but would greatly expand them. They would invent algebra (an Arabic word), and transmitted from India the base 10 number system (the concept of zero did away with the cumbersome Roman system), and expand science and math far beyond even Greece. Greek philosophy, destroyed or lost by the Catholic Church, would be brought back to light by contacts with Arabs in Spain. Arab writers in the 10th century even knew that mountains were formed by rain, wind, and land upheavals over a long period of time and figured out what Christian Europe rejected until the age of Charles Darwin.
The Christian churches knew of all of this, but rejected them for political reasons and mindless dogma.