Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
>   I wonder at what point atheists became the big monsters. I'm assuming
> it was somewhere around when communists stopped being so scary.

It may have been when communists *started* being so scary--during the McCarthy
era (the 1950s), when we Americans started stamping "In God We Trust" all over
everything.  I've run across people whose argument against atheism is that
communism doesn't work.  In their minds, all atheists are communists.  Stalin
and Mao and Pol Pot were evil monsters, therefore all atheists are evil
monsters.
_________________

If you apply the identical reasoning to Hitler, Torquemada, Anders Behring
Breivik, Cho Seung-Hui, and Andrea Yates, it surely follows that all Christians
are evil monsters.  Alas, Christian logic doesn't work that way.  Since Hitler
was a monster, he must surely have been an atheist.  This piece of backward
reasoning is so slick that most Christians aren't aware that they're doing it.
(And the pope reinforces this ignorance when he lies through his teeth about the
Germany of his youth.)  Now, having ASSumed that Hitler was an atheist we can
see that all atheists are evil monsters.  As for the others, they weren't True
Christians(TM).  It's confirmation bias and circular reasoning at their most
intransigent.

It must be noted that Christian scriptures teach that atheists are
evil--specifically, Psalm 14, Psalm 53, and Romans 1.  This might explain why
some people (who'll believe an old book before they'll believe evidence) will
trust a rapist before they'll trust an atheist who has never harmed anyone.

There's also the "totally depraved" theology of original sin that we need to be
scared of a god to keep us in line.

Then there's the misunderstanding that evolution instructs us to be mean to each
other.  (It is never noticed that natural selection is no more "godless" than
any other scientific theory.)  It doesn't help that apologists are teaching the
lie that Hitler and Stalin based their policies on evolution.

I've also heard the nonsensical proposition that atheists believe themselves to
be God (or greater than God), and therefore feel justified in setting themselves
up as "God" over others' lives.  A case of projection, I think.

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