George,

Since you have so much more knowledge and experience than us armchair experts (and yet somehow still needed to resort to a red herring that Bushbasher demonstrated to be nonsense anyway), perhaps you could address a point of mine that Graham has dodged:

If Marxism is so fundamentally built on Atheism, then how does one logically go from...

“I don’t believe in any Gods”

...to...

“The working class must therefore seize political power internationally through a social revolution to expropriate the capitalist classes around the world and place the productive capacities of society into collective ownership”?

Pelican,

An Atheist’s understanding of the term “Humanist” is often very different to a Theists understanding. In my experience, when a Theist thinks of a Humanist, they think of a person who puts people in an unjustifiably exalted status as if to replace God with mere “self-righteous” humans. (e.g. Runner)

This goes back to Graham’s failed point earlier about Atheism supposedly being potentially more prone to oppressive regimes “because it [supposedly] encourages an unrealistically high assessment of human infallibility”.

Mr Young,

<<I'm interested in ... the idea that Atheism doesn't have a belief system.>>

Yet you dodged my question in regards to this point. Doesn’t sound like you’re genuinely interested at all.

A “system” is a group of interrelated elements combined to work coherently together. So I’ll ask again:

If Atheism is a belief system, then please name for me a tenet of Atheism other than the disbelief, or lack of belief in any God/s.

Since “systems” require MULTIPLE (I wish we had italics) elements, surely you can name at least a couple more.

Remember, all it takes for an Atheist to become a Christian is evidence. Exercising the rationality to demand evidence before one believes something does not constitute a “belief system”.

Period.

<<Marxism is an atheist movement, and its actions prove that. It also has concerns about equality, wealth, distribution of power, but you don't understand it if you don't understand that it is underpinned by a radical humanist view of the world which is materialist.>>

Continued...

...Continued

Same old assertion, again, backed with no examples or reasoning. I refer back to my point to you earlier that I’ve now put to George.

<<...[suicide bombings] were pioneered not by religious fanatics, but by Marxist Leninists in Sri Lanka - the Tamil Tigers. That is Atheists are responsible for the invention of the technique.>>

A convenience of circumstance.

So are you saying that if bombs had been invented hundreds of years before they were, we’d still need to wait for Marxism to enter the scene and invent the idea of suicide bombings? None of the religions would have come-up with it?

If not, then you’re point is pretty weak.

<<Someone earlier on suggested that Atheism is the default position.>>

That would be me.

<<In fact, religion is the default position...>>

In fact, it’s not.

If you are going to continue down this line, then please tell me why my ‘juror’ analogy is inaccurate rather than dodging the point and continuing as if it never happened.

<<...you find very few natural Atheists in the history of the world until after the Enlightenment.>>

You’d probably also find that those who were Deists would likely have been Atheists had they had the scientific knowledge we now have on which to base their scepticism of religious claims.

<<That's because you needed the Enlightenment and the scientific revoultion to provide the philosophical tools.>>

Scepticism and disbelief do not rely on “philosophical tools” to exist. Scepticism can be a gut feeling not based on rational thought processes. Your failure to recognise this is where your argument, again, falls down.

Like I said before, it doesn’t matter what angle you approach it from...

<<Which underlines the fact that it is a belief system.>>

Given what I’ve said above, I’d say this is quite the non sequitur.

<<It depends on a particular theory of how the world operates to be viable.>>

No, it depends on the courage to say "I don't know", along with the total lack of evidence for any Gods; A total lack of evidence that was around long before the Enlightenment.

If "religion is the default position", why are we born with no religion? Religion has to be taught. Atheist is natural - a baby has no knowledge of god. However, it does has knowledge of love - in most cases from its first breath.

Again I ask:

Why do you wish to cast a non-belief in religion as tainted?

Why does it matter weather you're are a believer or a non-believer? There are good & bad on both sides.

Pericles, that is my point. Atheism is a belief system that holds that all there is to know can be known by scientific inquiry, and because scientific inquiry has not thrown up any evidence of God or gods then he, she or they do not exist. So part of the atheistic belief system is to believe that you cannot know anything apart from a scientific or logical context.

But this goes beyond the claims that science makes for itself, which is what makes Atheism a faith as well as a belief system, because faith pertains to that which you cannot logically prove.

Many of those posting on this thread seem to think that because something is obvious to them it is just fact, not a belief system, but they are ignoring all the factors that go to make us believe that this is just the way things are.

If the atheistic worldview is fact, it has not just happened as fact but has developed along with a whole lot of ways of approaching the world. So, the atheistic belief system privileges logic and physical ways of knowing. It also privileges man's intellect as the pinnacle of ways of knowing and understanding.

Marxism plays some interesting riffs on this. Dialectical materialism, which claims to be scientific, sees reality as being a function of power interplays, so to some extent malleable. So it is not scientific in the term that I am using science. Making its brand of atheism even more a faith than that of the western Atheist in a capitalist society.

But at the same time demonstrating that science and what it means is a contestable term, which underlines that when you refer to science you refer to a belief system, some of whose assumptions are questioned by others.

And before anyone accuses me of being opposed to science, I'm not. I hold to the standard Western Popperian view of what science is and should be.

George, thanks for your timely intervention. It seems too few people these days have any idea of what Marxism, in particular Soviet Marxism, was about. I've also been doing some googling on Marx and religion which throws up a lot of useful links. Bushbasher and others might like to read this one http://atheism.about.com/b/2006/03/13/karl-marx-religion-2.htm. It's written by an Atheist. Not all Atheists have a problem with the proposition that Marxism is an Atheistic movement.

Severin, there may be some Marxists who call themselves Christian, but as this Wikipedia post makes clear, while there are Christian Communists, they are not Marxists although they may share some beliefs with them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_communism. Fascism doesn't have a religious basis, so I'm not sure what you are trying to prove with your reference to Christofascism.

Bushbasher demands that I justify my description of Dawkins as a militant Atheist. Too easy. Wikipedia provides a definition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militant_atheism. "Militant atheists tend to make one or both of two claims that moderate atheists do not. The first is that religion is demonstrably false or nonsense and the second is that it is usually or always harmful." Dawkins would happily plead guilty on both counts, as would many of those on this thread.

To understand the term in context Bushbasher should also research Militant Christianity, and the Church Militant. These are descriptions many Christians wear with pride, and which have nothing to do with physical war (if that is Bushbasher's problem on this issue). I could call Dawkins an evangelical Atheist, which would mean a similar thing to Militant Atheist.