A recent poster wrote:
I am not sure I buy the claim that atheism is in decline, and I certainly question the statement that it is losing its scientific basis. Religious belief has no scientific evidence to support it and a long and bloody history of violence, cruelty, and intolerance.
If you don’t “buy that atheism is in decline,” then you didn’t read the study I quoted now, did you? Atheism is declining, paganism is on the rise according to the studies. If you have something besides an unsubstantiated opinion that atheism is increasing, you haven’t presented it.
Your contention that religious belief has no scientific basis overlooks the Christian Nobel Physicist winner I posted about last week who claims just the opposite. If you have knowledge about science and religion that transcends that of a Nobel Prize winner, you haven’t presented that, either.
Likewise your contention that religious belief is somehow responsible for violence, cruelty and intolerance overlooks roughly 180 million dead in the 20th century by secular governments. Stalin closed 48,000 churches and killed 40 million people. Mao Tse Tung killed 72 million people in the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution. The Communist takeover of Cambodia in 1975 killed 3 million people. The conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Cuba, Zimbabwe lead to millions of dead at the hands of secular governments.
I am not saying that wars have never been fought in the name of religion, just pointing out that if you’re choosing to believe in secular humanism because of the number of people that die in the name of religion, then perhaps you are not objectively looking at why people die in conflicts.
Christianity teaches us to love God with all our heart and to love our neighbor as ourselves. That’s hardly the message of “violence, cruelty, and intolerance” that you believe it is. Christ is love.
Chasing the Wind 
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