Monday, December 03, 2007

A nutjob is a nutjob

One of the most infuriating arguments that have been deployed against the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens goes like this: OK, religion has been behind a great deal of murder and mayhem, but what about atheism, just look at Stalin...

Now lets get this one straight. A dialectical nutjob is really not much different from a religious one. Anyone that subscribes to an ism is part of the problem, not the solution. For the moment you start to believe that no matter how many individual destinies inhabit this planet there is only one true path, you are buying shares in mass murder regardless of your own personal affinity with deadly weapons.

Atheism worth the name is a state of mind that involves a default position of scepticism towards beliefs that position themselves outside the normal conditions for establishing proof.

It doesn't matter whether Stalin really believed the ideas in whose name he committed mass murder. The same applies to Osama.

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