1. God is not responsible for war and suffering

Comment #48140 by Gadren on June 6, 2007 at 6:28 pm

the relatively well-documented resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth

Uh... give me a non-Biblical source, please?

On the contrary, the gifts of Christianity alone to culture, Islam to early medicine, Roman Stoicism to philosophy and Judaism to the legal order are priceless. It is also impossible to think of anti-theist print journalists without the Gutenberg printing press invented by Christians to make mass copies of the Bible. Similarly, various atheists' positions as academics would be inconceivable if the Christian monastic tradition hadn't preserved ancient knowledge during the Dark Ages, then shared it again in newly created universities from the Middle Ages onwards.

You mean the supremacy of Western Christian culture at the expense of all others due to conversion by the sword?
Or the fact that Islamic medicine didn't really draw anything from Islam itself, but was advanced by people who happened to be Muslims?
Or the Stoicism that had little to do with the gods until it was hijacked by the early Christian Church?
Or the xenophobic Judaic laws that had people put to death for the slightest of infractions?

Not to mention how Gutenberg's printing press brought vernacular Bibles because the Church had been preventing the people from learning about their religion, or how rampant censorship by the Church made monastic preservation of knowledge needed in the Dark Ages (assuming that it was really "dark")?

Indeed, the only reason religion rejecters can tally the apparently long list of religious errors is because religious believers invented the intellectual disciplines and furnished the academic tools that are used today to attack religion. And it was a Christian, Pope Gregory XIII, who divided time into units - days, months and years - to tell monks and priests when to pray and atheists when to launch their books. Similarly, atheists too often forget that, while they're tallying the lists of death and destruction apparently wrought by believers, they'd better add the most egregious numbers, the most horrendous crimes - the Holocaust, Mao's Cultural Revolution, Stalin's famines, gulags and secret police - to the column reserved for totalitarian regimes of a decidedly anti-religious and often officially atheistic bent.

I'm not finding evidence about that Pope dividing time into days/hours/minutes... The division of time is something ancient, and the second wasn't determined by the Pope; rather, secular or humanist intellectuals came up with that division in the 1600s. All Gregory did was adjust the calendar by a few days... and there's nothing there to indicate that his religion was what made that possible. Also, Hitler's fascism was strongly of a fundamentalist Christian bent, and as for the others? They didn't commit their evils in the name of atheism, which can hardly be said for the various "warrior popes" throughout history.

IS religion the sole and greatest cause of evil in the world? I don't think so. But it offers an all-too-ready weapon for evil, as it amplifies the potential to do evil in the world without really offering a good reason for its existence.

If you're going to say "that religion doesn't kill people, people kill people," then maybe you should give atheism the same benefit of the doubt instead of bringing up false Godwins.