If you don't think radical atheism isn't like radical Christianity and radical Islam, you haven't studied the history of the various communist countries of the world.
People who are absolutely certain they are right can do some fucked up shit.
Do you mean anti-theism? If you're talking about people that actively oppose religion. Atheism is simply a lack of belief in theism.
I'm also not sure how communism relates either, unless you're talking about secular societies that were communist and committed atrocities, such as Soviet Russia under Stalin. In Soviet Russia the state belief was atheism, but again, in their pursuit to eliminate religion I would argue that is really anti-theism.
I can agree with everything you said here, but read most of the posts and comments in atheist communities and tell me most of them aren't at least somewhat anti-theist.
Whatever belief or non belief anyone has isn't the problem .... it's when those individuals want to impose this beliefs or non beliefs onto other people whether those other people want it or not.
I really don't care what other people think, that's their life. The problems start when people start thinking that they have a right to force their ideas or thoughts onto other people.
Add up all the people that have lived over the past 4,000 years ..... wars, genocides, conflicts, violent revolutions have all led to countless dead because of religions.
You might be surprised to learn that the world population hasn't historically been as high is it is in modern times for more most of those 4000 years.
So I got at least a couple of billion people having their beliefs oppressed by atheists. You can now go through the exercise of going over historical documents and adding up the number of people that have been oppressed by religions throughout history, and let me know when you reach 2 billion and I'll start doing a more accurate accounting of the number of people oppressed by atheists. Because when you consider the populations of the Soviet Union and China and there being multiple generations living under atheist rule, It's likely the number is significantly higher than 2 billion. But I doubt you can get to that very conservative estimate by looking through all of history.
Sorry to be the one to break this to you, but atheists have been the absolute worst people to have held power in all of history. The facts just don't line up with what you believe.
I'm counting the dead not the oppressed ... atheists haven't been around long enough to rack up the same murderous numbers of death and destruction as theists have over the past few thousand years.
The Soviets and communist Chinese (both systems I disagree with and do not support) never launched full fledged pogroms, death camps or extermination programs of killing in order to get rid of religious groups .... they oppressed and abused religious groups and maybe even killed often ... but never to the level of industrial killing .. the Nazis did that and even though Nazis may be identified as atheists, they had a political / ideological belief system that was more identifiable as a religion than a lack of belief
The only system in history that has any blood thirst for killing opponents has been and still is religious based.
Imagine an actual violent war broke out between Star Wars fans and Star Trek fans. They are bombing each other's conventions, and shooting each other in the streets. From the outside, you're just like, why are they acting like this? None of it is even real! Why can't you just let each other enjoy science fiction? Why do they have to like YOURS better?
Atheists, like all people, do have things to go to war about. Money, power, real things that are important to them, and it may be greed or love that pushes an atheist to war, but science fiction had nothing to do with it.
Religious people, like all people, do have things to go to war about. Money, power, real things that are important to them, and it may be greed or love that pushes the religious to war.
Cute, but that doesn't work when "kill the infidels!" is literally their warcry. They openly call them Holy Wars and promote them as driven by religion. Sure, there's money and power involved as well, but people are fighting over religion. That's just fact.
You're defining your feelings as fact. Just like fundamentalist religious people that cry out "kill the infidels" do.
It's also a fact that atheists have killed even more people because of adherence to weird ideologies.
Like I say, people who are 100% certain of things can come to strange conclusions. Real life isn't so simple as seeing one person saying "kill the infidels" and concluding that all people in that religion think the same way.
Joseph Stalin was an atheist, does being an atheist make you think the same way as Joseph Stalin?
I'd be surprised if you had a single though about this whatsoever... Not only do you somehow link atheism, a philosophical outlook on the impossibility of godhood as described by religion, with Communism, a socio-economic model, you attribute the actions taken by dictatorial semi-socialist leaders to both.
I don't think a regular human could say something this stupid if they tried.
Are you saying it hurts when you're just lazily lumped together with fundamentalists simply because there's some overlap between what you believe and what they believe?