Summations Only

I doubt that jar and GDR have murdered anyone...

I can, but apparently Rahvin thinks there's some merit to it.Too, why focus on the bad stuff? Can't looking at the good things religion has done push it towards the high ground?

Art, literature, music, charities, soup kitchens, hospitals, orphanages, YMCA, Habitat for Humanity, Salvation Army, World Relief.There, that's 11.

Well, you just misunderstood... I was saying that he thought that he, himself, had the moral high gound. Which is funny because he acts like such a dick. Me too. To be fair to Portillo, he did metion atheist regimes rather than just atheism. That's what I was saying earlier. Its atheist regimes vs. religious atrocities:

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Atheistic regimes have killed over 100 million people. Thats 10,000 times more than all religious atrocities put together since the beginning of time.

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Where:'God doing the will of god' 'Man doing the will of god'Yes, that makes perfect sense.

Being "an atheist" doesn't give you qualifiers with which to count the numbers of things. But by being a part of a regime, you can get into the counting. It depends what you're talking about with "atheism"...A simple lack of belief isn't really something you can get behind. But as a positive belief, you can. An atheist regime can use the same cultural brain washing that a religious one does, but just put, for example, a dictator in place of a god.Wasn't that one of the points that Hitch made with Stalin, in the video that Mod linked to? Or would you say that that doesn't count as "atheist" if the Tsar is like a god?Its almost as if its "religious atheism"... so, er, would you count those deaths on the religion side then Edited by Catholic Scientist, : No reason given.

If "religiously motivated" = "Man doing the will of god", and "God doing the will of god" "Man doing the will of god", then "religiously motivated" "God doing the will of god".A = B. B C. Ergo, A CIts simple logic.

You're the one who provided the equivalencies... Because its man doing it not god doing it Because we're talking about the motivation for the act, not the end result of the act.Where religious morivation is man being motivated by his belief in god, you cannot have a religiously motivated god.

I guess I'll just have to take your word for that...But I don't doubt that religious motivation can increase death tolls. I don't think that question can be answered.

That's irrelevant... Holy shit, I just realized that there was more to Message 248 that was intended for me. That's a problem with a big post to mulitple people like that. I've still been waiting for your definition of "religiously motivated"... I just found it: I don't agree with this definition for the context of this thread, where we are comparing death tolls that can be blamed on religion, or blamed on an atheist regime.We're gonna hafta agree on terms before we can get anywhere.So, what is the goal? Figure out how much death was caused by religion and compare that to the death caused by atheist regimes and then use that to determine which one has the moral high ground.If you're going to count the deaths caused by god himself, how does that give the religion the lower moral ground? If we had a bunch of Satanists who did everything possible to be the best people on earth, I don't think you could say that they had the moral low ground because the Bible says that Satan was a bad guy. Even if the followers of the religion accepted that as a fact, how would the action attributed to their god count towards their own morality? You're not staying consistent...If the motivation of the act is to kill lots of people for not following the instructions of a god, then, yes, the poeple who did all that killing would be religiously motivated, and take a lower moral ground.But if we're talking about things like the global flood... How does the Flood myth take away any moral high ground from Christianity? Some people believe that their god killed everything. How is that a religiously motivated immorality? How can that fact be compared to the actions of a regime to say that believing that make them morally inferior to the regime? Because we're talking about the motivation for the act, not the result of the act. You could say that your minions were motived by management to complete the tasks. I would say that you, as the manager, shouldn't be counted in the tolls of those "motivated by managment", because that would just be self-motivation. You argueing that the same tasks got done regardless doesn't address what was the motivation. Well that was an If-Then statement, so no. But also no because, rather than saying its the only definition, I'm saying its the most appropriate definition for the purpose of this debate.It doesn't make sense to count the tasks completed by the manager, himself, when tallying up how much work got done by the people he manages as "motivated by management". If the manager down the hall did all the work himself, would you agree that his is better at managing people than you are? Its not about the swearing, its about typing in second person with comments directed towards the person who typed up the post. And rage doesn't take removing your feet from your desk. The reason its respected, is because its part of the rules here, and in debate in general:

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10.The sincerely held beliefs of other members deserve your respect. Please keep discussion civil. Argue the position, not the person.

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Usually, in a well-conducted debate, speakers are either emotionally uncommitted or can preserve sufficient detachment to maintain a coolly academic approach.
-- Encyclopedia Britannica, on debate source

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Honestly, I think it can go either way, depending on what attributes you want to assign to god.A more anthropomorphic god, who has desires, and ponders what he's going to do, and then desides to follow his own will, could be called religious in the sense that he's 'following god's will" (even tho its his own will that he's following ((which I would still kinda think ruins the definition for the purpose of this thread))).But a more overarching god, who's will just be's done, shouldn't really count as having some religious motivation.

Against a very small subset of Christianity... Most people know The Flud was a myth. How does that myth being in the Bible lower the morality of Christianity, in general? We can talk about whatever we want.

No, I'm saying that it means that there really wasn't a motivation for the act that a religion could be ascribed to.

I don't know.

Nonsense. It contains some facts. So it doesn't make sense to make blanket statements about their morality, does it? I'm still having trouble making the connection: How does believing that their god did something in the past that was bad, make them a bad person? Lets say we have a person we could all argree on, at face value, was a morally good person. How would learning that they believe in a god that did something bad, change our perception of their morality? How would it change their actual morality? Isn't is pretty much irrelevant what they believe?