Answer To An Angry Atheist

Monday the study of the depraved evil that is the North Korean government was being discussed in the news,  listing the horrific details of torture, brutal sadistic murder, mass enslavement - enslavement that is inherited by the next generation, those children born to slaves, those whose mother's aren't forced to murder them minutes after giving birth.  I haven't yet read the report so I don't know if the abduction of young girls to be trained as sex slaves for the hierarchy in the military dictatorship was discussed or if it had to give way to the massive weight of other violations of equal, inherent rights by a government which denies their existence and their moral obligation to respect those. Unlike the pedophile priest scandal, you mention, that is an official if unadmitted practice, not a basic violation of its stated moral stands.   No one is going to be defrocked, as it were, for abducting and raping young adolescents for the use of the North Korean establishment.

The possibility of making its leadership liable to prosecution in the international courts was widely dismissed by pointing out that they would be protected by China using its position as a permanent member in the United Nations to veto that measure.  The same UN which issued a, rightly, scathing report on the handling of the pedophile scandal by the Catholic hierarchy.  That is "The Peoples' Republic" of China, the largest officially atheist, communist government in history, one with its own record of brutal violations of human rights, including oppression of religious people.

You, as always, bring up the Inquisition which is a serious sin of the Catholic hierarchies and officials who conducted it.  The officials who conducted those and similar violations of rights were guilty of serious sins and deserve to be discredited and bring disrepute to the institutions they managed, during the time they were active.   Some of the most active critics of them and their acts have been religious scholars, many of them Catholics, some of them ordained priests and religious.

However, if the murders- estimated between the low and several tens of thousands by various historians - and other violation of rights that the Inquisition committed in its 700 years of existence is a permanent disproof of Jesus whose own words forbade what they were doing or the God by whose authority he forbade them, then the, literally thousands of times more murders under atheist governments must discredit atheism.  The Reign of Terror alone, the first official atheist government, beat that record in a few years.   Modern atheistic regimes are contenders with the right wing fascist regimes for the world records in per annum, per capita murder rates.

As with the atheist framing of rights and moral responsibilities discussed here last week, the atheist discrediting of religion by the sins of the Catholic church would mean that their faith was, as well, discredited.  Even more so because, as we saw last week, there is no atheist authority that issued disqualifying prohibitions on mass murder of the type that Jesus did.   Any one who calls himself a "Christian" but who violates the gospel of Jesus discredits his identity as a Christian, atheists don't have any recourse to such a test for whether or not the mass murderers among them are being bad at being atheists.

I will not revisit these issues.  I have repeatedly pointed these things out and no atheist has yet come up with an adequate refutation of them.  Atheism is a defective ideology that is incompatible with equal rights, the moral obligation to respect those rights and democracy.   It shares every fault associated with religion and has a demonstrated ability to practice depravity at an unprecedented level due to its entire lack of the kind of restraint that has, apparently, at times, prevented religious people from practicing the levels of murder and violations of human rights that are the record of atheists with political control.  For all its faults, some religions, some with large numbers of adherents, are among the greatest voices for those things, sometimes they even live up to the beliefs they aspire to live by.