= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
HalMorris comments on Rationality Quotes December 2014 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (440)
Militant atheism is of course more than just not believing in god There is also believing that terrible things are almost sure to happen when people believe in god (largely true with the collection of esp Abrahamic gods we have running around these days) AND believing that getting people not to believe in god will make it so much better
The USSR helped prove that "godless religions" can have all the worst characteristics of the worst religions (of course they didn't truly wipe out religion, but the dominant ideology didn't involve a theistic god -- we could debate whether it made "history" a sort of god.
As with so many things, including "regime change", it is harder than it looks to eliminate something bad without getting something worse.
Of course LW is very conscious of the need to put something better in place of the old thinking.
It's not clear how successful the USSR really was in getting people not to believe in God.
[EDITED to add:] Actually, I don't know whether it's clear how successful the USSR was in getting people not to believe in God. What I know is that (1) I don't know and (2) I have a hazy recollection of having heard things that suggest it wasn't terribly successful (a big increase in overt religiousness after the fall of the USSR, stories of somewhat-underground Christianity while it was still in place, that sort of thing). So let me instead make it a question: How successful, actually, was the USSR in getting people not to believe in God?