A Spotlight on Freethought August 14, 2012

A Spotlight on Freethought

By Hemant Mehta
August 14, 2012

According to the note at the beginning of the video, the Freedom From Religion Foundation has aired the following video on public television stations nationwide. In fact, it’s about to air “500 times in the next three months and reach three million people.”

While I really like the commentary, the whole clip looks like one of those movies I watched in grade school and fell asleep during… still, more of this, please. I suspect other people will love it.

If you see the TV spot come up in your area, don’t forget to thank the station managers!

(Thanks to MegaZeus Thor for the link!)

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  • Octoberfurst

    Nice video!

  • Respectful and direct. I love it.

  • Blacksheep

    Cute video, but a pretty big fact is wrong. Stating that more people have been killed because of religion than any other reason is not only misleading it’s so far from the truth it’s an outright lie. WWII alone killed almost 60 million people, largely because of greed and empire expansion. In second place is the definitively anti-theist regime of Mao Zedong, which comes in at 40 million. 20 million killed under Stalin’s leadership. It goes on and on like that. 
    –

    Even if you include all 200 years of the crusades, the estimates are in the 200,000 range. Still horrific – but it pales in comparison to the numbers above.
    –

    The medievil inquisitions, another inexcusible event, resulted in an estimated 6,000 deaths over a period of 500 years.
    –

    (By comparison, traffic accidents kill 40,000 Americans each year.)
    –

    From what I can see, most wars and the resulting death toll are because of human greed, selfishness, sometimes insanity.
    –

  • CanadianNihilist

     Well Hitler did use god and the bible on many occasions to justify his position. one of many examples:
    Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf:
    “I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the
    Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting
    for the work of the Lord..”

    No one is saying Hitler killed Jews because of Christianity, but he did use it as a tool to help spread hate.

    So the video stating that more people have been killed because of religion… is not technically wrong.

  •  Are you sure it’s public television and not public access television?  I suspect it is the later.

  • If you want to count all the deaths under Stalin and Mao because they were atheists, then you’d also have to count every single murder committed by every single theist in human history.  Pretty sure that will count against theism.

  • Blacksheep

    Some stats would be good. I still maintain that the overwhelming number of humans have been killed in the name of greed, selfishness, and evil, not because of religion.

  • Blacksheep

    No, it’s still wrong because the math does not add up. Hitler did not kill all 60 million people in WWII, it was worldwide insanity. Japan did their fair share too.

  • “greed, selfishness, and evil” (and I’d add ‘anger’ to that)

    Sure, but those aren’t “institutional forces”.  There are people who kill because they think their god wants them to.  And sure some of them are blaming God rather than thinking they’re listening to God.

    But there is no atheist ’cause’ to kill.  There are atheists who kill, obviously.  But the only connection you could possibly make with atheism is that there was no religion to stop them.  But since religion doesn’t stop so many believers from killing (for any reason) it doesn’t seem to be very good at preventing violence.

  • Clarissaz

     Bullshit…atheists kill because they want to wipe out believers.

    Lenin and Trotsky were masters of it.

  • Right.  That’s why they only killed theists and never atheists.  And why all death row inmates are atheists.

  • CanadianNihilist

    Japan was also being led by a man they believed to be a god. at least a direct descendant to Amaterasu. One of, if not thee most important god in the Shinto religion.
    Emperor  Hirohito probably also believed in his divinity and was practical role as leader of the Shinto religion.

    Your going to try to say that religion had nothing to do with it when the leader of the country/leader of religion goes to war?
    People follow tyrants because they use religion as a tool to lead the weak.