Date: Sun, 04 Aug 2002 02:46:36 -0400
From: S*****
Subject: Your Graphic...
To: darwin@atheists.net

http://www.atheists.net/images/MapToHell.gif
 
Right there, there are huge flaws in your argument. 
 
Since it's about 2 in the morning here, I'm not going to go through all of them right now.  I plan to go to bed right after this.  In the morning I'll have more energy to debate this out.
 
But as for
 
Hatred and Contempt
Despotic Political Regimes
Human Rights Violations
Religious and Ethnic Suppression
Spread of Weapons
Clashes
 
The Communists were guilty of practically every single one of these and they were an atheistic regime. 
 
Your claims that religion is the source of every problem is flawed.  Atheistic societies can show the same problems.
 
As for Less Education; the communists often got rid of Intellectuals, well Stalin did.  Intellectuals are smart enough to challenge authority and say "hey, that's bullshit!".  Stalin didn't like being told he was full of shit.
 
As for unsustainable population growth, populations grow rampant all the time without any method of controlling it.  Then you end up with more people than food and people die off in a famine.  The Chinese figured out ways around this by limiting the number of kids a family could have.
 
Disregard for human life is a characteristic of any dictatorial regime, which the communists were.  They had little regard for human life.  Let me remind you that Stalin had like 27,000,000 people excecuted.
 
As for increased pollution, that is a result of certain technological advancements.  Burning fuel produces pollution.  When we first developed internal combustion engines we didn't realize that the pollution had any effect.  Now that it does we have emission standards.  Cars have to be able to meet these emission standards. 
 
As for global warming and thinning ozone; we didn't know how much damage we were doing, by the time it was taken seriously, the damage was extremely significant.
 
The reason that we didn't realize it was plain ignorance.  We didn't know any better.  And the other reason was stupidity; we were warned and we didn't listen to the warnings, but false alarms sound all the time.  When people cry wolf enough and we don't see a wolf, we begin to disregard any claims of a wolf-sighting. 
 
I know, you'd like to claim every problem on earth is related to religion; I however would like to claim some of it is due to plain old human nature.  Eliminate religion, and we'd still have problems anyway.
 
- S*****