ThinkPlease: I give about as much weight to Stalin's statements as I do Jeffrey Dahmer's. Anyone who pushes responsibility for their actions away from themselves to a philosophy is copping out. I think the same case could be said for people who try use the same arguments to try to explain why philosphy X is better than Y because X has killed less people. This includes the author of this thread. Crazy people are found on both sides of the aisle, and trying to say that one side is crazier than the other is devolving the argument to an ad hominiem attack.
Oh, please, spare us the sophistry. Here's my original post. I stand by the facts cited and that ideas have consequences.
Godless Communism was responsible for upwards of 100 million deaths in the 20th Century, most of which were committed by the regimes upon subject populations. And how many fundamentalist Christian terrorist groups are you aware of? . . . "Secular Humanist" Darwinism was embraced by both Hitler and Stalin.
Perhaps I get too touchy when dealing with you, Phaedrus. Too often your comments are very blunt, and perhaps that rubs me the wrong way.
While I don't dispute that Stalin killed 100 million people, I do dispute that the very Godlessness of communism, or Darwinism was a major contributing factor in it.
Face it, when crazy people will do crazy things with any idea, look at Torquemada, or Bin Laden, or Richard the Lion Hearted or those idiots in Africa right now, or any other figure who uses religion to bludgeon people to death because they didn't worship the same religion they did. If you want to include Stalin et al, whatever, but others shouldn't get the idea that religions aren't immune to this kind of insanity either.