"Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important."

[Qwark]

DarthVolod said:

o_O.Q said:

there are penalties imposed implicitly and explicitly simply from living in civilisation no matter what, that doesn't go away even if you destroy all religion and i'd argue that it can get incredibly inhumane when atheism takes hold of a society, such as in the soviet union

its a perpetual problem of existing as a human being that's being framed by naive people as a problem stemming only from religion as opposed to simply coming as a result of humans coming together and forming groups and needing limitations to coexist peacefully

That is an evasion though ... I'm not talking about penalties imposed by civilization (not sure what you are referring to here). I'm talking about the implicit claim in the quote that argues that it would be better to believe in God (specifically the Christian God; ignoring all the other gods that have been claimed to exist) in order to avoid the consequences of not believing in it. I'm arguing that you should not believe in anything without proof / evidence first. We can speculate about many things, but what we should certainly not do is rearrange our lives (and society as a whole) based on a metaphysical belief that has not one shred of evidence in support of it. 

I'd argue that the Soviet Union (and communist states in general) was merely a different variety of religion that places society (which does not exist, a society is just a large collection of individuals) as a super organism of sorts that people must obey and serve. 

A society can exist based on a rational world view centered on reason / evidence. I would recommend looking into the concept of anarcho-capitalism (as for a political theory) and rational egoism (for a moral world view) as examples of means of arranging society without a God or gods or god-like super states. Atheism is a very broad spectrum ... not all atheists are communists, some, like myself, are the exact opposite. 

Some countries like the Netherlands and China can already be considered Atheist/Agnostic since more than 50% of the population doesn't have faith in religion. More countries in Western Europe will follow this decade.