Why are atheists leaders/societies so cruel?

[zen]

It is from a Christian PoV but still interesting:

 

 

[Real McCoy]

14 hours ago, zen said:

 

 

 

One of the comments on the video is more accurate than this video. Here it is

Here’s some quotes which proves that Hitler was no atheist: "I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator." - Mein Kampf, p.46 ""I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Almighty Creator. By fighting the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work." - Mein Kampf, p. 65 "We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity.... in fact our movement is Christian. Adolf Hitler, speech in Passau, 1928 "I am now as before a Catholic, and will always remain so." - Adolf Hitler to Gen. Gerhard Engels, 1941 Yes, I know the Hitler preferred religion similar to the one the Japanese had, or Islam, which is why he wanted to change Christianity. Criticizing your own religion doesn't automatically make you a non-believer. And before you turn to no true Scotsman fallacies, who is to say who is a true Christian or not? Let's not forget that in the Bible your god told his followers to slaughter people in his name. For reference look at Exodus 32:27-29 and Numbers 31:17. So any religious tyrant could've just refer to any of those verses to justify their atrocities.

[zen]

5 hours ago, Real McCoy said:

One of the comments on the video is more accurate than this video. Here it is

Here’s some quotes which proves that Hitler was no atheist: "I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator." - Mein Kampf, p.46 ""I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Almighty Creator. By fighting the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work." - Mein Kampf, p. 65 "We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity.... in fact our movement is Christian. Adolf Hitler, speech in Passau, 1928 "I am now as before a Catholic, and will always remain so." - Adolf Hitler to Gen. Gerhard Engels, 1941 Yes, I know the Hitler preferred religion similar to the one the Japanese had, or Islam, which is why he wanted to change Christianity. Criticizing your own religion doesn't automatically make you a non-believer. And before you turn to no true Scotsman fallacies, who is to say who is a true Christian or not? Let's not forget that in the Bible your god told his followers to slaughter people in his name. For reference look at Exodus 32:27-29 and Numbers 31:17. So any religious tyrant could've just refer to any of those verses to justify their atrocities.

Many experts, who have read Mein Kampf too, including Alan Bullock, who has written Hitler, a study in tyranny, have said that later on he turned anti-Christian/Atheist (non believer of God). In fact, he is more likely to have respected nature 

We are beyond quoting Mein Kampf (written early on in his life, which most experts have read), talking about some religious symbol, etc., ... 

 

Based on your limited research and reading mein kampf, if you believe Hitler was a Christian, I have no issues with it though. As I said, per many experts, he was an atheist 

[Real McCoy]

56 minutes ago, zen said:

Many experts, who have read Mein Kampf too, including Alan Bullock, who has written Hitler, a study in tyranny, have said that later on he turned anti-Christian/Atheist (non believer of God). In fact, he is more likely to have respected nature 

We are beyond quoting Mein Kampf (written early on in his life, which most experts have read), talking about some religious symbol, etc., ... 

 

Based on your limited research and reading mein kampf, if you believe Hitler was a Christian, I have no issues with it though. As I said, per many experts, he was an atheist 

I don't rely on expert opinions (which can carry special interest groups' interests) nor do I claim to be an expert either. I haven't read any books only presenting what that user posted. I do believe that EVERY thing on TV is a piece of propaganda. So I dismiss it including the anti-german propaganda after the war.

[zen]

13 minutes ago, Real McCoy said:

I don't rely on expert opinions (which can carry special interest groups' interests) nor do I claim to be an expert either. I haven't read any books only presenting what that user posted. I do believe that EVERY thing on TV is a piece of propaganda. So I dismiss it including the anti-german propaganda after the war.

Ok, so you have not read Mein Kampf, which can be a good thing. When I was in college, I started to read Mein Kampf but discovered that it had a hypnotic ability to make you want to hate so I stopped reading it. Maybe will revisit it someday. 
 

 

[zen]

One of the atheists that I despise is Rajneesh. The guy turned his ashram in to a harem, also teaching women how to be prostitutes (called getting $ for "it" as little sweets or something) and smuggle drugs. One of his goals was probably to create mindless zombies, which many of his followers turned into through his mind control initiatives. Many of his followers probably deserved that but sadly, the kids of these followers, who grew up there, were not spared as well (in all aspects). 

 

 

Bhagwan’s Mind Control

An ex-disciple describes Rajneesh brainwashing methods.

CATHY CHENEY

“Before I left for Pune [Poona, India], I was a very capable, articulate, professional woman,” claims Roselyn Smith, a forty-one-year-old social worker who was known as Ma Prem Sugatha when she followed the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. “When I got back I was in a totally hypnotic state. I was absolutely helpless.”

 

Although Rajneesh officials categorically deny that they practice mind control in any form, some ex-Rajneeshees, as well as some professional counselors who have studied the Rajneesh organization and interviewed ex-members like Smith, think otherwise. Smith believes that she was the subject of a very sophisticated program of mental manipulation while a member of Rajneesh’s “pseudo-religious, totalistic cult.”

 

Adrian Greek and Josh Baran, counselors in Portland and Berkeley, California, respectively, who deal with the social readjustment problems of ex-cult followers, think after recently interviewing Smith that her perceptions of her Rajneesh experiences are accurate. Greek and Baran say that the experiences she describes are similar to those described by other former members of the group.

 

Smith, who holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Boston University and a master’s degree in social work from Arizona State University, was a tenured instructor in psychology at Aims Community College in Colorado in 1980 when she decided to journey to the Bhagwan’s ashram in Pune, India, to seek enlightenment. In her first week at the ashram, she recounts, she plunged into a four-day “breath therapy” group in which participants did “slow, deep, forceful” breathing for hours on end in order to achieve a state of emotional regression and catharsis. On the third day, she says, she went into a cathartic state—“an altered state, like a trance”—that lasted for about four hours. “I went through a regression where I felt like I was a baby again,” she recalls. “When I opened my eyes I saw this huge poster of Bhagwan. I looked at him and felt he was a savior, an incarnation of love.”

 

Smith’s next experience at the ashram, she relates, was a five-day “intensive enlightenment” group. Greek considers the enlightenment intensive to be a virtual paradigm of the Rajneesh “resocialization” process. In an enlightenment intensive, Greek explains, participants spend up to seventeen hours a day, in five-minute intervals, alternately answering and listening to a partner answer the question “Who Am I?” Participants change partners every forty minutes and are not allowed to have any contact with nonparticipants on days the group is in progress. Greek thinks the exercise “plunges people into their unconscious and cuts them off from past support systems without letting them establish any real relationships in the present” a result that, he says, is the very foundation of mind control.

 

Smith says that her next experience at the Pune ashram, that of floating in a Rajneesh “samadhi” (enlightenment) tank—a lightproof, windproof sensory-deprivation tank filled with heated saltwater and resembling a coffin—was much more disorienting for her than the enlightenment intensive. Smith says she floated in her assigned samadhi tank for an hour a day on two consecutive days, until she went into a “deep, penetrating catharsis” in which she sobbed uncontrollably for five straight hours about a herd of horses she saw brutally slaughtered as a child. Smith calls this cathartic experience “a nightmare.”

 

“You’d think by this point that with all my training in psychology I’d realize I was tampering with something dangerous,” Smith says. “But I believed Rajneesh was an enlightened master and that he knew what he was doing.” Smith had taught a course on mind control at Aims Community College.

 

Smith says that the capstone of her indoctrination at Pune was a fourteen-day “insight group.” It is this type of group, under the designation “encounter group,” whose free-for-all sexuality and shocking physical violence are portrayed in the film Ashram, made by a German ex-sannyasin. After the worldwide publicity surrounding the mass cult suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, in November 1978, ashram officials proscribed further violence in the encounter group and changed its name, but Smith says that verbal abuse and orgiastic sex were still common in the group when she went through it.

 

“The purpose of the insight group,” in Smith’s opinion, “was to break you down completely, to destroy any remnant of self-confidence or self-trust you had left, any sense at all of your own integrity.” Smith says that by the end of the insight group she was “in a total state of mind control. I was,” she says, “a goner. A total follower. A fanatic.”

 

Smith says that, even with the help of expert counseling, it has taken her well over a year to begin to recover from the Rajneesh experience. “After those groups, I had no trust left in my own decision making,” she says. “It can sometimes take years for ex-Rajneeshees to regain a sense of self-confidence and self-worth,” says Baran.

 

Smith also says that she is “very ethically concerned” about what may be happening to followers at Rajneeshpuram, which she says is “in some ways like a gulag . . . the closest thing to a concentration camp I’ve ever seen. Most of the public has no idea of what’s really going on there,” she alleges. “They don’t realize what mind control is, that when someone takes over your mind you’re absolutely helpless. . . . I had techniques used on me that were far more subtle and more powerful than I could have ever comprehended. I’m an example of how powerful those techniques are.”

[Tibarn]

This is because the logical conclusion to Atheism is moral relativism and existential nihilism. 

 

Not everyone gets there, but once one does, like Hitler or Mao, they can make "anti-human" decisions with little care. After all, the idea that human life has any inherent value is itself a belief/belief-system and not a fact. 

 

[rkt.india]

On 5/29/2021 at 11:32 PM, zen said:

One of the atheists that I despise is Rajneesh. The guy turned his ashram in to a harem, also teaching women how to be prostitutes (called getting $ for "it" as little sweets or something) and smuggle drugs. One of his goals was probably to create mindless zombies, which many of his followers turned into through his mind control initiatives. Many of his followers probably deserved that but sadly, the kids of these followers, who grew up there, were not spared as well (in all aspects). 

 

 

Bhagwan’s Mind Control

An ex-disciple describes Rajneesh brainwashing methods.

CATHY CHENEY

“Before I left for Pune [Poona, India], I was a very capable, articulate, professional woman,” claims Roselyn Smith, a forty-one-year-old social worker who was known as Ma Prem Sugatha when she followed the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. “When I got back I was in a totally hypnotic state. I was absolutely helpless.”

 

Although Rajneesh officials categorically deny that they practice mind control in any form, some ex-Rajneeshees, as well as some professional counselors who have studied the Rajneesh organization and interviewed ex-members like Smith, think otherwise. Smith believes that she was the subject of a very sophisticated program of mental manipulation while a member of Rajneesh’s “pseudo-religious, totalistic cult.”

 

Adrian Greek and Josh Baran, counselors in Portland and Berkeley, California, respectively, who deal with the social readjustment problems of ex-cult followers, think after recently interviewing Smith that her perceptions of her Rajneesh experiences are accurate. Greek and Baran say that the experiences she describes are similar to those described by other former members of the group.

 

Smith, who holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Boston University and a master’s degree in social work from Arizona State University, was a tenured instructor in psychology at Aims Community College in Colorado in 1980 when she decided to journey to the Bhagwan’s ashram in Pune, India, to seek enlightenment. In her first week at the ashram, she recounts, she plunged into a four-day “breath therapy” group in which participants did “slow, deep, forceful” breathing for hours on end in order to achieve a state of emotional regression and catharsis. On the third day, she says, she went into a cathartic state—“an altered state, like a trance”—that lasted for about four hours. “I went through a regression where I felt like I was a baby again,” she recalls. “When I opened my eyes I saw this huge poster of Bhagwan. I looked at him and felt he was a savior, an incarnation of love.”

 

Smith’s next experience at the ashram, she relates, was a five-day “intensive enlightenment” group. Greek considers the enlightenment intensive to be a virtual paradigm of the Rajneesh “resocialization” process. In an enlightenment intensive, Greek explains, participants spend up to seventeen hours a day, in five-minute intervals, alternately answering and listening to a partner answer the question “Who Am I?” Participants change partners every forty minutes and are not allowed to have any contact with nonparticipants on days the group is in progress. Greek thinks the exercise “plunges people into their unconscious and cuts them off from past support systems without letting them establish any real relationships in the present” a result that, he says, is the very foundation of mind control.

 

Smith says that her next experience at the Pune ashram, that of floating in a Rajneesh “samadhi” (enlightenment) tank—a lightproof, windproof sensory-deprivation tank filled with heated saltwater and resembling a coffin—was much more disorienting for her than the enlightenment intensive. Smith says she floated in her assigned samadhi tank for an hour a day on two consecutive days, until she went into a “deep, penetrating catharsis” in which she sobbed uncontrollably for five straight hours about a herd of horses she saw brutally slaughtered as a child. Smith calls this cathartic experience “a nightmare.”

 

“You’d think by this point that with all my training in psychology I’d realize I was tampering with something dangerous,” Smith says. “But I believed Rajneesh was an enlightened master and that he knew what he was doing.” Smith had taught a course on mind control at Aims Community College.

 

Smith says that the capstone of her indoctrination at Pune was a fourteen-day “insight group.” It is this type of group, under the designation “encounter group,” whose free-for-all sexuality and shocking physical violence are portrayed in the film Ashram, made by a German ex-sannyasin. After the worldwide publicity surrounding the mass cult suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, in November 1978, ashram officials proscribed further violence in the encounter group and changed its name, but Smith says that verbal abuse and orgiastic sex were still common in the group when she went through it.

 

“The purpose of the insight group,” in Smith’s opinion, “was to break you down completely, to destroy any remnant of self-confidence or self-trust you had left, any sense at all of your own integrity.” Smith says that by the end of the insight group she was “in a total state of mind control. I was,” she says, “a goner. A total follower. A fanatic.”

 

Smith says that, even with the help of expert counseling, it has taken her well over a year to begin to recover from the Rajneesh experience. “After those groups, I had no trust left in my own decision making,” she says. “It can sometimes take years for ex-Rajneeshees to regain a sense of self-confidence and self-worth,” says Baran.

 

Smith also says that she is “very ethically concerned” about what may be happening to followers at Rajneeshpuram, which she says is “in some ways like a gulag . . . the closest thing to a concentration camp I’ve ever seen. Most of the public has no idea of what’s really going on there,” she alleges. “They don’t realize what mind control is, that when someone takes over your mind you’re absolutely helpless. . . . I had techniques used on me that were far more subtle and more powerful than I could have ever comprehended. I’m an example of how powerful those techniques are.”

What Rajneesh did wasn't atheism. People were calling him bhagwan. Atheism me koi bhagwan nahi hota.

[zen]

41 minutes ago, rkt.india said:

What Rajneesh did wasn't atheism. People were calling him bhagwan. Atheism me koi bhagwan nahi hota.

By Atheism, it is implied shoving key religions/gods (beliefs). Not creating a fraud where you try replace the gods with yourself to advance your agenda … Two different things

 

I do not know why you take time to make such comments. Ppl, esp. familiar w/ such subjects, know that he called himself Bhagwan, which he wasn’t and to probably make fun of Gods, and has been exposed enough to change his name to Osho 

 

Edited June 7, 2021 by zen

[zen]

Talking about Rajneesh, I have read on him, watched his videos, even watched some of the secret videos of what went on at his ashrams (shocking), tried to analyze his methods, etc., I do not care much about the adults who went there but felt uncomfortable for the kids that I have seen in various videos growing up there. A part of me always felt sad about what these innocent kids would have gone through esp. considering that one of the key goals of the ashram was to discourage serious relationships where the parents would be seperated (take away all your "real" support structure). They even gave you a new name to probably try to slowly cut you from your past. 
 

Based on how kids, future followers, were treated, Rajneesh may have wanted them to remain semi illiterate (so probably tried to close the doors for them to have a potential life outside the ashram)  

 

Below is a sad account of one of such kids, who suffered due to the unfortunate decision of his loser parents: 

 

In Poona:

 

Noa’s family soon agreed that this was their new life. After returning to the UK to sell the farm, they came back to India, Noa’s parents, Noa and his younger brother. His older one has a different dad and didn’t come, which would cause a lot of pain to his mum.

 

Noa remembers visiting Rajneesh to be given new sannyasin names and other kids running up and asking: “What’s your new name?” He couldn’t remember and had to ask his mum. Noa Maxwell’s new name was Swami Deva Rupam.

 

Soon Noa’s mum was living in one place in the ashram, his dad somewhere else, and Noa was in the kids’ hut. “We had been a tight, 70s middle-class family, and within a very short period that family unit was ripped up,” he says.

 

The children’s hut was an octagonal bamboo structure with bunks. Noa and the other kids – from Australia, Germany, America – were pretty much left to their own devices. There was a school, “run by this crazy English hippie called Sharma with long blond hair and a guitar and we would sing ‘We all live in the orange submarine’. I don’t know how much it mattered if we were in school or not. When I eventually did get back to this country when I was 10 I couldn’t read anything or write anything, or do two plus two.”

 

He did learn how to smoke. And at the age of six he got accidentally stoned by eating hash cake.

 

Noa was certainly aware of the sex. “You could hear people having orgasmic sex all the time. All night, like mating baboons, gibbons.”

 

And he knew his parents had different partners. Was that upsetting? “I never showed upset. The narrative – particularly from my dad – was: this is fantastic, you’re fantastic. So I showed fantastic. I know my mum was struggling. She has said since she was already massively questioning what we’d done. They were notionally still together but we weren’t living as a family unit.”

 

He says he can understand the appeal of Rajneesh, the aura of the man, the extraordinary voice, his charisma. “But I think without doubt he was deeply culpable, guilty of neglect of his people and did massive damage to many of them.” He doesn’t like seeing pictures of him. And he has fundamental problems with the message. “For me, the meaning of my life is about family, family relationships, and that was blatantly disregarded in the idea that these kids are just going to be happy growing up in this wild place.”

 

 

In Oregon:

 

Noa remembers the crazy, fevered work that was being done. And the elements, being colder in winter than he had ever experienced, and brutally hot in summer. Again, he lived with the other kids, running wild, trying to jump on to ice blocks floating on the river, killing snakes, putting spiders and wasps into cassette boxes to see which would kill which. In many ways it was brilliant.

 

He has one sad memory. “There was one night when we got hold of a barrel of beer and we were just necking the beer on and on, and suddenly for the first time I got really drunk. If you think about it, aged 10, it’s a bit early. Then I just started wailing for my mum and dad, I just wanted them.”

 

He says they – the kids – were probably a little bit more advanced with sex, too. “Not madly, well it depends who, but I think we probably were a bit further ahead. We were further ahead with everything.”

 

He thinks the series (Wild Wild ...) focuses too much on the conflict between sannyasins and rednecks. “That is interesting, but the inside story is more interesting – of how you end up with lots of intelligent middle-class people like my family going into where they got to, the heart of darkness. How does that happen? It’s like an ideal is bigger than reality and can make you lose your sense of justice and what’s right in the world.”

 

 

Back in UK:

 

Noa’s mother ended up wanting out – she had been uncomfortable even in Poona. They had come back to Britain, the marriage was over; she was going to stay in Norfolk, his dad was returning to Oregon and Noa and his brother were given a choice. “I remember sitting in the back of the car and they said: ‘What do you want to do?’ I said: ‘I want to stay and go to school and learn things.’” Noa’s brother made the same decision.

 

That has been Noa’s response to his “weirdo” childhood, to go diametrically opposite to everything he experienced. “I wanted to as be normal as possible, I made a lot of choices that would give me something solid.”

 

He says it was a good thing he got out when he did. “If I’d stayed longer I think the disengagement with the real world would have become more accentuated. That’s the sense I get from kids who stayed longer. I imagine it was hard to assimilate back and a lot of them ended up deeper in that kind of fringe world.”

 

 

Link

 

PS Stay away from his videos if you lack depth or are going through a tough or uncertain phase as you could be easily influenced (his talk appears to be designed to corrupt such ppl more) 

Edited June 7, 2021 by zen

[zen]

After these zombies have finished the day doing manual labor, they could be subjected to this:

 

 

 

[coffee_rules]

Why are you talking about Osho in this thread? He was not an atheist! This is no atheism. He started something that was based on a religion that later followers made it a cult.

[zen]

13 minutes ago, coffee_rules said:

Why are you talking about Osho in this thread? He was not an atheist! This is no atheism. He started something that was based on a religion that later followers made it a cult.

 

Not at all. Rajneesh was an atheist (non believer of Gods of key religions) ... Anyone can start any religion or whatever to create a fraud or further his agenda, that does not mean much ... I suggest you do some research but will leave you with this:

 

 

 

 

Rajneesh, an atheist created a deplorable society at his ashrams. His cruelness destroyed many 

Edited June 7, 2021 by zen

[zen]

13 hours ago, Tibarn said:

This is because the logical conclusion to Atheism is moral relativism and existential nihilism. 

 

Not everyone gets there, but once one does, like Hitler or Mao, they can make "anti-human" decisions with little care. After all, the idea that human life has any inherent value is itself a belief/belief-system and not a fact. 

 

 

excellent points!

[Tibarn]

The funniest part is when humanism is conflated with rationality by people who allegedly believe in science. 

Edited June 9, 2021 by Tibarn