The section about the French missionaries in this post about S Korean churches is possibly relevant - http://www.rjkoehler.com/2007/04/21/koreas-catholic-churches-gupodong-catholic-church/

If prayer worked, I might, but since it doesn’t, I won’t. And though I am totally against torture and killing of ANY religious group, I am not opposed to abolishing religion altogether. It is, more often than not, the cause of wars.

There is a simple way to do this without impinging on people’s personal rights; logic, reason, and rational thought. You start teaching these basic premises more thoroughly in schools, religion will eventually wither and die. Once you instill in young ones that some ancient people who lived in dirt huts had seriously flawed ideas of the world and that we know a heck of alot more about the world than they did, this will happen. Teach them that God endorsed, even commanded, genocide, slavery, oppression, etc. We now know these things to be immoral, so that’s a good starting point. All religions are ancient, old and busted. Time to evolve.

Power, greed and influence is the cause of wars. Not religion that is hi-jacked by power-hungry “leaders” of the world, past and/or present.

tor.que.mada meets double-byte characters is a nuclear combination

god doesnt exist. that’s all they had to say. saying isnt believing. does this actually prove strength of faith, or mere christian stupidity?

FYI, you can see the whole article for free by using a UserAgent switcher and setting your User Agent to that of the GoogleBot.

2795 °F is a pretty high temperature to be able to generate in a prison. I could see maybe saying it was molten lead (621 °F), or even aluminum (1220 °F), but molten iron seems like a stretch to me. I learned a long time ago not to believe anything that anyone who bases their life on faith and not facts tells me.

religion should be abolished. especially christianity. it’s followers like to claim moral high-ground, but their scripture is filled with murders, stoning, baby-killing, and “rules of rape”. if you deny this it’s obviously been quite a while since you’ve read all of the bible, or rather you think it sufficient to listen to the small selected phrases your preacher turns out. fuck your god.

christianity should be abolished, as well as all religion. christians need to stop claiming moral high-ground as long as they take advice from a book that advocates torture, rape, and murder of women and disobedient children as well as animal sacrifices. doesn’t sound familiar? maybe you should actually read the bible instead of simply going to church.

Oh, come on guys; just because this article is drawing a lot of—obviously—atheist attention is no reason to be heartless. I despise religion and think all of them are complete hogwash, but that doesn’t mean that I think that believers deserve torture. Believers, regardless how asinine their beliefs, are still human and deserving of inherent respect. There’s no call for this kind of inference that they “deserve” to be tortured—for their beliefs, or anything else. Given the nature of North Korea, the guards and establishment tends to find something, anything, to torture and hurt people for. Politics, religion, etc. I doubt anyone but those utterly aligned with the State completely evades harsh treatment.

While I find it hard to believe that North Korea has the facilities in their prisons to warm iron to melting point, I still feel for the plight of any and all those who suffer under dictatorships like that of North Korea. I may be atheist, but I’m not heartless.

Eradicating religion won’t stop all instances of brutality like these, as much as we’d hope it would. Bad men will still find excuses for their atrocities.

Kim Jong Il is human scum. Some of the comments in here are pretty bad and naive as well. Unable to grasp the notion of faith, geez. Get outside of your western bubble sometime, there are other religions out there besides Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. That Dali Lama is one evil d00d, right?

And you rip and tear into Christianity, yet I bet if you are American chances are you were born in a hospital that was named after a saint. You ever notice that? The number of hospitals that are named after saints? Do you know why that is? It must be because religion is evil and needs to be abolished…

Now go be good little moral relativists and worship the state. Moving to a place like NK would be a good start.

Listening to you angry interwebbers rail on how evil religion is makes me think of the Stalin quote, “how many battalions does the pope have?” Look up John Paul II and the Solidarity Movement and you’ll see that he had plenty, then talk more trash about how evil religion is.

The fact that some religious people are greedy and power-hungry won’t be a good enough excuse when you meet your Maker: God didn’t tell us to put our faith in religious people, but in His Son, our Lord and only Saviour Jesus Christ.