Video discussion of this event by Steve Shives (known for his star trek videos but also does politics) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6aMQAv-JYpk
Video discussion of this event by Steve Shives (known for his star trek videos but also does politics) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6aMQAv-JYpk
a lot of awful things happen just today (not to mention historically) because of religion, tbf to be more precise, due to religious justifications
sure, and in 1958 they started killing all the sparrows in china and 15 million+ people starved to death. It’s not
religionatheism that caused that one; turns out that people fuck up whatever they want to and blame it on whatever; it doesn’t mean the thing they are blaming caused the thing that happenedThey didn’t say all bad things happened because of religion. Your example has nothing to do with religion at all, it was pure human stupidity, but when religious people do pure evil with the only justification being “because my religion says so”, you can’t not attribute it to religion if you want to be honest.
so when a schizophrenic kills a busfull of orphans and says Jesus told him to do it, the pope is to blame?
Do you think all religious wars were done and are done exclusively by schizophrenics?
No, I think “religious” wars are done for the acquisition of resources and use religion as propaganda to obtain support
It’s very convenient if for every example of religiously motivated atrocities you can just say “Nuh-huh, when they say ‘I do an atrocity in the name of my religion because my religion says that I should’ they actually secretly do it for some other unrelated reason”.
But even in this version of reality you propose, when nobody was ever motivated by religion to do anything bad, when someone says “let’s go kill all the heretics and steal their shit because our god says so”, killing the heretics still comes first, and it wouldn’t be as effective as “let’s go kill our neighbors and steal their shit because I want their shit”. If religion gives an excuse instead of justification, it’s still just as bad.
But I reiterate that we don’t live in your magical reality, and religion is both motivation and justification for a lot of shit.
Anything can be abused as an excuse, that doesn’t make the thing being falsely accused of being the excuse is to blame. Otherwise atheism is responsible for any suffering caused by an atheist.
Nobody ever started a war in the name of stamp collecting. Nobody ever raped a kid and used “but I’m a leader of the local board game club therefore I shouldn’t be punished” as an excuse. Nobody assaulted a person because their local woodworking club disagrees whom that person should and shouldn’t love.
Nobody ever did any of that in the name of atheism either. Because there is no sacred book of atheism that says that we should let 13 years old rape victim die in childbirth because the atheist doctrine doesn’t believe in bodily autonomy.
If your thing eagerly provides easy and available excuse to do the atrocity your thing is bad and shouldn’t exist. But to reiterate the point that you keep glossing over, your thing provides excuse, justification, motivation, direct orders, all of it, the whole package.