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
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.
how about “I am the executive of a film studio”? did they use that as an excuse? “I am rich as fuck”?
What about the purges against religious people carried out by communist dictatorships? That’s not in the name of atheism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Soviet_Union
atheist doctrine doesn’t believe in anything. you can say whatever you want as part of it and it will be due to “religion is wrong, thus doing X has no moral consequence, there is no god”
you can blame anything. Cartoons, video games, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre