(November 29, 2018 at 10:06 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: Yet another common and commonly flawed grievance. No one is persecuting anyone on account of how no god told them to. This is just something that the religious have become fond of saying..and ofc, it's a repetition of US Cold War propaganda, so good job on carrying that line. You got a bit of that right, at least..yes..atheists here in north america are commonly humanists and commonly aligned with religious liberty. The religious, however, are not..lol. The religious overseas are no more inclined to humanism or liberty...and the far right populists to which you're referring are a massively religious lot themselves. Your boogeymen..themselves, Russia and China...simply privilege their own traditional and collaborating religions against those of the detested Other™.
“No one is persecuting anyone on account of how no god told them to” surely you can see the logical fallacy in that statement. Does persecution require that the persecutor persecute in the name of a deity?
Persecution is the treatment itself, regardless of whose name it is being done in. The modern states like Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Ho Chi Minh’s China, Castro’s Cuba, etc., persecute in the name of the state. In other words, the state itself is their substitute for any deity. I don’t think anyone here can compare the medieval inquisitions and witch trials to the 20th century holocaust, gulags, and “purges”, not to mention the ethnic genocides and autogenocides. In terms of scope there is simply no comparison.
Far-Right populism is essentially a non-religious phenomenon. There may be invocation of Christendom, but not really Christianity. I happen to regularly listen to far-right and alt-right discourse from their podcasts and they are unmistakably not motivated by religion at all, but rather by notions of race and racial identity. They want to preserve “Western civilization” feeling that the latter is a racially European civilization and without the racial component, Western civilization ceases to exist. What do they have to do with religion?
Listen to their spokespeople like Richard Spencer, himself a “tragic atheist”. The greatest influence on him is Nietzche not Jesus of Nazareth.
