(November 29, 2018 at 10:34 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: Further confirmation that I'm likely wasting my time. Meh..whatevs, I'll try to help you out anyway.
Perhaps -you- should see how that statement applies to the notion of "atheistic persecution" of the religious. Consider the statement "God wills it" alongside the statement "No God wills it!". Perhaps it'll jump out at you, this time.
Earlier inquisitors simply lacked the tools. They had all the necessary zeal and did impressive work for their time..but here you are, excusing them anyway. For reasons™. Directly after having tried to tie atheism to pretty much any dumb thing you thought you could float, lol.
LOL, stop.
I bet you do regularly listen to alt right trash, lol. Perhaps you might have noticed that euro jesus is a blond man with blue eyes? Religion and racial identity long ago coalesced into the same thing for rightwing nutballs. That jesus is too jewy for a nazi is unsurprising, but it didn't stop nazis from pandering or catholics from goosestepping. God was with them..but, you know, maybe, like, thor or somesuch. In truth, that biut of unpleasantness was entirely built out of explicitly religious pogroms spanning centuries. The muslims are still screaming about killing off the jews. Christians have largely moved on to bitching about how they're funding Killary Klinton.
: shrugs :
Like I said, when atheists persecute the religious it may not be in the name of a deity (obviously) but why does it have to be in the name of anything? Persecution is persecution regardless of motivation. When atheists persecute the religious it is simply because the atheists don't like religion and having contempt for the religious.
You say that the medieval inquisitions and examples of religious violence were proportionately as bad if not worse than the 20th century wars, purges and ethnic cleansing in the context of their time and means available to them. I beg to differ.
The truth is that if you look at the Spanish Inquisition, only about 1% of the total people who were tried were executed. That pales in comparison to the number of people that have been killed unjustly by 20th century authoritarian states with atheism as their official ideology, even if you want to compare proportionately.
And if you say that the atrocities committed by atheist states really had nothing to do with atheism but was about power and politics, the same is certainly true for the old religious wars. Religion was only used as a pretext for underlying motivations of wanting power.
As for me listening to alt-right material...it's simple "know thy enemy". As a racial and religious minority I'm probably more at risk from the rise of the Far-Right than you are. Of course I have a greater interest in understanding them than a white atheist who can afford to ignore them.
