(September 17, 2022 at 6:28 pm)h311inac311 Wrote: What will prevent the murderer from telling you that he is a more evolved being which has the right to naturally select his victims for death in the hopes of wiping out their gene pool?
Sense of compassion. People have compassion so they realize that other people are suffering. The other thing is that people evolved to be social beings who need other people to survive, so if they kill everyone or steal from everyone they will ultimately harm themselves.
But what you are talking about is ideology. Ideology is used by rulers to override logic and compassion to dehumanize other people. Needless to say that religion is frequently used for that, like when Pope Urban II called Christians to slaughter people of other religions saying that they won't be killing humans but getting rid of evil in the world and actually committing an "act of love."
When it comes to gambling, gambling itself is bad because people lose money on it, they just need some logic to see that it is not worth it (unless they are one of the few people in the world who know how to gamble). But if let's say some man is sick and insists on gambling, his wife can divorce him, unless they are in some religion that subordinates women to men.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
