I can feel your anger

[CliveStaples]

Except that you have to believe a god exists to believe it spoke to you. Now try to pull that same trick off with atheism and murder. I'm not missing any point Clive, I'm trying to explain to you that you don't have one.

Can theism be implicated in some unfortunate bits of history as major contributing factor? Yes. Mainly do to the various representatives of theism all having poor track records. This would the the religion bit. Now, you don't really have to be a theist to be religious, que Buddhists, (many of which are technically atheists) and Buddhism can also be implicated in precisely the same sorts of shit. It's not as easy to do with atheism in the absence of religion because there are no agreed upon commands or principles, no guiding hand, so to speak. People will still do these things, theist or atheist, but theres simply nothing in atheism that can be offered as a solid justification. The various representatives of theism have a whole lot of built in qualifiers (probably because justification for this or that is usually a bundled feature).

Nope, you're still really, really missing the point.

You say that theism is responsible for some action because ultimately, the set of beliefs that motivated that action were theistic--i.e., included the belief, "At least one god exists".

You say that atheism can't be responsible, because atheism alone doesn't justify actions; atheism is defined by a lack of belief in God, and nothing else. That is, you need atheism PLUS some other belief in order to justify something like murder.

But the same thing is true of theism. Nobody is motivated to kill by the belief "At least one god exists." No, they're motivated by a particular implementation of theism--something like Catholicism, or Protestantism, or Islam, and so forth. That's theism PLUS a bunch of other, specific beliefs--beliefs that are not a necessary result of "At least one god exists."



Let's look at a specific example. Suppose Mr. A believes that God exists, and is telling him to kill Mr. Z because you're not Christian, while Mr. B doesn't believe that God exists, but believes that he should kill you because you're Jewish.

Now, Mr. A's justification is no more a result of theism than B's justification is a result of atheism. It is not a result of "At least one god exists" that "God is telling Mr. A to kill Mr. Z because Z isn't Christian." Likewise, it is not a result of atheism that Jews should be killed.

Rather, what is to blame are the particular set of beliefs that are motivating A's and B's actions. In A's case, the set of beliefs implements theism; in B's case, it implements atheism (i.e., it does not implement theism).


Let me ask it this way: Can you give me a series of valid deductions by which theism (the class of all belief systems that include "At least one god exists") is to blame by A's actions, but atheism (the class of all belief systems that do not include "At least one god exists") is not to blame by B's actions?