(February 11, 2015 at 12:33 pm)FreeTony Wrote: I'm a little confused. There must be loads of murders by Atheists every year, just as there are loads of murders by Christians, Muslims etc. This is the first time I've seen it mentioned that a killer is an Atheist.
It's actually rare enough to be news in the USA. We're about 0.02% of the prison population and more like 2% of the total population. If you mulch all the theists together, they commit all crimes at a much higher rate than we do, but if you tease it out, we're about the same as liberal Quakers, Jews, and Unitarians.
The religious views of the shooter might seem more relevant because the victims are members of an often denigrated religious minority. Maybe it's a case of 'Thank goodness it wasn't a Christian murdering Muslims for a change'.
(February 11, 2015 at 12:33 pm)FreeTony Wrote: It is quite interesting to perhap feel what moderate peaceful Muslims go through when one of their radical brothers commits a similar act.
Maybe it will help some folks who are low on empathy in that regard.
(February 11, 2015 at 12:33 pm)FreeTony Wrote: There are however a few differences:
1. As an Atheist I don't claim to be any more moral than a Theist, nor would I say that of other Atheists. Religious people often claim that by following their religion they are better. It is this claim that we may counter with examples of religious people doing horrible things.
However, many of us claim, and I'm one of them, that being an atheist doesn't make a person any more immoral than a theist.
(February 11, 2015 at 12:33 pm)FreeTony Wrote: 2. I'm not going to claim that this guy wasn't a "True Atheist".
Ditto.
(February 11, 2015 at 12:33 pm)FreeTony Wrote: 3. There is nothing in the God Delusion, nor the Atheist Experience, that says anything about killing people. This isn't true of all religious texts.
There's nothing in this guy's Facebook posts that indicates that he thinks Muslims or other religious people should be killed, either, He's big on guns, supports gay marriage, and thinks religion is a bad idea.
Apparently he was having some kind of dispute over parking with the man, and possibly his wife as well. It's an incredibly stupid thing to kill anyone over, but sometimes in these cases I think it's a matter of whether they have a deadly weapon handy when the last straw lands on a person who is about to snap.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.
