Damned STUPID Priest yesterday . . .

[Cherub786]

"Democratic Kampuchea was officially an atheist state, and the persecution of religion by the Khmer Rouge was matched in severity only by the persecution of religion in the communist states of Albania and North Korea, so there were not any direct historical continuities of Buddhism into the Democratic Kampuchea era."
Wessinger, Catherine (2000). Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence: Historical Cases. Syracuse University Press. p. 282. ISBN 9780815628095.

That still doesn't support your statement that they were motivated by atheism or hatred of religion.  I'm an atheist, but when I eat food, I can tell you it isn't motivated by my atheism.  Telling us that they were atheists tells us nothing about what their motives were.

They were motivated by the desire to create a religion-less society. That obviously came from their atheism.

[GUBU]

You can do better than that wyzas, I want numbers, extinction numbers. I mean we theists did our part but i’ll take Marxist like regimes for 250 million Alex.
Let’s continue the false dichotomy of theist vs. secular. Fundamentalism vs. anti religious. It all leads to the same place that people can kill regardless of their philosophies. What is true is that denser populations and more efficient and horrible ways to kill exponentially increases the death toll. We should blame science for increasing life spans and reducing sickness and giving us tons of ways to easily kill. That’s it, science is the biggest killer, let’s quit that shit🤐

In the course of of 80 years the USSR killed maybe a few hundred people explicity for religion (they killed a lot more religious people for other reasons). The openly christian Nazi Germany killed at least 6,000,000 on religious grounds. And earlier in the century the openly shia Turkish caliphate killed between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 because of religion.

[Belacqua]

The openly christian Nazi Germany killed at least 6,000,000 on religious grounds.

You're really stretching it to say that the murders were done on religious grounds. 

In the early days of WWI as the German army proceeded through Belgium, it was considered good strategy to kill all the priests they could find. They calculated that priests could have authority in organizing local resistance. The motivation was power and land, which easily overrode religious comradeship.

Nazism was rooted in ethnic theories. These theories derived from the Enlightenment project to explain national and regional differences through materialist explanations. (That is, not the blessings and promises of God, but "scientific" things like blood and inheritance.) Montesquieu, for example, said that national character was determined by climate (with the French climate being the best, of course). For a long time there were influential theories going around that ethnic differences, differences of blood, scientific differences, determined which "race" was superior. It is horrifying to read the opinions of influential Enlightenment philosophers on the scientific (they thought) facts concerning blacks, Asians, and "Semitic" peoples. 

Nazis adopted a ridiculously simple ethnic view in which Aryans were superior, as demonstrated by the empirical facts of history. Semites, they argued, were demonstrably inferior. The fact that Semites were allowed to have influential positions in German culture, or even to mingle their blood with purer races, was to them horrifying. 

This had nothing to do with religion in the sense of belief, theology, etc. It had nothing to do with the soteriological views of the Semites. It was blood. And the Nazis fought for "blood and soil." 

They were perfectly happy to murder Christian gays, Christian handicapped people, etc. If it were a religious question, of belief, Jews could have saved themselves by converting. But that wasn't what the Nazis measured to determine who lived and who died. They measured ethnic percentages. 

Yes, it said "God with us" on their uniforms. Dimwits are comforted by the idea that cannon fodder goes to heaven. But Wall Street traders also deal in currency that says "In God we trust" on it, and it's not God's trust that they're working for.

[Cherub786]

Notions of Aryan supremacy and a superior race of people, if anything, came from Vedic religion and not Christianity

The swastika is a Hindu symbol, especially used by the Brahmins and the Arya Samaj (Aryan Society):



As for the "Armenian genocide" it had nothing to do with religion. In fact it was driven by the secularist Young Turk movement that was against religion.

[GUBU]

The openly christian Nazi Germany killed at least 6,000,000 on religious grounds.

You're really stretching it to say that the murders were done on religious grounds. 

In the early days of WWI as the German army proceeded through Belgium, it was considered good strategy to kill all the priests they could find. They calculated that priests could have authority in organizing local resistance. The motivation was power and land, which easily overrode religious comradeship.

Nazism was rooted in ethnic theories. These theories derived from the Enlightenment project to explain national and regional differences through materialist explanations. (That is, not the blessings and promises of God, but "scientific" things like blood and inheritance.) Montesquieu, for example, said that national character was determined by climate (with the French climate being the best, of course). For a long time there were influential theories going around that ethnic differences, differences of blood, scientific differences, determined which "race" was superior. It is horrifying to read the opinions of influential Enlightenment philosophers on the scientific (they thought) facts concerning blacks, Asians, and "Semitic" peoples. 

Nazis adopted a ridiculously simple ethnic view in which Aryans were superior, as demonstrated by the empirical facts of history. Semites, they argued, were demonstrably inferior. The fact that Semites were allowed to have influential positions in German culture, or even to mingle their blood with purer races, was to them horrifying. 

This had nothing to do with religion in the sense of belief, theology, etc. It had nothing to do with the soteriological views of the Semites. It was blood. And the Nazis fought for "blood and soil." 

They were perfectly happy to murder Christian gays, Christian handicapped people, etc. If it were a religious question, of belief, Jews could have saved themselves by converting. But that wasn't what the Nazis measured to determine who lived and who died. They measured ethnic percentages. 

Yes, it said "God with us" on their uniforms. Dimwits are comforted by the idea that cannon fodder goes to heaven. But Wall Street traders also deal in currency that says "In God we trust" on it, and it's not God's trust that they're working for.

Denying the holocaust now, lad?

[Belacqua]

Denying the holocaust now, lad?

What a bizarre thing to say.

You are denying the real causes of the holocaust. 

It would be unfortunate if it turned out that you want to re-write history into something false in order to put the blame on something you don't like.

[brewer]

You can do better than that wyzas, I want numbers, extinction numbers. I mean we theists did our part but i’ll take Marxist like regimes for 250 million Alex.
Let’s continue the false dichotomy of theist vs. secular. Fundamentalism vs. anti religious. It all leads to the same place that people can kill regardless of their philosophies. What is true is that denser populations and more efficient and horrible ways to kill exponentially increases the death toll. We should blame science for increasing life spans and reducing sickness and giving us tons of ways to easily kill. That’s it, science is the biggest killer, let’s quit that shit🤐

I just took the discussion to a logical reductio ad absurdum. Don't be offended that a book says your god kills. A book written by god if I understand the majority of theists I run into. 

Saying science is the biggest killer is just silly. You've just ignored all of the other killers in earth's vast history, from virus to comets.

[The Grand Nudger]

That still doesn't support your statement that they were motivated by atheism or hatred of religion.  I'm an atheist, but when I eat food, I can tell you it isn't motivated by my atheism.  Telling us that they were atheists tells us nothing about what their motives were.

They were motivated by the desire to create a religion-less society. That obviously came from their atheism.

They weren't, and it didn't.  As has been discussed in thread, the motivation was twofold - and the primary motivations lead to the eventual rationalization that expressed itself in their official stance.  First, institutionally, it was the need that seems to be felt by every despotic regime to silence critics.  At the popular level, it was motivated by the socio-economic reality of the buddhist temples of the time..which had become a place for unemployed men to laze around while stealing food from the poor under the auspices of piety and with the sanction of the previous regime.  These two things combined to form the propagandists reason...that buddhism was a monument to monks who asserted that social inequality was the proper state of affairs, now gimme your food and money. Buddhism was seen as one of the "three mountains" that had to be toppled in order to build a more fair and just society. A collaborater with the colonialist masters..which, in plain point of fact...it was.

Our, you know..hurr dur, atheists did it cuz atheism.

50/50

Nevermind the fact that they, too, were fucking buddhists, who were attacking an institution moreso than the belief system, lol. For more interesting trivia, and again as discussed in thread, it has become exactly what it was then in recent times..leading people to feel the same way about it, despite not being khmer rouge cultists. What we can see in this dynamic, is that the appraisal and general sentiment towards buddhist temples and monks exceeds the boundaries of the regimes ideology - it isn;t produced by that ideology, but more that the khmer rouge took advantage of that then-and-now present state of affairs to achieve it's own end, not the formation of a "godless" state (redundant, all states are godless, there is no god) or the suppression of religion..those were simply the means, but un-contested authority.

[Amarok]

They were motivated by the desire to create a religion-less society. That obviously came from their atheism

Nope it was motivated by not wanting a alternative power structure and anti theism is not atheism

[tackattack]

Why not just eliminating supernatural and natural killers, we are talking about humans here so let's leave out dingo killing and just focus on humans. Are you really denying that the biggest numbers come from modern superpowers?
I don't really distinguish between those that kill for God, or because of God, and those that kill for irreligious reasons or kill in response to religion or a hatred for religion. If Jihadest didn't have the Quran, they'd still find some other reason to kill. If Christians didn't have the Bible, and wanted to kill some witches and take over some lands and get some loot, they'd have found another reason for it.

My point was..here let's go through the absurdities:
1. Guilt by association- negative actions of any and all X reflect badly upon all X, all forms of beliefs held by X
2. Excluded middle- The big 20th century regimes were either by religious, irreligious. By those touting their religion or by a desire to destroy religion.
3. Snow Job- let's posit tons of supporting arguments and numbers to support and classify each side. Let's not, they're only marginally-relevant.
4. microscopically smaller and less dense populous and fractionally less practical mass murder tools in history make mass genocide much harder than it is today.
5. science attempts to limit populations, alter genes, invents more mass destruction capabilities, lengthens lifespans all without regard for cause or moral value outcomes.

All 5 of the above points are completely worthless. Science, religion, hate, fear, don't kill people any more than guns kill people. People will justify their actions with whatever is handy.
I'd rather see a conversation about trying to understand human motivations to kill and whether any social construct (law, morality, etc.) can prevent people from killing others, or are we all just domed for genocide?