Damned STUPID Priest yesterday . . .

[Amarok]

 Marxist like regimes for 250 million Alex.

Nope that rightly them as groups that pretended they were Marxist and were just despots taking advantage of it .

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 (Soviet Union, North Korea, Maoist China, Khmer Rouge, Ho Chi Minh, etc.) inflicted upon religious groups in modern times. In fact, the state atheist regimes' atrocities against religion continue till this day in both China and North Korea.
The Holocaust had nothing to do with religion. The motivation for exterminating Jews and others was not Christianity but a non-religious collectivist ideology called Nazism.
And both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia severely persecuted the peaceful Jehovah's Witnesses.

No such animal

[The Grand Nudger]

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?

You're trying to argue stats...lol. No one neds to deny that modern superpowers have the biggest stats. They had the nastiest weapons, after all. OFC.....modern superpowers are still chiock full with a majority of the religious....so there's that....

This is the short version of a long story.  If you'd like to argue that the religious have never been motivated by what they felt their god commanded them to do in the slaughter of others then I don't have the patience for your bullshit.  If you don't feel the need to explain how -atheism- motivates a person to kill in that same way, then..again..I don't have the patience for your bullshit.  

God told me to kill that motherfucker!

No God told me to kill that motherfucker!

Can you spot the difference? OFC atheists kill people! We might even be better at it than theists (lelz, just one more thing we're better at). The difference is that atheists do not kill people "because atheism" as the religious kill people "because religion". Now you can huff and puff from here to there and swear that no god ever commanded them to do so (and I'd agree..because there are no gods to do any commanding)...but that's not what they thought...now, is it?

-Now, turning my attention to the holocaust rewriters. Hey, you know what, it's true that the nazi admin wanted to come up with their own little cult and had little time for chriustendom as it was..but to maintain that the motivation for the soldiers who did the killings, who exterminated the jews, the apathy and antipathy felt..did not have it's origin in explicitly christian bigotry and pogroms spanning back centuries is....well, just more bullshit I don't have the patience for.

[brewer]

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?

Power, greed, manipulation.

#5, for the most part, is just silly. 


And BTW, go a day without the benefits of science,.............. and I'll go a day without religion. We'll see who makes it thru the day with that commitment.

[Amarok]

That was an inside job nothing to do with Religion

Bullshit and Alex Jones is an idiot and the Khmer_Rouge were not an atheist state nor can any such thing exist. How do you build a state on not believing in something .

[Angrboda]

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🤐

This is nothing but nihilism in a friendly coat.

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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.

I don't accept your assertion that it is obvious. That's the act of an emperor striding around without any clothes on. So, still, citation needed.

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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. 

Are you suggesting these ethnic theories and German anti-semitism had nothing to do with centuries of religiously rooted Christian anti-semitism?

Forgive me if I doubt, but I do.

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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):

Bahahahahahaha! That has to be the most pathetic argument I've ever heard on this forum! Congratulations. You've reached heretofore unbreached levels of stupidity.

[Amarok]

And that Hitler and the Nazi's didn't believe what they were doing was god approved

[The Grand Nudger]

Riffing off of the above, Cherub...and your comments on humanism being an ideology of identifying oneself as a part of humanity at large.  Why, yes!  Part of being human is to -be- a human creature, with all of the delicious (and sometimes sorrowful) interelationships with each other and all other life in our periphery..as well as our communal dependency on this little marble that we find ourselves perilously clinging to in a sea of empty and hostile space.

It is how I see myself, and it's so meaningful to me that I engage in those relationships for a living.  I also advocate for them locally and regionally, volunteering my time in presentation and in the preparation, trying to bring more people into that fold and showing them how a greater wealth and happiness and health can be produced by minding those interrelationships.  I raise my children with this explicitly in mind.  The idea that I will one day..in effect, go back to earth from whence I came and no more doesn;t fill me with dread, but with ideological satisfaction in that I'll have completed that circle.  I like to get drunk and hug the earth.  I like to stand in the rain and pound on the clouds.  

What is it you do, again..what meaning have you found in the bloodgod?  Do you bloodgod for a living?  Do you volunteer for the bloodgod?  Do you raise your children as bloodgodists?  Is your highest aim to one day find yourself poured down the bloodhole for bloodgod? If you can answer yes to all of these questions..and I doubt that you can do so without significant bullshitting..then all you'll have managed to do is establish your bloodgodism as an equal to my humanism. Good job, bloodgodism is still shitty, lol.

[Angrboda]

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?

You seem to want what you've already got, and are simply, irrationally complaining that it's not what you wanted.

[The Grand Nudger]

Religious belief is one of those motivators..and..arguably, one of the strongest.  It stands right up there with things like rampant patriotism..but, importantly, presents itself as a competitor..because..what does a patriot do if they're told to do something against the supposed commands of their god?

[Cherub786]

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.

What are you actually defending the Khmer Rouge?
Buddhist monks should be exterminated because they are lazy and beg for food?

That's the problem with authoritarian ideologies, they want to impose what they imagine is for the greater good for society at the expense of religious and individual liberty. No wander such authoritarian tendencies appeal to the non-religious and the atheists. I think it's the same line of reasoning used by Nazis to exterminate disabled and sick people. Burdens on society must be exterminated for the material progress of that society.