Comment by thirdtruck 4 days ago
Exactly this.
Not to mention the tens of thousands of people who were killed in the witch trials (medieval and contemporary), among so very many other examples.
Few things are more personally relevant than not getting tortured and executed by your neighbors because you were granted no defense against spectral evidence.
Oh honey, xe are visibly queer. None of the above is new to xe, as a matter of survival. And a matter of sanity, as xe were raised to believe that the world was created from whole cloth six thousands years ago and that dinosaurs either lived with humans or were an invention of the devil.
There are no such things as atheist beliefs any more than there are a-unicorn beliefs, even if many things have been done in its name. The same goes for evolution. And no, communism isn't any more inherently atheistic than German fascism was inherently Catholic (it certainly wasn't atheistic) nor US democracy inherently Protestant. Anyone doing anything "in the name of evolution" is projecting their own hate and small-mindedness onto whatever convenient vocabulary at hand, as has happened over and over and over long before science. Avoid confusing belief with confidence in replicability, not when only one was sufficient for humanity to reach the moon.
No, as a science-minded secular materialistic atheist, xe are burdened with expecting nuance, detail, precision, specificity, and consistency of xirselves and in xir communications. But xe also expect the same of others in kind. Tell xe again how belief will save you from junk forensic science if you are ever accused falsely of a crime? Because actual science has no patience with such nonsense whereas xir original point still stands. We can resume this discussion after that.
What about the tens of millions of people who have been killed because atheism?
But how about this: the first time that any relevant powers decided that slavery was wrong at a global level was due to Christian beliefs, fancy that. And luckily they went on to impose that moral belief to the rest of the world. (England, France vs. Slavery)
It's true that a lot of evil has been done in the name of Christianity, but that's not of Christianity. If I came to your home and punched you in the face in the name of your mother, would you blame your mother?
But Christianity and the Bible have been abused very wrongly by evil powers as tools for control, something possible through deceiving illiterate, uneducated people.
As some other comments mention, Protestant Evangelicals made a big push for literacy precisely so people could read and interpret the Bible themselves, without depending on interested third parties.
Anyone taking a little time to read the Bible will see and understand that the Crusades were wrong, racism is wrong, oppressing women is wrong, and so on.
> Few things are more personally relevant than not getting tortured and executed by your neighbors because you were granted no defense against spectral evidence.
As @arkey points out, this happens with atheistic beliefs as well. By numbers communist purges have killed vastly more people than all religions combined just due to the numbers of people involved in modern ages.
The denunciations are very similar with actual evidence rarely being required or needed. Or it’s based on some characteristic of being on an outside group. Netflix’s adaptation of the Chinese authors book “Three body problem” gives a visceral showcasing of what that would’ve been like as one of the characters father is denounced and killed during that time for having “anti-Marxist” beliefs like gravity.
I’ve been to the Pol Pot’s killing trees in Cambodia where they slaughtered millions of people. Anyone who was educated in any way were considered polluted by capitalism and killed. Things like having spectacles was sufficient evidence.
I’ve seen the holocaust monuments in Berlin and Tel Aviv where the ideals of racial purity based on pseudo scientific interpretations of evolution were a key philosophical underpinning.
Actually much of the anti-evolutionary zeal in the US can be partially traced back to progressives (of that period) use of “evolution” to justify mass forced sterilization of “undesirables” by several US states during the 1910-1930’s.
Really humans are pretty flawed with any belief system. You fool yourself if you think “scientific” or “atheist” are any hindrance to these group behaviors.