Israel - Hamas War October 2023

And there on-going examples of Christians killing non-Christians and Christians based on their religious beliefs.

Baslamist vinegar ftw

Yes, I saw the Northern Ireland troubles mentioned as a contemporary version of that, in which religion played a large role. No one in this thread was denying that happens, while statements were made that no one’s atheist beliefs drive them to kill. It may be a slight difference that saying certain world-views that feature atheism also denigrate religion and when in power have killed many religious adherents due to their religion. It happened in the 10’s of thousands and more during the French revolution, and hit the millions in the 20th century with the rise of communism and continues today with the suppression and imprisonment of millions today. Just as the reasons underlying those killings aren’t simply religious, neither were the rise of Islam across the world and the 16th century wars between Christians in Europe simply a matter of religion either.

Atheists have killed people
Christians have killed people
Jews have Killed people
Muslims have killed people
People of other faiths have killed people.

Doesn’t seem like we can draw a whole lot of conclusions beyond, humans kill other humans. Sometimes they use religion as the justification, other times they use getting rid of religion as the justification.

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Stalin needs you to hold his beer.

In fairness to Stalin, he killed a lot of people regardless of their religious beliefs and a lot of people because of their religious beliefs. He was kind of an equal opportunity mass murderer in that sense.

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I would argue that Stalin wanted to institute a semi-religious worship of him and his government, and that he killed people not because he was an atheist, but because they didn’t properly worship him. Most atheists would advocate for a government that doesn’t impose worship, whether it be of a deity or a leader.

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atheism is a recent thing. it’s silly to make judgments about it. ive noticed that in the absence of religion people will worship something else. I wouldnt be too confident about the moral superiority of an atheist even though I am one. People think atheists are peaceful because we have peace among the usual powers but thats mostly because of nukes.

I’ve annoyed a few atheists in the past by pointing out that their fervor and their evangelism of their atheism were sufficient to make me believe that their form of atheism is, for all intents and purposes, a religion.

Except for all those people born before the start of religion.

Not sure I believe this. Everyone starts out as an atheist.

I don’t think ~2,500 years ago is recent, but if you’re discussing the word atheism existing, we’re only talking more like 350 years.

That’s only discussing written works, though. Of course we had a time before a god was invented. (Any monotheistic believer must admit that a god was invented, as other monotheistic religions exist.)

I saw a documentary that showed people in the future worshipping a nuclear bomb.

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well.

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You need to hang out with different atheists. I’ve never met one that’s starts a religious conversation, and why would they.

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For a while, on a social mailing list (one of the oldest on the internet), there was one participant who couldn’t help himself… every social and political ill was an example of the harm done by theism, and even theists who kept their faith private were culpable. He was driven to get people to walk away from theism and become atheists.

Interestingly, another person on that mailing list did some of the early work on adding rules to email clients to automatically filter messages, eventually moving on to developing some of the early spam-filtering logic, when that started to become a problem.

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And I should clarify/defend that. I’ve made statements about religion causing problems in the past on this forum. But I’ve never in my life said that to anyone outside my family or very close friends, and even then it’s not like it’s a common topic. All it does is piss people off and solves nothing.

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I don’t think so. Religiosity is still dying everywhere, including the middle east. It continues to hold sway in the poorer more isolated parts of the world, but doesn’t have much hope of going anywhere. If the war in gaza is profound enough, I suppose it might generate a new movement of Islamic terrorists, but so far it doesn’t seem to be going that way.

(of course, relatively easy to say that when I don’t live in Israel/Russia right now.)

The latest Last Week Tonight is about Israel-Palestine again. Wasn’t able to finish it, will do later.

Interesting tidbit, by the Israeli government’s admission, over 95% of building permits by Palestinians are rejected in certain areas (“Area C”). If Palestinians don’t work their land for a period of 3 years, it’s considered abandoned and legitimate for the Israeli government to seize and build a settlement and give it to Israeli citizens.

So the government says no, you may not build on your land, also if you don’t, we will take it. Should have used the land, now get off our property.

Whoa wrong threa… nevermind

Area C is the least populated of the areas. Under Oslo II, it was given to Israeli control, with the goal of “gradual transfer” to the Palestinians. Since the Palestinians didn’t keep their end of the Oslo Accords, this transfer didn’t happen.