More killings by insecure, violent, deranged, religious men.
First a family slain by a father who couldn’t take it that someone he did not vote for might remain president. If he was worried then why didn’t he just top himself? That would have been too easy and not played to his vanity; he decided that the future was too gloomy for his boys and wife too so it would be up to the paterfamilias to take action.
Then in Canada another christian idiot decides that his imaginary friend has informed him his girlfriend is pregnant and is planning an abortion; so he beats her to death and stabs bible pages to her chest. Oh and he then blames his imaginary friend for letting him do it…. He must have forgotten the nuanced and sophisticated argumentation that excuses god from actually doing stuff.
Religious expression allows folk to make excuses for any action because it, by necessity precludes any requirement for the practitioner to remain in reality. That’s why it is inherently dangerous.
So should we then remove the right to religious expression? Barret was criminally insane, and just happened to be a christian. What about the prison guards in the gulags, who revelled in their moral inhibition because there was no god to punish them?
No, but then neither should we ever accept a religious reason for harming anyone. No form of religious expression, which is a changeable point of view, should ever be used to persecute anyone for any unchangeable quality they possess.
Nice red herring about the gulags, most Russians then and now followed the Orthodox faith. Maybe not openly, but it was certainly a pillar of society. Just like the guards in the Nazi camps were christian. How could they not be? Being religious didn’t stop existing by dictat.
I’m not suggesting that anyone accept any reason for harming someone, religious or otherwise. The point about the gulags (as taken from Solzhenitsyn, rather than my experience) was that an atheistic ideology is just as potent a weapon as a theistic ideology can be when it comes to expressing a violent nihilism. People aren’t going to stop being evil if they stop believing in God. I’m not saying they’re going to be particularly more evil, although radical changes of ideology in large populations seem to often result in tragedy and bloodshed.
“People aren’t going to stop being evil if they stop believing in God. I’m not saying they’re going to be particularly more evil, ….”
Indeed Brent. But what atheists can’t rely on is a supernatural master who excuses their evil acts because it is the will of this supernatural being. If an atheist commits an evil act, it is their act to own. If a person of faith commits an evil act, it’s god’s will. Accountability and responsibility in the former case is with the actor, not so much in the latter case.
As Stephen Weinberg said, “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” Lucretius covered much the same turf too, “tantum religio potuit suadere malorum”
People, please do not refer to murders as Christians – they REALLY ARE NOT, they are hypocrites. They can call themselves that if they were raised in that religious denominations, but from such acts they cannot be called a true christian. people are bad everywhere and in every religion – Islam, Hinduism…the psychos can be everywhere!
Unfortunately that is a fallacious argument called the “Not a real Scotsman” fallacy.
Much like many prophets, whose words you probably do hold dear, they were inspired to do what they did by divine suggestion.
How do you know that it wasn’t the same deity telling them to do that?
You don’t and that is why religion, all religion is truly unreasonable and irrational. You follow your version of an invisible faerie, these guys were following theirs.