sniikeri wrote:Jeremy wrote:These kinds of attacks on atheism are ignorant and illogical, and completely miss the point of the criticism towards religion; which is that religious views are a significant direct factor in the violence and war that people attribute to it
Wait, are you saying religion is actually a reason to violence rather than just an excuse? Because, honestly, I believe the people killing in the name of their god would just find another excuse if religions didn't exist.
What evidence do you have for that belief?
The reality is that a lack of religious belief is the fastest growing view on religion, and has been for centuries now. In that same time violent death has dropped enormously.
Think about this, in any conflict people are separated into different sides. What is that separates them? In almost all cases it is either race, religion or nationality. If people didn't distinguish each other based on those groups, what would separate them, giving them a reason to fight? It's not a question of what excuse would they find to fight, it's a question of how could you have 2 sides to fight at all?
If we look at Hitler, since he's a common theme. Hitler was really involved in two separate conflicts that weren't that strongly connected. He was involved in the holocaust (which I guess wasn't a conflict, or a very one sided conflict) where he separated people by race because he felt that a few races were to blame for his perceived oppression of his race. He was also involved in WW2 because he felt that his nation had been oppressed by other nations unfairly after WW1. In both these cases there is conflict because people are distinguished by race or nation.
An example relating to religion. Osama bin Ladin's grievance with America and the Western world isn't that we have different beliefs to him, his grievance is that he feels that Islam is oppressed by the world (especially America and especially Christianity). If the whole world was Islamic, or none of the world was Islamic, how could he feel like that, and what excuse could he come up with to fight?