The comment that religion is the greatest source of evil and death in the world is usually the opinion of a non-religious person. They always discount the death caused by the twentieth century’s most prolific killers, NAZIS and Communists
Thank you for writing what I've been thinking for so long! Actually, I read a historian once who said that even many of those old wars we consider 'religious' were really more territorial conflicts between groups who were culturally of different religions, but not in conflict over religion. I'm always shocked at how the modern mind can completely ignore the atheistic murders of the 20th century. And in particular, even when noticing the Nazi murders can continue to pretend that the Communist murders weren't really an issue. Well done sir.
"Politics" seems to enjoy subverting 'faith" for its own ends. And "faith" has many faces.
Henry the Eighth had some "interesting" thoughts on the matter of "church and state".
The sand-pirates have a bizarre and violence-driven "political philosophy" dressed up as "a great Abrahamic religion".
Buddhism is supposed to be all about enlightenment but NOWHERE does it seem to reject war.
In 1970s Cambodia, most of the population had been raised as Buddhists or Catholics.
The Khmer Rouge recruited from the peasant classes, and especially the children. Their most ruthless and brutal killers were generally children between the ages of eight and fourteen.
The Khmer Rouge "Management" were almost ALL multi-lingual; trained at expensive French universities and imbued with the psychotic revolutionary socialist madness that STILL permeates "academe". The body count from those years is informative..
One interesting side-note: Most of the "loyalist" troops fighting against the Khmer Rouge were either Buddhist or Catholic. Some of these troops would cut the liver from slain KR and eat part of it, raw. This practice is more widespread than one would imagine and dates back into antiquity. At least they did not rationalize away, "woke-style", the nature of the KR Beast.
The late Australian documentary maker, Neil Davis was one of the very few "media" types who went to the really pointy-end of this war. One of his observations was that just before going into combat, many of the soldiers would take the small Buddha figure they wore around their necks and place it in their mouths. No mention of whether the Catholic troops placed their crucifixes in their mouths a la "the Host". Additionally, Davis noted that the Khmer troops had an interesting saying:
I wouldn't dispute that religion has inspired or excused a great deal of killing, but why single out openly deolatrous religion? NAZIsm, Communism, and whatever the hell the French were doing at the end of the Eighteenth Century bear most of the hallmarks of religion.
It does not always happen that a substantial number of people do something notably moral at risk to themselves or their families, but when it does happen—as for example when the Israeli army notifies enemy populations of its intended attack targets, at risk to its own people, or when Christians in Europe risked their lives (and their families’ lives!) to succor Jews during the Holocaust—it is (to the best of my knowledge) always because of religion, specifically Jewish or Christian religion. It would not astonish me to be informed that there were instances like that involving the Stoic, Confucian, or other religions. But I know of no case in which atheism, agnosticism, or self-actualization of any kind had such an effect, not counting that on rare, relatively isolated individuals.
Atheists at least had the great hope that it would banish the worst features of religion: wars of religion, conformity under compulsion, extermination (or subordination) of different believers. But the 20th Century, an in particular the religious war between the National Socialist Germans and the Communist “Soviets,” both atheist regimes, put paid to that.
The Gulag, the Terror, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Killing Fields. Collectively they account for most of the excess violent deaths in the 20th Century, and flow from the teachings of one man who sat quietly every day in the reading room of a library in London, wielding the pen that launched a thousand atrocities. And yet in our day we have academics and students and NGO leaders who are proud to invoke the term “Marxist” for their philosophies and programs.
The comment that religion is the greatest source of evil and death in the world is usually the opinion of a non-religious person. They always discount the death caused by the twentieth century’s most prolific killers, NAZIS and Communists
Thank you for writing what I've been thinking for so long! Actually, I read a historian once who said that even many of those old wars we consider 'religious' were really more territorial conflicts between groups who were culturally of different religions, but not in conflict over religion. I'm always shocked at how the modern mind can completely ignore the atheistic murders of the 20th century. And in particular, even when noticing the Nazi murders can continue to pretend that the Communist murders weren't really an issue. Well done sir.
"Politics" seems to enjoy subverting 'faith" for its own ends. And "faith" has many faces.
Henry the Eighth had some "interesting" thoughts on the matter of "church and state".
The sand-pirates have a bizarre and violence-driven "political philosophy" dressed up as "a great Abrahamic religion".
Buddhism is supposed to be all about enlightenment but NOWHERE does it seem to reject war.
In 1970s Cambodia, most of the population had been raised as Buddhists or Catholics.
The Khmer Rouge recruited from the peasant classes, and especially the children. Their most ruthless and brutal killers were generally children between the ages of eight and fourteen.
The Khmer Rouge "Management" were almost ALL multi-lingual; trained at expensive French universities and imbued with the psychotic revolutionary socialist madness that STILL permeates "academe". The body count from those years is informative..
One interesting side-note: Most of the "loyalist" troops fighting against the Khmer Rouge were either Buddhist or Catholic. Some of these troops would cut the liver from slain KR and eat part of it, raw. This practice is more widespread than one would imagine and dates back into antiquity. At least they did not rationalize away, "woke-style", the nature of the KR Beast.
The late Australian documentary maker, Neil Davis was one of the very few "media" types who went to the really pointy-end of this war. One of his observations was that just before going into combat, many of the soldiers would take the small Buddha figure they wore around their necks and place it in their mouths. No mention of whether the Catholic troops placed their crucifixes in their mouths a la "the Host". Additionally, Davis noted that the Khmer troops had an interesting saying:
"Death is a woman".
Shakespeare comes to mind: The fault lies not with the stars but within ourselves.
I wouldn't dispute that religion has inspired or excused a great deal of killing, but why single out openly deolatrous religion? NAZIsm, Communism, and whatever the hell the French were doing at the end of the Eighteenth Century bear most of the hallmarks of religion.
It does not always happen that a substantial number of people do something notably moral at risk to themselves or their families, but when it does happen—as for example when the Israeli army notifies enemy populations of its intended attack targets, at risk to its own people, or when Christians in Europe risked their lives (and their families’ lives!) to succor Jews during the Holocaust—it is (to the best of my knowledge) always because of religion, specifically Jewish or Christian religion. It would not astonish me to be informed that there were instances like that involving the Stoic, Confucian, or other religions. But I know of no case in which atheism, agnosticism, or self-actualization of any kind had such an effect, not counting that on rare, relatively isolated individuals.
Atheists at least had the great hope that it would banish the worst features of religion: wars of religion, conformity under compulsion, extermination (or subordination) of different believers. But the 20th Century, an in particular the religious war between the National Socialist Germans and the Communist “Soviets,” both atheist regimes, put paid to that.
The Gulag, the Terror, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Killing Fields. Collectively they account for most of the excess violent deaths in the 20th Century, and flow from the teachings of one man who sat quietly every day in the reading room of a library in London, wielding the pen that launched a thousand atrocities. And yet in our day we have academics and students and NGO leaders who are proud to invoke the term “Marxist” for their philosophies and programs.