Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Aug 23, 2018 5:13 pm
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Thu Aug 23, 2018 5:53 am
But note this is the Philosophy of Religion section, so to topic we will only deal with religious related evil acts and not others.
Atheism IS a religion. Its a gratuitous creed, the whole focus of which is the question of God's existence. And like the most blind of religions, It takes complete faith to believe it at all. So I'd say it qualifies here.
You are trying to be deceptive and rhetorical here.
'Religion' is a very loose word but conventionally 'atheism' is not recognized as a religion.
Many relate to certain habits and hobbies are religions, e.g. soccer and those sports that has fanatical followers.
There are many definitions of 'what is religion.' I prefer Ninian Smarts concept of religion which must conform to 7 critical and necessary dimensions.
http://danbhai.com/wr/l01.htm
Instead of trying to deceptive, what not just defined 'atheist' and atheism for what it typically understood.
Personally I do not prefer to refer myself with the term 'atheist' and atheism.
I prefer 'not-a-theist' and I have my own personal beliefs.
I am not a Buddhist but I adopt one of the Boddhisattva Vow to be compassionate to all human beings and thus is against evil acts.
Re religious related evil acts, I have always focus on the specific ideology primarily where Islam is the worst of them all but other theistic religions also has lesser but also the evil threat that is significant to humanity.
Are you afraid of the Quakers again? Is there a "significant threat" posed by the Hassidim? Are you getting Mormon death threats? Or have those nasty Zoroastrians attacked someone?
I did not
say all religions pose an evil threat to humanity in the same degree.
Whilst Islam is really toxic, the other Abrahamic religions do pose some threat in the resistance against the progress of humanity, e.g. their insistence on creationism over evolution and other issues.
In any case, how would one justify calling any "religious related acts" "evil" at all? In Atheism, there's no objective thing such as "evil". For them, it's not even possible to call the most psychotic ISIL terrorist "evil" in any coherent and meaningful sense. To do that, you'd have to refer to objective moral values; and for that, you'd need God. So we're back to Theism for the very terms necessary to mount a critique of any action, "religious" or not.
Note I am not moving forward as an atheist nor atheism.
I am progressing as a human being.
As for dealing with evil, I am relying on a Framework and System of Morality and Ethics [based mainly on the Kantian model] with groundings on absolute moral values that do not necessarily depend on a God [illusory] who delivered holy texts with absolute moral commands [like kill non-believers, and others.
It is immoral to rely on absolute commands from a God which is illusory and an illusion.
If humanity can weaned of specifically Islam, then that would reduce a major % of religious related evil.
I have exact figures, actually. Let's take homicides as indicative.
Before 2000, Islam accounted for about 3.5% of the world's conflict dead. Another 3.5% could be roughly attributed to other religions, including Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Animism, Catholicism, and
all the rest of the other religions of history combined.
Total: 7%.
The rest were killed in conflicts over such things as economics, language, land, resources, politics and so on; but by far the biggest percent by Atheistic regimes. In fact, as you know, more people were killed in the 20th Century wars than in all previous wars combined. And as you'll recall, none of those wars was religious...unless you include Atheism as a religion. In that case you really would have a good argument.
So let's keep Atheism in the game...where it belongs. If we don't, we'll never be able to address the preponderance of the question of evil.
As I had stated elsewhere humanity
must address ALL evil acts, i.e. theistic and non-theistic related evil acts and violence.
But non-theistic related evil acts are off topic within this section which can be dealt with in other non-theistic sections like politics, social, etc.
In terms of numbers, note it is claimed Islamist killed over 80 million Hindus over a 1000 years in India. Islam has continued to kill non-believers up to 2018.
So the number is large enough to warrant serious attention.
Note I have argued Buddhism, Christianity, non-violence Hindu schools and other pacifist religions are not responsible for the evil acts of their followers.
There are no leading evil laden texts within the
main sutras to exhort Buddhists to kill non-believers in the name of Buddhism nor the Buddha.
It is the same with Christianity where Christ did not exhort Christians to kill non-believers but rather to love their enemies.