I’ve just read this headline on Stuff …
Backpacker jailed for stabbing man to death in row over God and evolution.
Now, before I open it, shall we place a bet on what side of the argument the person who did the stabbing was, and what side of the argument the en-stabulated person was?
I don’t even need to offer a real bet, do I? Because we all, even my Christian readers, know that the person who believes in the Sky Beards and Demons and Djinns and Goblins is going to be the one using the old Okay Fine Let’s See If Maybe You Can Rebutt My Friend Mr Slicey You Fucking Smart Ass argument, yes?
…and sure enough, clicking through, the guy who was stabbed is a biomedical scientist who was arguing the Negative on the subject of creationism. How about that. I, for one, am shocked.
Atheists don’t tend to kill people over which God they don’t believe in.
December 15, 2007 at 1:56 pm
I had exactly the same thought pattern as you. I saw the headline on news.com.au today and thought, “Oh fucking Christians, killing people over their silly imaginary god again” and sure enough, I was proved right.
December 15, 2007 at 2:51 pm
This came to mind:
– MugginsM
December 15, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Atheists don’t tend to kill people over which God they don’t believe in.
Except in, you know, China and stuff.
December 15, 2007 at 10:28 pm
http://www.faluninfo.net/torturemethods2/
“The goal is to eradicate Falun Gong, either by coercing its practitioners to renounce their belief, or by physically destroying them if they refuse. The tactics range from long-term sleep deprivation, being surrounded with loudspeakers demonizing their practice 24 hours a day, to being force-fed with human feces, or shocked and even raped with electric batons.”
December 15, 2007 at 10:33 pm
And North Korea:
“Forum 18 has received other reports of the execution of Christians, and the torture of religious prisoners in North Korea. A Korean speaker, who has interviewed North Korean refugees, told Forum 18 that a group of elderly Christians, who had maintained their faith since before 1950, in a small town along the North Korean-Chinese border were executed in 2000, for their refusal to renounce their faith.”
http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=431
December 16, 2007 at 7:04 am
I’m not well informed about China and North Korea, but I strongly suspect that the governments in both of those countries are not killing Christians for being Christians per se, but rather they know that humans appear to be fucked in the head for Jebus[1] and that as a result a religion can go from nothing or a mere fringe group to something big enough to cause problems and conflict with the government[2] in a comparatively short space of time.
Communist governments and Malevolent Dictatorships tend to dislike being competed with, mostly because almost any alternative works better. So these poor people are being killed not because of their religion, but because they might end up being a threat to the government. If the same government thought that a local Chess Club could grow into a threat, they’d soon be shot as well, regardless of whether they believed in The Scientific Method, Odin the Allfather, or the FSM.
[1] My own mental shorthand for “Appearing to have certain mental quirks which attract them towards the idea of Religion in general, and religion as a tribal marker specifically.”
[2] Scientology, for example. Didn’t exist before 1953, now routinely conflicts with the governments of the UK, US, Canada and Germany (just for starters).
December 16, 2007 at 5:10 pm
The operative word was “tend”.
Personally, I don’t think the types of replies of “Oh, but look at China and X” carry much weight: the comment was directed towards individual religious loonies and the predictability of where they fall given certain types of actions. Mass group psych is entirely different from individual – mass groups, especially the control-at-all-costs ones, have a penchant for demonizing identifiable groups for the sake of providing, as someone else said, an “other”. Demonizing religious groups just tends to be the easiest option. The passion and nuttery of an individual believer and their propensity for leaping to violence is an entirely different kettle of fish IMO – increase the passion of belief and you can damn near track an exact corresponding drop in ability to reason or act rationally.
I would invite all of you to come to the US Midwest for personal examples everywhere.
December 15, 2007 at 10:55 pm
Atheists don’t tend to kill people over which God they don’t believe in.
Well… no. In much the same way that you don’t kill people over which rugby team you don’t care about, and I don’t kill people over which version of Marxist revolutionary doctrine I find untenable.
I was going to craft an argument about how Christianity shouldn’t be judged by idiot literalists, and so on, but you know perfectly well the distinction between “religious” and “young-earth creationist, Left-Behind-reading, gun-shooting extremist”.
So, yeah… that guy was screwed up, and whatever church community he was involved with was complicit in the killing by encouraging him to get that upset over natural selection. While I find distasteful some things that some atheists say and do in connection with the evolution issue distasteful and impolite, you are quite right in observing that the kinds of religious people who consider this an issue are more likely to end up killing people over it.
Jesus, though, is not so much to blame.
December 15, 2007 at 11:50 pm
“Jesus, though, is not so much to blame.”
I’ve often wondered how much nicer the world would be if the kind of person who wears WWJD jewellery actually DID what Jesus would have done.
December 16, 2007 at 4:00 am
Nicer, except for money lenders in sacred places and unproductive fig trees. You _really_ want to be producing fruit when Jesus comes around.
OTOH lepers and weddings out of wine got some excellent help.
December 16, 2007 at 4:12 am
…you don’t kill people over which rugby team you don’t care about…
This makes me think of soccer hooliganism. Which strikes me as such an arbitrary reason to have a fight. It’s not about belief, power or wealth, it is simply “we wear red and green and you wear blue and white”.
Sure I know that local issues can exsacerbate things but seriously… You are merely “other” is a heck of a basic causus belli.