Mass Shooting in Plymouth UK.

[tstorm823]

Again, splitting hairs. Where are the atheist terror attacks? Where's the atheist crusades, inquisitions, jihads, or human sacrifices?

Can I answer "The Cultural Revolution" 4 times?

OT: I think you're all looking at this backwards. I don't think being an incel makes people violent. I think violent people are weirdos and are attracted to fringe groups that might accept them. Just like, I don't imagine not having sex makes incels incels, I think they're horrible to begin with and have found a way to rationalize their anger. Fixating on how people to choose to rationalize their crimes likely doesn't get at the actual causes.

 

[Silvanus]

And just because this is the internet : No, i don't blame atheism for the Nazis.

That's lucky, since the vast majority of Nazi party members and voters were Protestant Christians.

(No I don't blame Protestant Christianity for Nazism).

 

[Hawki]

Can I answer "The Cultural Revolution" 4 times?

First, communism, not atheism. Communist regimes were atheistic, yes, but atheism was part of the ideology, not the defining part.

Second, the Cultural Revolution did human sacrifices? Um...

 

[Xprimentyl]

Christian terrorism does exist, but globally, is dwarfed by Islamic terrorism. I've never heard of an atheist terror attack, but feel free to point to examples.

Also, if your religion gives you onus and/or cause to murder people because of your belief system, then your belief system is screwed up. And if you want to say "well, don't most religions?", congratulations, you now know why religion is terrible.

Again, the point IS: terrorism is terrorism, the acts of deranged people. It has no religion OR belief system. The vast majority of Muslims are not terrorist, so specifying terrorism to that religion does little more than sensationalize it for US nationalists who want to point a finger and say "THEM!" Terrorist acts by white people are too readily written off as "oh, that singular guy was crazy and blew up a hospital; but we arrested him, so you're safe." Terrorist acts by a misguided Muslim person? It's "oh, another one of those dangerous brown people from over there didn't something horrific. Be on watch... a Muslim might live next to YOU!!!"

 

[tstorm823]

First, communism, not atheism. Communist regimes were atheistic, yes, but atheism was part of the ideology, not the defining part.

Second, the Cultural Revolution did human sacrifices? Um...

In most communist catastrophies, I would agree with you, but not that one. The atheism was absolutely defining there. The CCP was already in power for over a decade, and then they started having massacres to destroy the "Four Olds", ideas, culture, habits, and customs. The cultural revolution was a crusade against all the old cultural elements of China, and that included all the religions. It was explicitly a movement to create a new, secular culture and enforce it through violence.

If you're going to define human sacrifices as "killing people as an offering to a deity", you're deciding in advance that you can't have atheist human sacrifices. But when you publicly humiliate, torture, and execute people as a method to advance your cults agenda, I'm not inclined to see the difference.

 

[Hawki]

Again, the point IS: terrorism is terrorism, the acts of deranged people.

Not necessarily. You don't need to be deranged to be a terrorist. If anything, very intelligent people can commit terrorist acts.

It has no religion OR belief system.

Um, that's true, but religious terrorism does exist, just as non-religious terrorism does as well.

The vast majority of Muslims are not terrorist,

True.

so specifying terrorism to that religion does little more than sensationalize it for US nationalists who want to point a finger and say "THEM!"

Yeah, no. If we can't call a spade a spade, we're getting nowhere.

Islamic terrorism exists. As does terrorism of various other religions, and various other terrorist actions that aren't religious in nature. It's a bad idea to lump all terrorism together regardless of ideology.

Terrorist acts by white people are too readily written off as "oh, that singular guy was crazy and blew up a hospital; but we arrested him, so you're safe." Terrorist acts by a misguided Muslim person? It's "oh, another one of those dangerous brown people from over there didn't something horrific. Be on watch... a Muslim might live next to YOU!!!"

I keep seeing this argument, and while maybe it's true, I can't reconcile it with anything I've seen. No-one tried to justify the actions of Brenton Tarrant or Anders Breivik for instance, nor was there any compunction (that I saw) in declaring them terrorists.

Okay, I did see Fraser Anning try to rationalize Tarrant's actions, but the fuckwit was shouted down for it.

In most communist catastrophies, I would agree with you, but not that one. The atheism was absolutely defining there. The CCP was already in power for over a decade, and then they started having massacres to destroy the "Four Olds", ideas, culture, habits, and customs. The cultural revolution was a crusade against all the old cultural elements of China, and that included all the religions. It was explicitly a movement to create a new, secular culture and enforce it through violence.

Again though, that's an outgrowth of communism. Even if the CCP was more extreme, antipathy to religion is common in communism.

If you're going to define human sacrifices as "killing people as an offering to a deity", you're deciding in advance that you can't have atheist human sacrifices. But when you publicly humiliate, torture, and execute people as a method to advance your cults agenda, I'm not inclined to see the difference.

Well, yeah, I don't consider public humilation, torture, and executions as human sacrifices, I consider them as, well, humilation, torture, and executions. When I'm talking about human sacrifices, I'm talking about human sacrifices, which, as far as I'm aware, are sacrifices to deities or spirits by definition.

Like, who is an atheist going to sacrifice a human to? An atheist by definition doesn't believe in any deities.

 

[tstorm823]

Like, who is an atheist going to sacrifice a human to? An atheist by definition doesn't believe in any deities.

"When we kill people, it's at least not religiously motivated" isn't very compelling. The killing is the problem.

 

[Seanchaidh]

"When we kill people, it's at least not religiously motivated" isn't very compelling. The killing is the problem.

Presumably, ritual human sacrifice is something that is meant to be done repeatedly and viewed as a good thing in itself. Something like the cultural revolution is meant to change society in a particular way, not become a recurring ritual. So one of them will continue to kill absent any change and the other won't. That being said, it is best to avoid the fetishization of revolution as an end in itself rather than a means to an end.

 

[Satinavian]

That's lucky, since the vast majority of Nazi party members and voters were Protestant Christians.

(No I don't blame Protestant Christianity for Nazism).

Nazis had already started to move against religion including Protestant Christianity. They didn't like people defining themself as anything else but Germans. Or allowning any kind of organisation not controlled by them. There was also the push to identify all abrahamitic religions as inherently jewish derived. And last but not least there are the many conflicts between Nazi ideology and Christian teaching that were seen as a hindrance. Many pastors reminding people of that went to concentration camps, many christian religious celebrations got fornidden and we even got some secular substitute festivities to get rid of religious influence.

Plans for purging all traces of Christianity from Germany had been made and were sceduled for after the war.

Nazism is an utterly atheist philosophy and not nice to any kind of religion, aside from the special hate for the jews. The only exception was some strange neopaganism that was more tolerated for celebrating some imagined nordic ideal past than actually practiced by anyone.

Presumably, ritual human sacrifice is something that is meant to be done repeatedly and viewed as a good thing in itself. Something like the cultural revolution is meant to change society in a particular way, not become a recurring ritual. So one of them will continue to kill absent any change and the other won't. That being said, it is best to avoid the fetishization of revolution as an end in itself rather than a means to an end.

So something like removing "subhumans" and other "undesirables" from the gene pool to improve the human species would count as an atheist human sacrifice equivalent ?

 

[XsjadoBlayde]

On the subject of incels, perhaps society should slightly lower the pedestal upon which sex is placed, and people should stop insulting others on the basis of physical appearance, height, weight, or their hobbies. For example: "basement dweller".

What's wrong with dwelling in basements? Why is that such a slur to you? I love dwelling in basements. They're nice and out of the way of the daywalkers.

 

[Terminal Blue]

On the subject of incels, perhaps society should slightly lower the pedestal upon which sex is placed, and people should stop insulting others on the basis of physical appearance, height, weight, or their hobbies. For example: "basement dweller".

Incel spree killers, as a rule, do not tend to be exceptionally hideous or unsightly people. They range from slightly overweight to being in excellent physical shape, and most are just average looking men. Based on their appearance alone, none of them would have had any problems finding a partner or getting into a relationship, just as countless people who look like them do every day. What does tend to unite incels in general, however, is an unbelievably judgemental approach to women's appearances. Incels generally aren't people with serious problems, they're just average guys who think they're entitled to date cheerleaders because that's what happens in movies.

If you wanted to look for actual ways in which they may be disadvantaged, it's possible that some incel spree killers were not neurotypical, which may have contributed to their social isolation and inability to deal with rejection. As someone who isn't neurotypical and does struggle with rejection, I was not a very nice person at 22 either (insert obligatory self-deprecating joke about how nothing has changed). However, not being neurotypical doesn't turn someone into a murderer, and isn't always the explanation for social difficulties. Sometimes, people become isolated because they never learned how to behave around people, or had low social motivation. Maybe they spent their childhood doing boy stuff and then suddenly realised all that intensive video game training hadn't prepared them to talk to women. It happens to a lot of men, and most get through it, it just takes a bit longer to learn the skills.

But some of them end up on the bad parts of the internet, where they are fed an ideology that teaches them that world is divided into "alphas" and "betas" (and all the other dumb greek letters they keep adding) that any social difficulty at all indicates that you are a "beta", and that you can never improve or change this because you are just genetically cursed to be alone and miserable forever. So they give up. They retreat from the world and from any source of positive reinforcement or validation until their only source of support is an online community telling them how hideous and cursed they are, and also that (((cultural marxists))) are responsible somehow. The same community that holds up and worships mass murderers as martyrs and glorifies the idea of violent revenge against those who dare to be less miserable. That glamorizes acts of mass murder as a political "uprising."

This isn't happening because incels really are the disgusting, wretched creatures they believe they are, it's happening because incels work together to actively recruit people, to find people at their lowest moments and then break down their self-esteem and isolate them so they can be indoctrinated into becoming more incels and thus validate the horrible things incels believe. It's a cult of people who have fucked up their lives so badly that the only way they can justify their existence is by convincing other people to fuck up their lives too.

 

[Bartholomew]

Incel spree killers, as a rule, do not tend to be exceptionally hideous or unsightly people. They range from slightly overweight to being in excellent physical shape, and most are just average looking men. Based on their appearance alone, none of them would have had any problems finding a partner or getting into a relationship, just as countless people who look like them do every day.

Of course! And neither are women who develop eating disorders as fat and as unattractive as they truly believe themselves to be. It's the bullies and the magazines that teach them these lies. The difference is that these women harm themselves, instead of harming others. You can arguably say that one is worse than the other, and that the mechanism through which is spreads is different, but I think it's reasonable to say that the mechanism behind both are the same: An unhealthy fixation on a failure to meet a societal expectation.

Just as bullying contributes to eating disorders in young women, so too does bullying contribute to becoming radicalized in this way.

This isn't happening because incels really are the disgusting, wretched creatures they believe they are, it's happening because incels work together to actively recruit people, to find people at their lowest moments and then break down their self-esteem and isolate them so they can be indoctrinated into becoming more incels and thus validate the horrible things incels believe. It's a cult of people who have fucked up their lives so badly that the only way they can justify their existence is by convincing other people to fuck up their lives too.

They wouldn't be able to recruit as many people if they weren't bullied into being at "their lowest" in the first place.

 

[Buyetyen]

They wouldn't be able to recruit as many people if they weren't bullied into being at "their lowest" in the first place.

There are a lot of things other than bullying that can drive someone to rock bottom. I speak from experience.

 

[Silvanus]

Nazis had already started to move against religion including Protestant Christianity. They didn't like people defining themself as anything else but Germans. Or allowning any kind of organisation not controlled by them. There was also the push to identify all abrahamitic religions as inherently jewish derived. And last but not least there are the many conflicts between Nazi ideology and Christian teaching that were seen as a hindrance. Many pastors reminding people of that went to concentration camps, many christian religious celebrations got fornidden and we even got some secular substitute festivities to get rid of religious influence.

Plans for purging all traces of Christianity from Germany had been made and were sceduled for after the war.

Nazism is an utterly atheist philosophy and not nice to any kind of religion, aside from the special hate for the jews. The only exception was some strange neopaganism that was more tolerated for celebrating some imagined nordic ideal past than actually practiced by anyone.

No, this is revisionism. You cannot say that Nazism was an "utterly atheist philosophy" when almost none of its adherents were atheist (fewer than 2%).

There were moves against many existing religious institutions, resulting from that distrust and dislike of any organisation outside of Party control. But they aimed at creating a state-sanctioned single Protestant Church in its place. This was quite explicitly not a movement against Protestant Christian belief-- obviously, since the vast majority of Nazi Party members were Protestant Christians, including in the highest echelons. It was an aim to dismantle the old institutions that represented them, and shift them under a heavily controlled organisation of their own device: the Protestant Reich Church.

The Nazi Party officially espoused what they called "positive Christianity". Hitler himself frequently evoked the Christian god in speeches, and privately he referred to atheism as "uneducated" and "animal".

 

[happyninja42]

or "atheistic terror attacks?"

Well off the top of my head, because I can't recall a single time that anyone went on a killing spree specifically because "I'm killing them because I don't believe in invisible sky daddies" as their stated reason.

They use those labels, generally when it's seems highly likely the REASON for the attack at all, was motivated by some belief system the killer holds. They don't often call it a christian terror attack, primarily because this country, is predominantly christian, and they HATE it when people point out that they do horrible things, and that their book is filled with horrible shit, that a lot of horrible people use to justify horrible behavior. They instantly call it religious persecution, even when the killer spouts something like "I did it because angels told me to do it, christian angels because armageddon blah blah" We're somehow unfairly labeling it a christian hate crime or whatever. And given how many shitbag conservatives have actually legalized christian preferential treatment in the law, most news outlets just avoid referring to it to avoid any scandal, and potential legal issues.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

No, this is revisionism. You cannot say that Nazism was an "utterly atheist philosophy" when almost none of its adherents were atheist (fewer than 2%).

There were moves against many existing religious institutions, resulting from that distrust and dislike of any organisation outside of Party control. But they aimed at creating a state-sanctioned single Protestant Church in its place. This was quite explicitly not a movement against Protestant Christian belief-- obviously, since the vast majority of Nazi Party members were Protestant Christians, including in the highest echelons. It was an aim to dismantle the old institutions that represented them, and shift them under a heavily controlled organisation of their own device: the Protestant Reich Church.

The Nazi Party officially espoused what they called "positive Christianity". Hitler himself frequently evoked the Christian god in speeches, and privately he referred to atheism as "uneducated" and "animal".

I mean Hitler used to proclaim how he was an Atheist to try and show himself as superior, it's suggested he very much wasn't but he tried to present that look / attitude and a thing. Also Veganism too.

 

[MrCalavera]

Also Veganism too.

Don't forget about dying hair and liking Nintendo/Disney.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Don't forget about dying hair and liking Nintendo/Disney.

Well I guess it was boring in the bunkers to Nintendo Playing cards were something to do.

 

[gorfias]

Incels are a death cult, and yet people still refuse to believe me when I say that. Guess they haven't killed enough for their tastes.

These people are a threat and we are far past time to start treating them as such. I say this without apology.

I think incels can feel very frustrated. I think frustrated people can be dangerous, regardless of what it is that is frustrating them. But your post is horrifyingly simplistic and insensitive. A lot of these people are just guys that can't get out of their own way. Sometimes they can be helped. I think a lot of the time, they cannot.

 

[Silvanus]

I mean Hitler used to proclaim how he was an Atheist to try and show himself as superior, it's suggested he very much wasn't but he tried to present that look / attitude and a thing. Also Veganism too.

There's evidence he was vegetarian, not vegan.

Can you provide the quotes proclaiming atheism?