LET’S ALL DECLARE JIHAD ON @clovis8 DEATH TO UNBELIEVERS!
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I know you are kidding but for the record this has been a perfectly fair discussion. No attacking at all that I have noticed.
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Muhammad was a delusional warlord. “I am the most peaceful person you will ever meet….unless you accuse me of having made up all this stuff…. in which case me and my followers will be forced to murder you on the spot….”
Rinse, repeat. Oh wow, look at that, this super peaceful dude and his followers were forced to violently conquer a bunch of territory.
The problem here is your broad definition of violence. You are calling any legal action by the state violence. If don’t agree. No society operates without legal sanctions and if we call all legal sanctions violence (including fines) there is no place to move the discussion.
Of course things like fines and jailing can be discriminatory (often are of course) but substituting the word violence for discriminatory here only muddles the discussion. It doesn’t further it imo.
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True. The fact is that there’s no easy way to deal with religion in society. Religious institutions both actively oppress subordinated groups and to their credit feed the homeless. Like most institutions, groups, and individuals they are not absolutely evil nor are they absolutely good.
The sketched out lines of how a modern society deals with this stuff is to not try to legislation belief, but legislate the limits of one’s beliefs on impacting other people. People can hold homophobia in their hearts in they want, but they can’t physically assault gay people nor can they discriminate in public settings like the workplace on the basis of sexual identity. This is messy and imperfect but:
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There was a whole lot of violent religious repression under communist regimes in the 20th century. China is still doing it.
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Forcing people to either adopt or not adopt a religion has never worked very well throughout history.
Then don’t pretend you oppose using violence. Calling violence legal doesn’t make it nonviolence. It is a delineation of where you think violence is justified. The Holocaust was legal, man. Calling your violence OK just because a government says so is hardly comforting.
The only thing that has ever prevented atheism from widespread religious violence is that it is usually a minority belief system without state support. Grant the atheists either of those conditions and they’re gonna start putting boots on necks. Give them both and they’ll happily start genociding.
It’s not a religious vs. non-religious thing, it’s a humans and their beliefs thing.
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The state functions by using the state’s monopoly on legitimate political violence to coerce behavior. Repressing religion is not an appropriate use of that power.
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This is just reappropriating an unconvincing RWNJ argument. Call every government action a violence backed threat then say a plastic straw ban or whatever is an outrageous use of violence.
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I guess, but you’re going to find a lot more people willing to go to jail for wearing a hijab than you’ll find businesses willing to keep using plastic straws after a few fines. It’s clear, though, that fines, while theoretically nonviolent, are backed up with the threat of violence if you don’t pay or continue to do the fine-bearing behavior. At least plastic straws, on a large scale, are more likely to harm other people than a woman voluntarily and knowingly wearing a hijab.
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Can we get some psychedelics and phenethylamines legalized first?
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Legalizing coke is just another hand out for banks.
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I would love to hear you explain this to black church leaders in the south.
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The track record of regimes that enforced state atheism is…not good.
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How does it compare to regimes that imposed state religions?
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