A man in a social media forum told me that school shootings were a result of secularism. The government took God out of school and that’s why kids are killing their peers and teachers. However, the more secular a society becomes, the less is the level of violence in it, I pointed out. In fact, religion, especially the Abrahamic traditions, are rather strongly associated with violence. It’s not video games, either, by the way. The more video games there are, and the more graphic their depictions of violence, the less violent a society becomes, everything else being equal. What else do you think might explain the phenomenon?
He couldn’t say. I pointed out that violence is associated with the relative absence of non-stressed emotionally-available attuned parents (co-presence is not enough), the presence of patriarchal structures and misogynistic attitudes, and these are generally religion based. Then there is the disappearance of the individual into tribal life where grievances are exaggerated, trauma from maltreatment specifically but alienation generally, and the availability of guns and the gun culture, which includes militarism.
“Respectfully, sir, you misread the nature of what secularism is and does,” he interrupted me me. “It is, among other things, responsible for more than 1.5 BILLION with a B murders of unborn infants worldwide just since 1980. True, there was a violence connected with religion (not just the Abrahamic religion.) However, it is not God who does the violence, whether people believe in Him or not. It’s the people in his name who do the violence.”
I responded to his reference concerning reproductive freedom:“That women cannot have their bodies commandeered by the state, stripped of their humanity, and forced to function as brood mares for theocrats driven by superstition, fables, and mythology is hardly the degenerate outcome you suggest. Indeed, it is a great advance for humanity that women are emancipated from the traditional religious and patriarchal structures that previously dictated to them how their bodies shall be used. To return to the barbaric period in which the state forces girls and women to have babies is a bizarre and cruel atavistic desire. It certainly shatters any claim to moral integrity. A moral person does not do that to women.”
I continued: “On the question of God, yours specifically, Yahweh, granting his existence, I will also grant you that your god does not always do the violence directly. Yahweh allows violence to be visited upon people by failing to stop it. So all the aborted fetuses are ultimately his responsibility because he has the power to stop abortions. Otherwise you would be saying that Yahweh lacks the power to stop evil. So you’re in a bind there. What is more, it seems rather obvious that Yahweh does plenty of evil directly.”
“Consider the violence he will visit upon persons in the afterlife who do not submit to him. I’m an atheist. I was never baptized. My fate will be a terrible one, and it will be entirely because Yahweh—the maker of all things—created hell and will throw me into it. Because I am a good person, what Yahweh will do to me is evil. I can be good all my life but if I do not recognize the passion of his scapegoat, I cannot enter heaven. Yet, I can rape children all my life, he will not stop me, and I can then accept his human sacrifice (Jesus) and I will live in eternal bliss.”
I finished with this: “Yahweh is a psychopath.” He never responded.
freedom and reason 