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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

I think we're letting our bias show in cases of religion. Why care what religion someone is, as long as they're ethical, accepting of others, and generally non-toxic? The fact that some Christians are intolerant of others doesn't mean all Christians are, and it's sad that we have to have a disclaimer such as yours, to "remember that not all Christians are bad".

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Also worth noting that the it's often the most disagreeable people who shield their actions with the label of Christianity. And of course, far too much blood has already been shed over declaring who a 'true' Christian is.

Shedding blood over identity is not unique to Christianity. It is a human universal.

Dying for what you believe in? Sure, I'll buy that.

Killing for what you believe in? Nah, that's pretty much the realm of fanatical extremists, of which religion has its greater than fair share.

A peculiar feature of The Soviet Union and Maoist China is that they suppressed religion. As far as I’m aware, those two ideologies have the largest body counts ever recorded.

Largest body counts as a percentage of the population? Surely God holds that record, what with smiting everyone but Noah?

I prefer to stick with historical (as opposed to mythical) facts.

You edited your reply ;). Replying to the first edit, You mean that The Flood took longer to kill everyone who wasn't on The Ark?

And to your second edits meaning: I also like to stick to facts, but I was replying to Christians claiming that non-godly people are more evil than godly people by pointing out how nasty they believe God to be.

Estimates of how many citizens were killed in the Soviet Union vary and depend on how you count and what you count https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_deaths_in_the_Sovi... 2-6m seems a bad enough number for Internet arguments.

Ww2 killed 60-80m and that was caused by Hitler who was Catholic (although he didn't kill in the name of religion).

Of course other things God supposedly created have killed far more, such as Spanish Flu which killed 500m and The Black Death which killed 30-60% of everyone in Europe.

> You edited your reply ;)

Guilty as charged!

The conversation was generally about what people do in the name of religion. What god has supposedly done is not really relevant to that...

Both of those examples were effectively a religion-as-state with their state heads elevated to the status of gods.

I don't think all that many non-religious people actually care/object when religious people practice their religion as long as it doesn't infringe on anyone else's rights.

You're defining "religion" broadly enough that some religions would be considered anti-religion.

How so?

These examples share a huge number of common traits with (fundamentalist) religion.

Your comments about intolerance and toxicity is sequitur to what? Am I missing a deleted post or a radical edit to the parent to yours?

Perhaps the reason we have these kinds of exceptional disclaimers for religious types [and conservatives] is because it is absolutely true, the exceptions are exactly that.

maybe because MANY christians say that ALL non-christians are bad and going to hell?

Christian theology teaches all people are bad deep down except God (including Jesus) alone. That idea doesn’t mean anybody can’t do good things, but biblical Christianity says judgment doesn’t have anything to do with being or doing good, because everybody’s already disqualified!

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