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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

> Pretty minor ones.

I don't know how you could say that, considering the many horrible things taught because of or done in the name of religion over the millennia. Like, to use a recent issue, the biggest thing stopping gay marriage in the US at least was people's religiously driven belief that homosexuality is morally wrong.

I know many will say, "well it's only nominally driven by religion, people would've done [bad thing] regardless". But that's a clear double standard, if you don't also say that people would've done good things regardless.

I'm guessing the truth is both: sometimes people really would've done bad or good things anyway, the religion is just a cover. And other times, they really were driven particularly by religion.

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Those things would have been done in the name of something else too. Religions here is just a pretext.

Killing the american natives, the tutsi, the jews or the cambodgian intellectuals intellectuals were among the worst things humanity have ever done, and the religion of the perpetrators had nothing to do with it.

Terrible humans will use any rationalization to do terrible things.

Most muslim women in my country don't wear a hijab. However, men beating their wifes are from all kind of religious and non religious backgounds.

I now believe that religion is a reflect of the state of your society, not the other way around. People are racist, homophobic, intolerant, entitled, misogynist, and then, they sometimes use religion to justify that.

> Those things would have been done in the name of something else too. Religions here is just a pretext.

...and there it is. I literally addressed this in my comment already.

> Terrible humans will use any rationalization to do terrible things.

Sure, but you can say the same thing the other way: fantastic humans will use any rationalization to do good. Good people aren't going to suddenly turn into monsters if they don't believe in an All-Powerful Judge in the sky.

Communists (atheists) done a lot more harm than any religion, and they hate gay marriage too. Anything powerful can be used to do a good thing and a bad thing. Any institution can be used to do an evil thing, neglect, or be corrupt, e.g. police (police can be abused to protect corrupt regimes), courts or event justice as whole (slaves were legal in many countries), church, etc.

Communists is not equal to atheists , in fact most of the atheists I know are not communists. Blaming to atheists the crimes committed in name of communism is like saying that as Hitler admired christianism all his crimes should be blamed on christians . And right the ones trying to impose their beliefs, and deny rights to others, in Europe and USA are the followers of some of the Abrahamic religions.

Atheists are not communists, but communists are atheists: they're believing that God does not exist, so they can take his role.

That line of thinking is dangerous, you can assume that televangelists are scammers because they are christians or that priests that abuse children are abusers because they are christians. and not, they are because they are bad people. Stalin/Mao/etc .. were bad people and that's the reason they did what they did not because they were atheists or communists, when a priest abuses a child does it's because he's a bad person not because he's a christian.

> Communists (atheists)

Those aren't the same thing, even if the demographics somewhat overlap.

In any case, I'm no fan of authoritarian socialism either, because yes, they did some really horrible shit in the name of their ideology.

But most atheists aren't communists/authoritarian socialists.

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