A comment from a Daylight Atheism post, reproduced in full:
I have so often wondered: if we impose the death penalty on murderers
and those sociopaths who are simply too dangerous to allow to continue
living, what would be the morality of having all religious people
executed? for the good for humanity.
I simply, despite trying,
cannot come up with a reason why this should not be done except that it
would be an extreme measure and that no human is fit to make such a
decision (the giver of the order, that is). Which is, apparently, the
main difference between myself and any fundamentalist I've yet to meet:
I'm willing to admit that the world would be better off without
religious people, but I'm not willing to do what would need to be done
to protect humanity.
But -- they are, because they offload the
incredible arrogance and and wicked ego-centrism by claiming that an
external source (god) declares it to be morally alright.
The ends, the means, and the question of whether the cure is better than the disease.
Obviously this isn't representative of atheist thought - on the thread itself, the regulars jump down this guy's throat. Still, he doesn't seem like a troll to me. This is the sort of thing that leads people to equate atheism with Stalinism - hell, it's the idealized form of such a thing. Protect humanity? God help us.
Yes, that's right. Many religious literalists trumpet humanity as inherently broken and flawed, while their actions convey the exact opposite. It's tempting to consider evil as something that can be totally overcome: the weird fundamentalist conception of sin, for instance, or 'irrationality'.
ReplyDelete(And thank you for commenting! I was trying to put my finger on exactly what bothered me - well, besides the mass murder - and that was it.)