I think you’re wrong about religion. You’re trying to say that religion is used as justification afterwards, but we know that real numbers of religious nuts will endorse horrible things because of their religious beliefs.
In other words, would there be less violence occurring in that region if nobody had any religious beliefs? I think the answer has to be “probably yes”. We know this by talking to people, by looking at religious zealots throughout history. But even if our logic is correct, we cannot accurately guess how much less violence would be occurring if the region were full of atheists.
And in some sense our counterfactual thought experiment doesn’t even matter because the reality is that region is of great religious significance and you can’t really write that off as being irrelevant when several millennia prove that it is.
I think you’re wrong about religion. You’re trying to say that religion is used as justification afterwards, but we know that real numbers of religious nuts will endorse horrible things because of their religious beliefs.
In other words, would there be less violence occurring in that region if nobody had any religious beliefs? I think the answer has to be “probably yes”. We know this by talking to people, by looking at religious zealots throughout history. But even if our logic is correct, we cannot accurately guess how much less violence would be occurring if the region were full of atheists.
And in some sense our counterfactual thought experiment doesn’t even matter because the reality is that region is of great religious significance and you can’t really write that off as being irrelevant when several millennia prove that it is.
Also statistically countries with larger populations of atheists are significantly less violent.
Of course correlation doesn’t equal causation and it could be other environmental factors contributing to that nonviolence but nevertheless…