Why the religious mindset can be so dangerous

[Metanoia]

1. If you expose your sin, it corrupts the morality of the society as a whole
2. It corrupts you. Sinning easily leads to more sinning. That you would commit this one disgusting act, means you would probably be willing to commit other sins.

Explain the free pass for sex that Islam allows for bigamy.....

 

[Metanoia]

Is there a moral high ground that we are missing here ?

 

[lurchadams]

So your argument is a concession and then you name some weirdo who I've never even heard of that was a disgusting degenerate. Brilliant.

Surely you don't support full deregulation of legislating peoples personal lives, right? What if someone wants to have sex with dogs or 12 year old kids? Why is that wrong according to you?

Yep, the 'ol "man on dog" Rick Santorum special. Moronic arguments like that is what ended that asshole's career. You haven't heard of Jerry Fallwell, the former chancellor of Liberty University? Your ignorance is not our problem, it's yours.

 

[Neoliberal Fanfiction]

Prove that it corrupts. What do you mean by 'corrupt'? What is disgusting about consenting adults having sex? You have some odd opinions.

We under

Yep, the 'ol "man on dog" Rick Santorum special. Moronic arguments like that is what ended that asshole's career. You haven't heard of Jerry Fallwell, the former chancellor of Liberty University? Your ignorance is not our problem, it's yours.

Oh look, another non-argument.

It seems like you’re unable to articulate an argument without bringing up names and people which are totally unrelated to the argument. You might be better suited for real housewives or the Kardashians than politics or philosophy seeing as you enjoy gossip so much.

 

[lurchadams]

We under

Oh look, another non-argument.

It seems like you’re unable to articulate an argument without bringing up names and people which are totally unrelated to the argument. You might be better suited for real housewives or the Kardashians than politics or philosophy seeing as you enjoy gossip so much.

My argument all along has been that the religious right who've always had the mission to control who people love and what they do in the bedroom are the biggest hypocrites in the world, like Jerry Fallwell, Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart and all the other immoral ****s who's mission is to tell people how to behave in their personal lives and then get caught in a Denver hotel room snorting meth off a gay male hooker's taint while telling you if you donate to their megachurches you'll get salvation.

That's why you guys are such trump fans. You are prime chattle for snake oil salesmen like trump, Swaggart, Fallwell and the rest of them.

 

[Neoliberal Fanfiction]

My argument all along has been that the religious right who've always had the mission to control who people love and what they do in the bedroom are the biggest hypocrites in the world, like Jerry Fallwell, Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart and all the other immoral ****s who's mission is to tell people how to behave in their personal lives and then get caught in a Denver hotel room snorting meth off a gay male hooker's taint while telling you if you donate to their megachurches you'll get salvation.

That's why you guys are such trump fans. You are prime chattle for snake oil salesmen like trump, Swaggart, Fallwell and the rest of them.

Right. More gossip and names and “poplitics”.

I think it’s more likely you just lack the cognitive faculties to articulate a winning argument so you avoid the argument entirely by talking about a bunch of degenerates who have nothing to do with the philosophy or arguments I’m posing.

 

[lurchadams]

Right. More gossip and names and “poplitics”.

I think it’s more likely you just lack the cognitive faculties to articulate a winning argument so you avoid the argument entirely by talking about a bunch of degenerates who have nothing to do with the philosophy or arguments I’m posing.

"Rumors". yeah - these people were either confessed or there's photographic evidence. Let's not forget the biggest immoral pig of all: trump - a man who had unprotected sex with a porn star while his wife was at home nursing their newborn son.

You guys really know how to pick them <rolling eyes>.

 

[Jonsa]

Most liberals just have a goofy and ill-informed misunderstanding of religion. They'll say stuff which *sounds* intelligent like, "Religion is just an institution used to control the masses." but when comments like this are dissected, they're exposed as not really being functions of religion, but human nature itself.

I think, in many ways, the modern liberals acts like a miniature self-adulating simulation of the god whose existence or realness he dogmatically denies but whose role of unmoved mover and moral arbitrator he wants to assume. Liberals are constantly tinkering with the social and moral universes, while granting no possibility of the unforeseen or unplanned consequences which arise in a society that is without God and follows through with their agenda. Most progressive liberal types, with their contempt for the past and their chauvinism for modernity, which assumes that everyone in the past couldn't figure it out because they were not nearly as educated/enlightened/hip/cool as he or she is cannot acknowledge that anything inherited, whether a social custom or institution, has ever justified it's use or function and has no inherit value.

Or maybe modern non religious liberals know this to be true of many who profess a savior.

 

[devildavid]

I don't know where else you want to go with argument man. We're at an impasse. You believe that mans consciousness and ability to reason comes from the infinitesimally small chance that we arrived here through cosmic randomness. Even if that were the case, why would we trust it? If all of our perceptions and stimuli are created by total randomness, what says any of it is true or real? You could argue that 2+2 =/=4 with this logic. This is what I mean when I say that with this interpretation of reality, nothing is objective and everything is subjective.

In fact, if all outcomes were the result of cosmic randomness, you wouldn't be able to make objective statements like this:

You can't make any objective statements despite the fact that you've made many in this thread. If everything is random, there's no reason to trust our sensory perceptions and call something objective or true.

I believe otherwise and I think overwhelming proof points toward some sort of intelligent design. The problem is, if we disagree on this foundational point of the argument, there's no point in arguing further.

How did you arrive at the conclusion that there is an infinitesimally small chance that human beings arrived here through "cosmic" randomness? Randomness is randomness, nothing cosmic about it. Math is a human created concept. 2+2 =4 because we say so. There are objective facts within physical reality. There are no objective values or morals. Our consciousness and our ability to reason come from our highly complex brain and nervous system. Other animals may also possess the same abilities to a different degree. Randomness does not preclude objectivity. That things cam to be by random occurrences does not mean that any old thing could happen. It is a combination of random occurrences and the effects of the physical limitations within the environment. So while change is random, only certain things can succeed under certain conditions. It is not 100% randomness. If lightning strikes someone or if someone develops cancer it is due to random acts. But these random acts are physically constrained. Lighning needs certain conditions to occur, so does cancer.
+

 

[Dans La Lune]

Yeah just tired of repeating myself to people who don't care to read other parts of the thread seeing as I've been replying to basically the same arguments made by six different people this entire time. Try to keep up.

That's a low IQ response!

Oh, please do educate me. What you're saying is that when these passages mention faith, they specifically exclude science?

Specifically? No, the Scientific Method did not exist for humans when the Bible was written. However, faith in the context of religion is the antithesis of the Scientific Method.

You can have faith in God and still have faith in modern science and medicine. It isn't mutually exclusive.

You're not supposed to have 'faith' in modern science. The Scientific Method exists so that faith is not required. The homework is shown.

Yes it is. My argument is that a creator is necessary for objective morality to exist. If morality isn't objective, then it has no meaning.

Your brand or morality has no meaning to me, especially since by your own words you cannot prove that you're even following the correct God. You have faith that you are, but your faith is worth less to me than beans.

In other words, if there isn't an objective standard by which you could observe an act is good or evil, then morality is fluid with the subjective opinions of human civilization.

What if morality stopped with the Old Testament?

At times in human civilization, people have legalized pederasty, genocide, murder, etc.

Often in the name of God, or with the help of the religious.

You'd have to defend all of these things as being morally ambiguous as a believe in subjective morality. You wouldn't be able to call them objectively evil unless you believed in a creator. This is basic stuff.

Well, the world is nuanced. Is killing always evil?

Evolution is real in the sense that humans have progressed and become more mighty over the ages. Is it real in the sense that one day, through total randomness, matter started to coalesce into single celled organisms which then further coalesced into the complex human eye or human brain and form what we know today as consciousness? It is very, very, very unlikely.

What's more likely, in your opinion, that the natural laws of the universe were suspended for the Virgin Mary -- and a supernatural All-God impregnated her with his divine essence -- or that the Virgin Mary was not actually a virgin? Please answer this, then we can get onto the likelihood that evolution is 'very, very, very likely' guided by God.

The evolutionary argument for atheism is actually one of the weaker ones in my opinion. If everything is the result of randomness, you couldn't trust any of your sensory perceptions, rational faculties, or thoughts to even be true. You couldn't trust atheism to be true or anything else. Everything would be relative and subjective.

What an utterly meaningless statement.

 

[Dans La Lune]

I mean if we're using mathematics... statistics?

Allow me to illustrate: lets say some time in the not-so-distant you and some other future human beings landed on mars. You initially spot a giant mountain in the shape of 1,000 perfectly cut and shaped triangles. Now, you might immediately assume that it could be civilization of some sort... but it reasonably could be some sort of geological phenomenon. You take 10 steps forward though and you find a note on the ground that reads "Hello Dans La Lune. Welcome to our planet. Have you brought recipes from earth?". Using your reasoning faculties, would you assume that matter happened to just randomly form into a note that read that way or would you assume intelligent design?

That's funny. Please post the actual mathematics and statistics supporting your argument.

What do you mean why was it so sloppy? In comparison to what? If the universe has always been chaos then why should we assume that, for no reason at all, there has been a period of extended peace and order which has led to the development of extremely complex species?

It is objectively sloppy by any comparison, unless you think the death of a million stars and a billion worlds is coloring within the lines.

Uh, yes they do. Everyone with relevance, anyway.

Who determines who is relevant? You?

Muslims and Jews have different perceptions of Jesus, but Christians overwhelmingly agree with one another.

No, they don't. There are sects of Christianity who view the other side of Christianity as the literal Anti-Christ.

This is an entirely separate argument though which I'd rather not get into. We'll be at a total impasse when it comes to the "trueness" of Christianity because you're not even a theist.

You'd get farther with me than you would with a Christian who viewed your brand of Christianity as pure evil. In a way, I'd be the objective third party.

Probably not my preferred form of government. I am against democracy and liberalism, though, so it would have its pros and cons.

The New Testament is demonstrably more liberal and progressive than the Old Testament. Why is that?

Any time liberalism would seek the destruction of the prevailing order, there should be a rigorous Q&A about why supplanting that order is "good" and what "good" even means from that perspective.

Funny you should say that, since Jesus was a reforming of the prevailing order of his generation. You wouldn't have gotten along with Jesus had you been of the Old Order during his time.

Why is homosexuality good?

Heeeeeeeeeeere we go.

Why is it good to for kids to be raised by homosexuals? Why is no-fault divorce good? Why is abortion good? So on and so fourth.

Please, continue. I want to know what other "sins" you'd abolish under your brand of government, if you had power.

 

[watsup]

Lol... okay we'll walk through this like little babies.

Quality: the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind; the degree of excellence of something.
Higher: great, or greater than normal, in quantity, size, or intensity.
Lower: less high in position.

A person with an IQ of 100 has a higher intellect than a person with an IQ of 90. A person who can lift 350 pounds, has higher muscle mass than a person that can only lift 150. The point of the post was to suggest that inequality can only exist in situations where a higher quality exists. In an individual sense, can a lower quality person (in any field or social dynamic) oppress a person of a higher quality? Of course not. Does this mean we should oppress lower quality people? No. Does this mean lower quality people are lesser in their dignity before god? No. Does this mean lower quality people are subhuman or somehow less human than higher quality people? No.

Does this mean that, for absolutely no discernable reason at all, we should worship and praise low quality behavior? Absolutely not.

If there is no consequence to your discussion about higher quality, then why even bring it up in the first place. Was there actually a point involved?

 

[watsup]

[QUOTE="Neoliberal Fanfiction, post: 1072834483, member: 36782"
How is God and natural law a tautology? Lmao what are you even talking about man. People in this thread have repeatedly demonstrated that they haven't gone through my past posts, they have poor philosophical understandings of the words "objective" and "subjective", and they have a poor understanding of the origins of Christian theology. There's nothing I can do about this and I'll call it out when I see it, there's nothing ad hominem about that.


Again, you betray your poor understanding of what "objective" means in philosophical terms. You can only come to a conclusion that morality is objective through the existence of a divine creator or God. You cannot come to a conclusion morality is objective through cosmic randomness. It's simple as that. Philosophy.
[/QUOTE]


What I said ans you simply overlooked and changed it, was the your little "logic" bit about God and it being the source of morality and thus morality was objective was a tautology because it fit this definition: a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form.
The ONLY way that your statement is "logical" is within your little "explanation" and when looked at from outside that tight little circle it has mucho problems. Let me expand:

You start with an absolutely huge "IF" of a "God". No proof given, no evidence given. Then you simply DEFINE this "God" as the source of all morality. Again, no proof, not even any evidence. And on this flimsy platform you erect your conclusion of "objective morality" and then later on somehow use this flim-flam to supposedly show that there is also "natural law". Again, no actual evidence or proof, we're just supposed to take this all on your say-so, or on other very flimsy conditions. And then you claim that is based in philosophy, which is a trap door that allows you to quickly dismiss quite valid disagreements.
And you keep claiming that the respondents just aren't smart enough to understand all of this and that it is your deep understanding of philosophy that allows you to see it all so much better than everyone else. Well, here's the truth: It's not that difficult to understand. It's very simplistic, really. The problem is that it just doesn't hold the water of logic very well. Lots and lots of holes in the logic bucket.

BTW, you are not alone in the claim that those who disagree with your particular theology/philosophy are not very bright. Practically every theist who has produced their own little theory of "God" and posted it here have done the same. It is a common theme among the believers here that no atheist could ever understand the deep meaning of their particular construct. Except that it's never true, and it's not true this time. It's just a shield that you believers put up when the going gets tough in terms of actually trying to logically explain your particular fable.

 

[watsup]

Lol... okay we'll walk through this like little babies.

Quality: the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind; the degree of excellence of something.
Higher: great, or greater than normal, in quantity, size, or intensity.
Lower: less high in position.

The opposite of inequality is not quality. The opposite of inequality is equality.

 

[Integrityrespec]

How do you‘s people wonder why there is often antagonism to their mindset. What’s the harm, they ask, of having faith and hope.

Well, because the mindset leaves them open to all sorts of crazy ideas and wily politicians who can manipulate that gullibility to exploit them, and by extension, the rest of us.

One of the manifestations of this pathology is now the QAnon cult, which is finding fertile ground in the evangelical community.

How QAnon uses religion to lure unsuspecting Christians | CNN

Some Christian conservatives are falling for QAnon, which uses emotionally fraught topics such as suffering children to draw converts to their unhinged conspiracies.

www.cnn.com

After all, as Thomas Jefferson said,

“Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.”
-Thomas Jefferson

Religion is not about manipulation. A religion that teaches do unto others as you would have done to unto you is hardly a threat.

 

[watsup]

I think, when you consider all of the laws of physics, mathematics, biology, and science broadly, you'd almost have to have more faith in randomness than theists do in the belief of a creator. The probability that every law of science works the same every single time, is never wrong, and is the result of total randomness is so Infinitesimally small that it might as well just be zero. The chances that the universe would eventually reach a point (through total randomness and not intelligent design) where you and I can have this conversation with the level of sentience and reason that we both possess requires an extremely strong faith in a probability that is almost infinitely small. Consider this line of thinking when you posit whether or not the universe is the result of total randomness or some kind of intelligent design.

No matter how often you make the claim "infinitesimally small", it has no merit. What you leave out is 13.8 BILLION YEARS. With our puny little brains, we can hardly fathom a century, let alone billions and billions of years. Do you have a reference to a scientist that agrees with you or to scientific research that would show the "unlikely" formation of the universe as it presently stands, to include life on this planet, or is this just an opinion that you pull out of thin air?
There's one other problem with your statement. Evidently you believe that the universe cannot operate as scientists it does and thus needs a "creator" who did some "intelligent design", but you don't say exactly how it is that said creator, who would have to be infinitely more complex than our universe in order to "design" it can exist as an independent entity in and of itself. By your standards above, the possibility would have to be zero.

 

[watsup]

[QUOTE="Neoliberal Fanfiction, post: 1072834470, member: 36782"

If, however, morality is the result of cosmic randomness and evolution, then nothing can be true. There's no reason why we should trust atoms randomly bumping into one another and matter randomly coalescing to form any kind of objective morality. If cosmic randomness is the only true law of the universe - then there is no objective moral law of the universe. If some guy takes pleasure in blowing your head off with a shotgun, that is his own individual morality. Sure, you might disagree with his morality but that's just your word against his. Since everything is random and there is no higher purpose to human life, he's just reorganizing the matter of your head, which is what the universe had done for billions of years prior to your existence. The only thing that binds him to any "right" or "wrong" is man-made positive law, which is totally subjective.


I think the problem here is that you don't understand philosophy. If there is no universal standard for what can be considered "good" or "evil", then morality is subjective. This is VERY basic to understand.
[/QUOTE]

So many many problems with this statement. First of all, I am going to talk about ethics rather than morality. The term morality is normally associated with a "God" as you do in this thread. When used in that manner, it has very little meaning to an atheist who doesn't buy into the concept of a god in the first place. The term I prefer to use is ethics, which are normally though of as a human-developed structure of right and wrong.
You misuse the meaning of random in the universe. In actuality, there is randomness and seeming chaos existing alongside order in the form of the "laws" of science that you refer to.. All of the elements of the universe were present at the big bang, along with the physics and chemistry of this particular universe, and then the biology that would come along later when life developed. Yes, it is true that there is lots we don't know about the mysteries of the universe, but that is why scientists continue to study it rather than just throwing up their hands and proclaiming "God did it" as you are doing.
While the process of thought by homo sapiens does consist if "atoms bumping into one another", there's really much more to it than that. The human brain is capable of reason and rationality and thereby can indeed come up with ethical standards for living in society. While they may not be "objective", there are a few which do indeed show up in almost every civil society from the beginning of human time on earth, to includes strictures against murder, stealing, lying, and adultery. Most civilizations also have adopted a respect for elders in a family, the equivalent of "honor they father and mother". And all of this was done in these societies without the need for "divine guidance" and were extant prior to the so-called Ten Commandments.
So morality is subjective and follow manmade laws. So what? The ethics developed through humanism work just fine in a civil society such as the United States, thank you.

 

[lurchadams]

Ah, ignoring the bulk of my post while replying with a condescending substance-less post. Brilliant argument.

Consider this: merely identifying as being "religious" does not actually make you truly religious. Nor does it make any of your political beliefs justifiable according to your religious doctrine. Most of modern liberalism is actually at massive odds with Christian theology.

Yes, because the bible was written by men thousands of years ago who had zero clue about how the world worked. That's what the religious right is - a bunch of medieval zealots.

 

[watsup]

Probably not my preferred form of government. I am against democracy and liberalism, though, so it would have its pros and cons.

Let's see, you are against democracy so some form of tyranny would probably be more suitable. And you are against liberalism, so a right-wing emphasis should be agreeable to you. So what you are really looking for is a tyrannical right-wing government, which is sometimes called fascism Hail il Duce!

 

[watsup]

I'll end this post with a quote from CS Lewis which I think summarizes the arguments I've made against naturalism in a very concise and salient way:

"Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God. "

So what? It's the opinion of one man, with the normal sophistry instead of solid logic.

 

[lurchadams]

So what? It's the opinion of one man, with the normal sophistry instead of solid logic.

You're doing great watsup, but when confronted with religious extremism, expecting a religious fascist to admit the puritanical morals they've been fed since birth may need a modern review session will fall on deaf ears. They will always want to legislate morality while the people who make the laws as well as many of the pastors who preach them are themselves highly immoral and sometimes criminal people. Neoliberal is a religious fascist and a smart one which makes him extra dangerous. People like him will always demand you live by his rules - while at the same time people who preach these rules frequently end up in a motel room with a gay hooker snorting meth - like Ted Haggard, Jerry Fallwell, and Ralph Reed and perhaps someday even people posting like Neoliberal on this forum will have to face up to their denial of their helpless attraction to other dudes.

 

[Neoliberal Fanfiction]

How did you arrive at the conclusion that there is an infinitesimally small chance that human beings arrived here through "cosmic" randomness? Randomness is randomness, nothing cosmic about it. Math is a human created concept. 2+2 =4 because we say so. There are objective facts within physical reality. There are no objective values or morals. Our consciousness and our ability to reason come from our highly complex brain and nervous system. Other animals may also possess the same abilities to a different degree. Randomness does not preclude objectivity. That things cam to be by random occurrences does not mean that any old thing could happen. It is a combination of random occurrences and the effects of the physical limitations within the environment.

I'm not talking about cancer happening spontaneously or lightning striking spontaneously. I'm talking about the laws which lead to all of these things. The foundations of science. The human brain, nervous system, and the human eye are so complex that their forming out of total randomness would be incredibly small.

It's like the analogy I listed earlier. If you were to happen upon a planet and find a note out the ground that read "Hello devildavid. Welcome to planet X. Have you brought recipes from earth?", would you assume this note was created through matter randomly coalescing into a readable note or would you assume aliens or some other intelligent life form made it? Human beings are much more complex than something like that and yet we exist, according to you, through total randomness.

So while change is random, only certain things can succeed under certain conditions. It is not 100% randomness. If lightning strikes someone or if someone develops cancer it is due to random acts. But these random acts are physically constrained. Lighning needs certain conditions to occur, so does cancer.

This says nothing about the laws which allow lightning to strike or cancer to metastasize. These are the things I'm talking about. At the foundation of all things, there is total chaos without intelligent design.

 

[AConcernedCitizen]

"Hello devildavid. Welcome to planet X. Have you brought recipes from earth?", would you assume this note was created through matter randomly coalescing into a readable note or would you assume aliens or some other intelligent life form made it? Human beings are much more complex than something like that and yet we exist, according to you, through total randomness.

Not through total randomness. Through genetic algorithm, which is the non-random selection of random mutation.

If you had trillions of notes with a random sequence of characters, and you had a mechanism that destroyed all the notes that were least similar to "Hello devildavid. Welcome to planet X. Have you brought recipes from earth?" and allowed the remaining notes to produce new notes with combinations of their component characters, with a small chance of randomly assigned characters, that system could easily produce such a note.

And if you could literally see this random character generator and non-random selection mechanism, and build a computer model of how it operates, and look at a history of past notes evolving from gibberish to gradually increasing similarity to the note in question, and you didn't see any signs of anyone else around who could have written that note, it is a pretty good bet that the note came from that random generator.

 

[Juks]

Religion gives us an excuse for almost any behavior and prevent us from questioning. It also promotes elitist thinking; We and them where we are better and the holders of the ultimate truth.


"With God on our side"

 

[Neoliberal Fanfiction]

That's a low IQ response!

"no u"

Specifically? No, the Scientific Method did not exist for humans when the Bible was written. However, faith in the context of religion is the antithesis of the Scientific Method.

I'm not talking about the scientific method. Does the bible say not to dress an open festering wound and instead trust in prayer? Or does it say dress the wound, but also put your faith in God to help you during your struggle?

It should be noted that even from a practical perspective, science has shown that prayer has many psychological benefits.

Prayer can help people handle difficult emotions, study suggests

Those who choose to pray find personalized comfort during hard times, according to a sociologist. The 75 percent of Americans who pray on a weekly basis do so to manage a range of negative situations and emotions -- illness, sadness, trauma and anger -- but just how they find relief has gone...

www.sciencedaily.com

.

You're not supposed to have 'faith' in modern science. The Scientific Method exists so that faith is not required. The homework is shown.

Well faith, by definition, means to put your trust or confidence in something. Do you not trust or feel confident in modern science?

Your brand or morality has no meaning to me, especially since by your own words you cannot prove that you're even following the correct God. You have faith that you are, but your faith is worth less to me than beans.

What if morality stopped with the Old Testament?

It isn't "my" brand of morality. It is a standard of objective morality intuitive to all human beings that was written on our hearts by a divine creator. Natural law doesn't even assume that the God is a Christian God. You don't have to believe in a creator and can instead choose to believe in subjective morality, but you can't say objective morality is "wrong" or "my" brand of morality. If it is true, it just would be. I don't need to prove to you whether or not it is objective if we are the product of intelligent design. How do you not get this basic point yet...

I don't even know what the bolded question is trying to ask.

Often in the name of God, or with the help of the religious.

Basically all modern mass and industrial murder has been secular. Even if it were true that Stalin or Mao were "devout" Christians - it wouldn't mean that the church endorsed their crimes. Dumb take.