Are theists more violent than atheists?

[Audie]

I'm not terribly knowledgeable on the topic, but it seems some totalitarian regimes can be fairly antireligious.

I don't think communism is based on
atheism. In N Korean the Kims are gods.

 

[Onoma]

Theism seems like a great excuse to be hostile

Atheism, not so much

 

[Audie]

The answer depends on one's definitions of an atheist person and a religious person. The confusion has to do with many atheists, having had previous religious training as children, but chose, as an adult, to become defined as atheists. If such people do good they are called atheists by the atheists and if they do bad they are called religious by the atheists. Stacking the deck with dual standards adds to the confusion.

For example, Dawkins who is often considered a poster child for atheism, is self described, in his biography, as having been brought up as an Anglican. Later in life he became an atheist. Hitler was raised as a Christian, but later in life Hitler believed in social Darwinism; superior race, which was an atheist concept. These two men are treated with dual standards by atheism. They atheists will own up to Dawkins, even with his early religious upbringing, but not Hitler, even though both men found atheism later in life. The math becomes fudged.

If you look at life on America, the left, which is less religious, than the right, sides more with atheism. It is far less tolerant and had more violent demonstrations in 2020. They are more likely to censor free speech, force conformity and become vindictive. This will be blamed, by atheists, on early religious training, like Hitler, and not choices as adults, like Dawkins.

Most of the violence in America's large inner cities is connected to atheists; the criminal godless, who are not officially card carrying atheists. They may have started out with basic religious training. But in the end, one can tell a tree by the fruit it bears. The violence is not about love or self defense of others, but about criminal behavior for self enrichment and clans; drug and gang wars. That is not taught by religion.

Based on these observations, I tend to believe the worse offenders are those whose belief systems are conflicting hybrids; have both conflicting religious and atheists leanings. These tend to be the worse, since they are often in conflict, while lacking the reliable moral restrain. For example, in America, the talk of reparations for blacks, by the left, is an atheist spin off from the religious concept of original sin. Just as in the story of Adam and Eve, future generations beyond the originals, are somehow assumed scarred and liable, for the past, independent of their own actions. This is how the conflicted hybrid minds think. They used calculated bastardization of religious doctrine for atheist-religious manipulations. This can rally other hybrids, since it appears to bridge the chasm of doubt

If anyone remembers the Russian Collusion Delusion in the USA, from 2016-19, this is where all the senior level leaders within the Democrats party, conned and lied nonstop, for three years, until the lies were exposed. Then the lying was buried, like it never happened. Pelosi and Schumer, to name the top two con artists of that era, are often labeled as Catholic and Jewish, respectively. However, both bastardized the truth, based on self serving calculations not in their religions. They are hybrids; wolves in lamb's clothing. They are the worse and give a bad name to both the true atheists and the true religious, who are far less conflicted.

When I became a teen, I was inhibited by my early religious training as a child. This initially prevented me from participating in the wild times of the 1970's; sex, drugs and rock-n-roll. Since I wanted to participate, I decided to become an atheist, since this was more conductive to those ends. The godless could dive in the deepest. In my hybrid, the ends could justify the means, instead of the means being censored up front by moral law. I justified the immorality as being part of a useful learning experience. However, I could only go half way; some inhibitions remained. This was the place I needed to be. Later in life, this center translated to the goal of finding how these two orientations could unite. In the end, religion is about the needs of the inner self, while atheism is about the needs of the ego. Both are needed to feel complete and content.

No matter how skilled "theists " are at self -deception, its impossible to decide to be an atheist.

 

[Audie]

Theism seems like a great excuse to be hostile

Atheism, not so much

Religion is like being a soccer fan.

Asoccerists are apathetic about soccer.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Perhaps part of the value of religion is whether we believe applying its principles makes a difference in our lives, those around us and our relationships. A personal example is that I don’t consume alcohol due to the Teachings of my faith. Yet a close member of my family regularly consumed two bottles of wine each night, contracted liver and died. I doubt I would have become an alcoholic if I hadn’t become a Baha’i but its one less thing to complicate my life.

I’m not a violent person by nature and never strike my children (its illegal in my country now anyhow). I feel my faith has given me some strategies for dealing with conflict and made it easier to do so. I suspect some religions may incite violent responses under some circumstances rather than advocating peace.

In short, the question of the value of religion in our lives or not is a personal one for each of us to contemplate.

I think different religions have different effects.

Your religion may guide you away from striking your children, but I can't count how many times I've heard Christians quote Proverbs 13:24 ("spare the rod, spoil the child").

And at a societal level, there's the issue of power. Secularism is a relatively new - and still somewhat rare - thing. It's fairly common for the dominant religion in a society to exert influence on government; often, this influence gets used to shield people from punishment if they weild violence that's in line with the tenets of the religion, or if the perpetrator is someone with high status in the religion.

... and even when there isn't a formal relationship between church and state, religions exert informal influence just based on their size. Even when a society is nominally secular, a religion that represents the majorith can still use its influence to shield members from consequences for violent acts.

In general, atheists just don't have this sort of political and societal influence. They would be less protected from consequences and punishment if they were to want to commit violence; because of this, atheists are less likely to act on any violent impulses they might have.

 

[robocop (actually)]

Question for you: was it atheism that drove their violence, or some other ideology?

How many violent acts can you find in history that were incited by nothing except for a disbelief in gods?

Just out of curiosity.

It was lack of religion that drove the violence.

100 million due to Marx.
10 million due to Hitler.
250,000 due to secular war policy.

 

[robocop (actually)]

So a few individuals causing a lot of deaths equates to this? Surely that just shows their effectiveness rather than anything else.

Surely they had many helpers. Did Stalin or Hitler act alone? Was there not many people that worked on the a-bomb?

 

[Vee]

Or are atheists more violent than theists?

How can we know? Can we know?

What is the evidence one way or another?

I have never seen any reliable studies that can answer that question.
There are millions of theists and millions of atheists in the world. I'm sure there are violent people and peaceful people among both groups. I think violence goes a lot deeper than a belief or not in the existence of God. Normally when you look at the history of people who are violent you will find a lot of things, not just their religious belief. They might have been educated in a violent house, maybe they abuse alcohol or drugs, maybe they are just disheartened with their lives and violence becomes an outlet, etc.

 

[epronovost]

Theocracy in the Vatican?....ummmm, sorry, I can’t really see it.

A “theocracy” is “rule by God”...not the Pope or “the church”.

A theocracy isn't "rulee by God" it's the name of a government ruled by priests/prophets or other similar religious figure in the name of God/gods. The Vatican is a theocracy as is Iran for example.

Original Christianity had no Pope....or large ornate buildings or distinctive clothing or funny hats. Their worship was less formal, with emphasis more on Bible education than repetitive, ritualistic worship and repetitive prayers.

Actually the Bible as you know it is younger than the Catholic Church and its rituals and funny hats. The worship of early Christians was mostly based on "charismatic preachings", oral tradition Gospels (as they were not fully written and distributed yet) and ritualised prayers. Your Bible was selected and edited during a Catholic Church council and was still debated for centuries. Revelation, for example, became part of the official canon in the middle-ages and wasn't accepted by the main Christian denomination until the Reform era. Even today, Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, Coptic and Syriac Churches have a few books different in their Bibles.

Jesus never recommended a cloistered monastic life or taking vows of silence.

Actually, he did recommand for Christian not to live amongst non-Christian or at least seperated and cloistered from them and live a communal life of sharing everything amongst each other, contemplation, prayer and charity. The monastic tradition is older than both the Catholic Church and your Bible by almost 2 centuries. The first traces of monastic Christianism are the Desert Father and were living life of hermits, sometime accompanied by close friends and familly members, emulating Jesus' time in the wilderness.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Marxist based communist regimes in Russia and China are good examples.

The Soviet leadership's position on the Russian Orthodox Church varied over time. In some periods, they suppressed it; in other periods, they promoted it.

In China, the official policy toward folk religion is "benign neglect," and the Communist Party has endorsed certain Christian churches.

In both cases, it seems they weren't so much "anti-religion" as they were "anti-dissent." It's just sometimes, religious groups would be dissenters. They generally didn't seem to have a problem with religious groups that were compliant.

 

[Clara Tea]

Any history book or encyclopedia can tell us about wars. But often the reasons for those wars are obscured. Victors write history, and even the vanquished have their own versions. For example, Japan, allied with the brutal Nazis, sneak attacked Pearl Harbor during peace negotiations, but, in their history, the US was the aggressor. Japan even went as far as asking for an apology from China for Japan's brutal attack on them.



There are many false awards which could easily fool casual observers.



For example, Adolph Hitler (initially a Christian), today, is known as a warmonger who had attacked peaceful nations and made torture death camps for innocent Jews. But lets not forget that Hitler was Time Magazine's man of the year (1938), Stalin (1939 and 1942), Khrushchev (1957) and Ayatollah Khomeini (1979).



In 1994, Yasser Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet, intelligence reports show that he spoke peace to the world, but spoke of war and terrorism to his own Hesbola.



After years of oppression by Britain, the Irish (predominently Catholic) rose up. Arthur Griffith's Sinn Fein (including Gardner Place and Kevin Street) spawned Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, and in 1970 spawned the Worker's Party of Ireland which was associated with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (the violent IRA).



Central to this question (who is more violent) is whether religion encouraged violence or not. Sure, we can show that a certain nation adheres to a religion, but was that the proximal cause of aggression? Even if a relgious leader caused war, did that leader's religion prohibit killing? (Thou shalt not kill....yet war persists).



After historians have sifted the facts, we see that many wars were created by theists Christians. Often it was religion that spurred war. For example, when King Henry VIII created the Anglican religion in order to divorce his wives and seize power from the Catholic church, his daughter, Bloody Mary returned England to the "true" religion by chopping off the heads of over 150 Protestant priests who had refused to wear the correct robes. This started a flurry of brutal murders in which Anglicans and Christians clashed, culminating in the Grand Petition (5,000 angry citizens demanding that King Charles II signs a decree prohibiting a Catholic from assuming the throne). Given that his father, Charles I, had been recently executed by Parliament over the issue of who was in charge of England (was Parliament merely an advisor of the king), King Charles II was quite concilliatory with the angry mob.



When Charles II died, his Catholic brother James II was made king. The ill-fated Monmouth Rebellion was to put King Charles II's illegitimate son (James Scott, Duke of Monmouth) on the throne, instead. The few remaining Monmouth rebels were instrumental in ousting James II for King William of Orange (and wife Mary, dau of James II).



Thus, power and religion created many wars. Atheists were not really involved. However, God had ordered his followers not to kill. So, though the wars were started by theists, they were defying God.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Surely they had many helpers. Did Stalin or Hitler act alone? Was there not many people that worked on the a-bomb?

Still very few people involved doing so (compared with the numbers involved fighting and/or killed), and as I've remarked before, no one basically votes to go to war. People can be emotionally whipped up and fed propaganda such that they will fight but it's usually those in power who do all the instigating. Much the same can be said for religious conflicts, where those fighting are more or less encouraged to hate the others by their leaders.

 

[Clara Tea]

But does religion result in peoples becoming more or less evil?

God said "thou shalt not kill" "turn the other cheek." Mankind (including theists) defy God, and kill anyway.

I find it shocking that there are Chaplains in the military who don't advise everyone to quit fighting.

We have seen, in our own lifetimes, the attack on Iraq. Fear motivated that attack. Fear that we would be sitting ducks for terrorist attacks if we didn't fight back, and we might as well attack them on their soil rather than ours. Our president said that he was "fightin' evil." Yet he was the evil one....the warmonger.

We must have the faith that God will take care of terrorists, without us defying God's orders.

Theists make more wars. Yet, they defy God when they do.

Thus, theists are corrupted by fear and thereby become evil. Satan corrupts with fear and deception. We can't blame religion for Satan getting his way.

 

[robocop (actually)]

Still very few people involved doing so (compared with the numbers involved fighting and/or killed), and as I've remarked before, no one basically votes to go to war. People can be emotionally whipped up and fed propaganda such that they will fight but it's usually those in power who do all the instigating. Much the same can be said for religious conflicts, where those fighting are more or less encouraged to hate the others by their leaders.

To be honest, these things kind of gradually grew on people. It's difficult to say how much others reasonably could have stopped them.

 

[Ponder This]

If religion can not result in a discernible change in behaviour for the better then what is its value?

Atheists are not necessarily irreligious.
Theists do not necessarily congregate.

FWIW I don’t know if one group is any more violent than the other and it would be a difficult question to objectively answer. One method could be to look at the religious affiliation of violent offenders when incarcerated. There seems to be few if any good studies that do just that. So its possible we can’t know due to lack of good research. Maybe someone can provide links to studies that comprehensively study this issue. Until then I’m disinclined to draw any conclusions.

"Violence" covers a broad spectrum of activities, some criminal, some not criminal.

Or are atheists more violent than theists?

How can we know? Can we know?

What is the evidence one way or another?

Perhaps the question is insufficiently defined. What does it mean to be "more violent"?

 

[Mock Turtle]

To be honest, these things kind of gradually grew on people. It's difficult to say how much others reasonably could have stopped them.

I still get the impression that it is leaders and the led, in whatever conflict, when mostly people are not naturally aggressive towards others and as such have to be motivated in some manner. Plenty of reasons for being so too. As in, how many people really are there willing to die for some cause?

 

[robocop (actually)]

I still get the impression that it is leaders and the led, in whatever conflict, when mostly people are not naturally aggressive towards others and as such have to be motivated in some manner. Plenty of reasons for being so too. As in, how many people really are there willing to die for some cause?

Suppose Marxism, Naziism and the a-bombs were just one person. Where not these people exceedingly destructive and were not they Satanic/fake Christian/secular?

What in the religious world could compare?

 

[epronovost]

Suppose Marxism, Naziism and the a-bombs were just one person. Where not these people exceedingly destructive and were not they Satanic/fake Christian/secular?

Lenin and Stalin definitely were atheists. Hitler was a christian, not more fake than any other christian of the time and place and relying on centuries of religiously motivated antisemitism inherited from the wittings of Martin Luther for example to spread hysterical hatred of the Jews in a largely christian society. Though he was not very fervant in his personnal life. The a-bomb was the product of a group of scientists let by Oppenheimer who was jewish and strongly interested and fascinated by Hinduism so not really an atheist or secular per say, but not overly strong devout either.

If Nazi antisemitism relied upon prior christian antisemitism, it was not a religiously motivated form of killing like the Crusade would for example. The Soviet Union attacks on priests and the Orthodox Church are motivated by atheism, but most of the Soviet Union most devastating and murderous politics were not motivated by atheism, but by the forceful, radical and brutal application of a new economical reorganisation in a war torn and devastated country. As for the Atom bomb, it was a war of massive scale and religion only had a tangental effect on it.

What in the religious world could compare?

The expulsion and pogroms of the Jews from France, England and Spain on religious grounds. The Crusades and militant Jihad in response (though the response was a lot more restrained and even in counter-example in the case of Saladin's conquest), several large scale rebellion based on religious cults in China like the Yellow Turban rebellion for example.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Suppose Marxism, Naziism and the a-bombs were just one person. Where not these people exceedingly destructive and were not they Satanic/fake Christian/secular?

What in the religious world could compare?

But it's still the few over the many being led - it hardly matters what beliefs they have. How can you blame the many when basically they are not using their free will to act? That is, they wouldn't choose to kill others unless they became motivated and commanded to do so. And we know from the likes of Trump that many can be motivated by certain rhetoric and persuasive talk. It's not as if violence spontaneously arises out of nowhere. It is usually brought to prominence by such talk as mentioned or stoking grievances - xenophobia towards immigrants 'taking our jobs', for example. In the past when we lived in small groups there was no doubt more reason for violence - resources to fight over - but this has lessened over the years. Although now it could be said that we play for higher stakes.

 

[night912]

Atheists are more violent than theists and theists are more violent than atheists.