john9blue wrote:no, you're thinking of "leftism"
"religion" is the reason we aren't killing each other and nuking ourselves off the fucking planet.
crazy fucks like you are what happen when most people abandon religion
Aside from the other responses this post has already had, second generation Abrahamic religions tend to attract a small but significant minority of people who WANT the world (or just their own life) to end so that they can be taken up into the loving arms of God. You can see it in both the Christian and Islamic faiths. There have been polls done that show that over decades the percentage of people in America that believe the end of times will come during their own lifetime has remained fairly stable (and if memory serves at around 20-30% but google isn't helping me find the stats)
Also, religion is the cause of much of the conflict America is in right now. Why sit firmly on the side of the only nation within the middle east that doesn't have oil? Why force yourself to continually go in guns blazing to either directly protect Israel or to deal with the fall-out from the extremist Islamic community from the perception that Palestine has been dispossessed for what they see as a bunch of foreigners? It's certainly not freedom or democracy, or there would be plenty of other places to get involved. It's not oil, that's all over the world too (and not in Israel). It's religion, and by this I'm not claiming some batshit crazy government level plot to ensure the bible prophecies about Israel at the end of times are fulfilled (though I think there are some people for whom that is a motivation), but more that fundamentalist christian politicians have appealed to both fundamentalist and more liberal christian voters with messages in very carefully constructed black and white terms.
Look at Dubbya for easy examples. āFreedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war,⦠and we know that God is not neutral between them.ā He told the world that āyou are either for us or against us.ā The world is, according to Bush, black or white, good or evil, friend or foe; this is absolutist language. Nothing is ever relative, it is never grey. Just like in the old westerns, good guys wear the white hats and the bad guys wear the black hats. It's very easy for a good person to commit harm against "the bad guys" if they honestly believe that they are doing something moral. Not so easy to do so when you take a more realistic look at the world and note that yes there are still bad guys, but they don't divide up easily along national or religious or political lines, no side has any right to claim the moral high ground, and everyone has a duty to use compassion and careful judgement before doing harm to another for any reason.
(But of course that's atheist morality, which is just arbitrary and never stopped anything evil happening right?)