FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
[EDIT] - I'll leave the below for clarity, but I think I can make things even simpler.
Here are three beliefs:
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someone throwing salt at you is casting a lethal curse.
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Some guy you've just met has had a divine revelation and now speaks for God.
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Someone two thousand years ago was God, and we have a ~1900-year-old book laying out his teachings.
Let us presume that all three of these beliefs are wrong. Your argument, as I understand it, is that they are wrong in the exact same way, such that all three will result in essentially identical behaviors. Am I understanding you correctly?
The definition I'm working from is the one I laid out above: an incorrect fixed belief that is immune to updating on empirical evidence.
That seems like a reasonably good definition. You should apply it rigorously.
Must I imagine some? Very well.
Walls of text are unnecessary here. This is really quite simple. Based on the following paragraph, you pretty clearly believe one of the following:
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That all Christians here are members of a financially-exploitative tele-evangelist-style megachurch, or are initial converts to mormonism, or both
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That those of us who are not members of a financially-exploitative tele-evangelist-style megachurch or are initial converts to mormonism, nonetheless fall victim to similar forms of grifting.
Both of these examples appear very different from your salt curse example, being far more abstract and elaborate. But then, I'm fairly confident that most Christians you converse with here have never been initial converts to mormonism, and also have never donated money to a tele-evangelist or similar. Your position appears to be that we must be falling for some other, unspecified grift. Only, why not specify it?
The straightforward explanation is that you can't. You want to claim that we are delusional. You claim that our beliefs are exactly identical to an obvious delusion. I ask for examples, you give much weaker examples that do not actually apply, and then handwave.
I could elaborate further, I could do this all day, but you have a distressing tendency to vanish whenever I make an effort post calling out a bad argument you make, for n>>1.
I certainly agree that someone has a habit of making bad arguments. Sadly, I have much, much less time to write than I used to.
But here, specifically, you do not need to elaborate further, because you have not actually elaborated at all. Nor does God even come into the argument in any substantive way. I asked you for an example of how my delusion might be exploited in an obvious, empirical fashion. You have failed to provide one. This isn't some pedantic gotcha; you are making a very strong claim that is in fact indefensible, when a small amount of moderation would put you on much firmer ground. You appear to be doing this because you are failing to parse the details of your own statements in anything like a rigorous fashion.
Suppose I argued that Atheists are all bloodthirsty murderers, and when questioned pointed to the 75-100 million murders from atheist regimes in the last century, and claimed your beliefs were exactly identical to theirs. I do not think you would consider this a valid argument, but if there's a difference between such an argument and what you're presenting here, I'm not seeing it. Perhaps you could point it out? While both they and you were atheists, is there perhaps some notable set of differences between how their atheism and yours operated? If such differences can exist between their atheism and yours, why would you suppose that no differences exist between how my belief in God operates, and how the belief in God of first generation Mormons or African salt-fearers operates?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16hr ago
You might feel like laughing at these silly, superstitious fools. Haha, they think witch doctors can hurt them!
If you (for a general you) are a Christian, or any other religious denomination, you are exactly as laughably deluded from my perspective.
Could you provide a definition of "delusion" that you're working from here? You describe people whose beliefs cause them to act in what appears to be a very silly, very irrational way when presented with a simple stimulus. If we're as laughably deluded from your perspective, what's the equivalent prank you can pull on us? If there isn't one, why do you believe we are exactly as laughably deluded from your perspective?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
There's also at least one "perfect heist" type movies where the meat of the story takes place after the money gets stolen according to plan, but for the life of me I can't remember the name.
The Great Train Robbery works this way, IIRC.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
However, on a more how-the-real-world-works level, war is less likely. Trump demonstrated quite clearly that the US military is far more capable and combat-ready than observers had assumed.
As one of those observers, and as someone strongly opposed to the previous foreign policy consensus, imagine the counterfactual world, where the US military was not in good shape, and we only found out about it after committing to a serious, high-stakes war with China, of the sort that has been generally assumed we were going to have within a decade.
One of the few silver linings to this whole debacle is getting an objective picture of our actual capabilities against a fairly serious opponent.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Also (...mostly...) correct.
...I guess the logic there is that a crisis hits, and the army has to pick sides? That's not a wildly implausible outcome, I suppose, but note how all action still routes through the state.
I just think you're going a bit far when Mr. Brexit is making a credible bid for prime minister, and you're calling it an "intra-Blue conflict".
Have you seen the clips where Farage categorically rejects the idea of mass deportations? He seems to be all-in on the idea that Conservatives have to find a way to convince the immigrants to vote for them, undergoing whatever self-modification would be necessary to gain immigrant votes. Alternatively, his claim that no one has done more than him to suppress the "far right".
There was a time when people would have laughed at the idea of calling George W Bush a Blue. But he is in fact a Blue, and was a Blue in the past as well, even if lesser polarization made that difficult to see. Him endorsing the democrats over Trump is in fact him being consistent to his tribal nature. Farage seems similar to me.
Society has been built on a lot of things for the entirety of its existence and right down to the then-present day, until people started to realise that it was wrong.
This would be a good argument if it came with evidence that people had, in fact, realized that it was wrong in some generalized fashion, as opposed to realizing it was wrong exclusively in the context of when they were on the bad end of the consequences.
I do not like the wokists' excesses either; that's why I came here!
A lot of people don't like a lot of things, and yet those things persist.
To the extent that the excesses of woke have been pushed back, they have been pushed back by tribal identity and tribal warfare. Vibes, papers and essays accomplished nothing; re-electing Trump accomplished much more. Opinions are irrelevant, what matters is what people are actually willing to do.
Because many (of at least the central examples of) hate crimes have two parts: the direct victimisation of one or a few individuals (e. g. a Black person beaten after registering to vote), and the threat to thousands or millions of others (other Black people deciding whether they ought to register to vote).
you are describing the pathway from the individual to the collective. You cannot actually quantify the collective impact of a crime against a black person in any meaningful way. Hate Crime laws do not attempt a rigorous analysis of the individual impacts; they simply assume collective impact and proceed from that assumption. And modulo some quibblings about strategy and focus, they are correct to do so: Collectives exist, matter, and must be managed if complex society is to continue existing. Naive atomic individualism is a delusion that cannot be sustained in the real world.
Which, if you are referring to Dresden and Tokyo, I do not condone. (If we hadn't done so, we could've added charges for Coventry to the Nuremberg Trials.)
Whether you condone it or not, our society clearly has condoned it, and will continue to condone it in the future. Your disapproval is a personal quirk, not a reflection of the moral structure by which our society maintains itself.
Well, first of all, through God all things are possible, so jot that down.
"The poor will always be with you." Reality intrudes.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
I believe a man that his marriage is happy as much as I believe a hostage saying that his captors treat him excellently.
Is it conceivable that evidence could convince you otherwise, or is this belief axiomatic?
Sort of. In terms of who gets listed in the 'factors leading to' paragraph in the history texts, it is reasonable to list $GROUP did $THING. In terms of who ought to suffer Consequences, one has a duty to make finer distinctions...
And yet, our society has been built on a sharply limited willingness to make such finer distinctions, in both war and peace, for the entirety of its existence and right down to the present day. I observe that such fine distinctions have been remarkably rare when it seemed desirable to coordinate consequences against my tribe for its perceived misdeeds. We've had affirmative action for generations. We've had hate-crime laws for generations. We've firebombed cities in wartime, we've bombed weddings in the present day. Justice has been apportioned in collective terms for generations, and routinely still is.
it is not appropriate to blame or ostracize an individual liberal for the murder of Mr Kirk if the liberal in question did not, after said murder, continue to call for violence against 'Nazis' without being clear which right-wing figures do and, more importantly, do not fall under that label.
It appears to me that most liberals fail that test, but leave that aside. Why should I even bother to disagree with this statement, as opposed to simply selectively quoting it verbatim when the shoe is on the other foot? I readily agree that it will be highly inappropriate to discuss any concept of Red Tribe's collective responsibility for the hypothetical future murder or abuse of Blue Tribers. I readily agree that the correct response to such attempts is a retreat into a fog of abstractions. In the meantime, it's very important that we take Online Radicalism and Stochastic Terrorism very seriously, and provide accountability to those who foment hate and extremism, so long as all definitions used in this process are mine and mine alone. If that seems like a bad system to you (and it should), you probably should have won the fight against Blue's attempts at full-spectrum social dominance. But neither you nor others won that fight; to the limited extent it was won, it was won by people like me, who burned most of our principles to make it happen. If on the other hand you considered their push for full-spectrum social dominance distasteful and gauche but ultimately acceptable, it seems to me that the correct response is to invite you to consider my tribe's pursuit of dominance in a similar manner.
...Or to speak more plainly, it's not even that you're wrong, it's just that you are incapable of drawing these distinctions fairly, much less enforcing them on society as a whole. Your principles may or may not be wrong, but they are certainly irrelevant because they have never and will never be implemented in the real world. What is, is.
Your statement:
I think People's Front of Judea jokes make sense with regards to splitting hairs about who's a communist vs a socialist vs a trotskyist and so on, but your proper anarchists are not going to be interchangeable with the above.
...indicates that you recognize that some ideological differences are marginal, and assert that some are significant. I am asking you why the Anarchists belong in the "significant differences" category while the Trotskyists do not, given that both Trotskyists and Anarchists followed what appear to me to be identical trajectories in the defining example of communist revolution.
If you want to map meaningful ideological differences, you first need to establish that they exist and are significant. Did Trotsky break with Stalin because their ideological models were incompatible and a dispassionate pursuit of sociopolitical truth through a rigorous Rawlsian veil of ignorance led them to tragically incompatible conclusions and thus to lethal conflict? Or was it a simple matter of it not being possible to share absolute power?
I would argue that ideology can matter in some instances. There are people who opposed both Communist Russia and Fascist Germany, and the Anarchists, and the Trotskyists, for consistent ideological reasons.
Then there are people who broke with the Nazis or the Soviets only because the leopard started eating their face in particular. The fact that a lot of these people were still carrying water for the Khmer Rouge or the Maoists in the 1970s indicates to me that it's not really about ideological details as such. If your ideology is based around the idea of unrestrained and unaccountable wielding of absolute power to secure good things and remove bad things, and that any negative consequences apparently caused by such wielding are either imaginary or the fault of counter-revolutionary forces that your ideology bears no responsibility for, as Enlightenment thought observably has for hundreds of years, then searching for deeper ideological motivations is hallucinatory. You seem to recognize this for Trotsky. Why is Kropotkin different?
I don't think that's fair. The European Red Tribe isn't going to look the same as the American one, and while the hard right has it's gripes with Farage, they aren't that different from the American hard right's gripes with the Republicans.
To give two examples, it doesn't seem to me that there's a European analogue to the Christian Right or to Gun Culture in terms of relatively-large, cohesive and politically-powerful subcultures. It seems to me that this is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, a distinct, cohesive, organized Red Tribe is the reason America is such an outlier politically from the European political scene. On the other hand, it means polarization and thus tribal conflict gets much worse, because legible structure makes coordinating large-scale, serious meanness much easier. And in America, the coordinated meanness is much further along the escalation spiral: we're actually trying to do mass deportations now, and Blues are actually coordinating terrorism to fight back against those efforts.
The UK right is pretty clearly willing to accept the left's electoral victory. Their reasoning, which is in my view correct, is that a left victory will result in very bad policies, which will in turn discredit the left further and rebound in their favor. This is a risky bet, but the risk seems rational and acceptable to me, given their situation. However, a dominant variable in that calculation is that they don't really have much of a choice, because they have no legible path to victory other than that provided by electoral politics.
In America, by contrast, I'm willing to accept the left's electoral victory, for certain definitions of "accept" that do not preclude their leaders and agents being murdered by people on my side, in much the way they have been willing to "accept" my electoral wins, modulo murders of my leaders and agents by people on their side. That doesn't change the fact that if such murders happen to them, they are not going to accept it as I have, and instead are going to escalate to the limits of their capability, or the fact that I will support unlimited escalation in return. Electoral Politics is still plan A in both the European and American contexts, but American politics has a legible plan B, and both tribes having been in a degenerate orbit toward it for at least a decade now.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
What is the limit? How low can the republicans sink while the base stays loyal?
This current situation still appears better than the previous baseline.
Americans should do what the British are doing by abandoning the torries en mass
I would disagree. The UK can afford that better than we can because they are not as polarized; their current situation is a conflict within the local Blue Tribe analogue, with no significant Red Tribe to speak of. This lowers the pressure significantly, and allows maneuvers that are probably not survivable in our context.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
I think People's Front of Judea jokes make sense with regards to splitting hairs about who's a communist vs a socialist vs a trotskyist and so on, but your proper anarchists are not going to be interchangeable with the above.
Why not? Were anarchists not a core constituency of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution? Do Anarchists now not trace their lineage back to ideological progenitors who failed the Bolshevik test, just the same as the rest of the trotskyists and socialists and communists?
The truth, I think, is that the ideology is not and has never been load-bearing. Observably, where ideology has imposed unacceptable real-world tradeoffs, the overwhelming majority of leftist ideologues have ditched the ideology rather than accepting the losses. Ideology is a means to an end, nothing more.
Do collectives exist?
Can collectives do bad things?
If the answer to those two questions is "yes", then collective blame is a necessary concept.
If the answer to either of those questions is "no", then humanity and its history is rendered incoherent. What is war, without the concept of a collective? What is the Civil Rights era, without the concept of a collective? What is Womens' Rights? What is Communism? What is Islam? Christianity? Judaism, political parties, economic classes, modes of government, etc, etc?
If the answer changes depending on what is personally convenient to one on a moment-by-moment basis, then one is a liar.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
But much, much better than The Count of Monte Crisco.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
You did not believe Trump could win a second term, and argued vociferously that all was lost years ago. Is all more, less, or about the same lost as it was in 2024?
In any case, you have already concluded that I am a liar, and I have already concluded that you are incapable of being anything other than tiresome or dangerous, and that I prefer you tiresome.
But by responding straightforwardly and honestly, one can at least claim to hold principles instead of having to admit that they're calculating tribalists who make decisions based on tribal allegiances rather than principles.
What penalties do you observe for being a calculating tribalist who makes decisions based on tribal allegiance rather than principles? Do you observe these consequences to be uniformly applied? If I argue that being such a calculating tribalist is the correct response to the current situation, what would your counter-argument be?
And moving up a level, a tribe that accepts or even encourages its leaders to submit to such tribalism has to admit that it's a tribe that is merely trying to beat the Enemy because they're the Enemy, rather than following principles that they believe the government and society at large should follow.
By no means.
"Principles" are another way of saying "rules". To the extent that we use the term "rules", we use it to refer to legible rules. But it is not possible to construct a perfect, legible ruleset that covers all situations and contingencies, such that human judgement is obviated by a flowchart.
The point of society is to promote good things and suppress bad things. Values-coherence allows people to do this under generalizable rules which rely on those coherent values for grounding. When values are mutually-incoherent, this is no longer possible, and attempts at sticking to generalizable rules is signing up for exploitation without meaningful limits.
My perception is that the fact that there was even a single random blue-haired leftist who, when confronted with such a slogan, hemmed and hawed about dog whistles instead of straightforwardly and honestly answering, "OF COURSE it's okay to be white! I want white people to feel perfectly okay being white, and the principles and policies that I am (we are) pushing doesn't conflict with that in any way, so much so that if you or anyone else believes - incorrectly - that such a conflict exists, I will actively help you resolve that conflict, by crushing whatever might be making white people suspect that such a phrase is wrong" placed another chink in the armor that tribe was wearing.
How did this chink in the armor manifest, in your view? Obviously not only did a single activist do this, but it was the default response for Blue Tribe as a whole, with any dissent being exceedingly marginal and fringe.
People talk (foolishly, in my opinion) about Woke being dead. It is obvious to me that Woke did not "die" because principled moderates put it back in a box, but because Red Tribe burned many of its own principles to go all-in on tribal warfare, and turned out to have better terrain for it than the Blues. The moderates had more than a decade to fight, and in that time they accomplished nothing significant, fielded no champions, won no battles outside the context of Red Tribe treating the culture war as a war.
Trump will not last forever. A large portion of the Republican elite very clearly want to wash their hands of him and go back to the way things used to be. That is not an acceptable solution to Red Tribe, though, and every success we have had at securing our values has come from refusing to accept this exact sort of "moderation".
"It's okay to be white" was effective because Blues really do believe that it is not okay to be white. They could not allow themselves to let it stand.
"Stand if you disavow fascism" is effective not because Republicans won't stand, but because many of them will, not because they are notably less fascist than those who remain seated in any objective sense, but because they want the people making the demand to be nicer to them. In doing so, they weaken my tribe, and I hold them in contempt for doing so.
The basic fact is that at the object level, it is not the case that Blues have a problem with people being white in the same way that Reds have a problem with Fascism. The actual difference in tribal attitude and inclination cannot be handwaved, and while it is obvious that it cannot be agreed upon either, the current situation does not require agreement for things to proceed along their current trajectory. Speaking in broad generalities, it appears to me that Reds are not fascist to any significant degree, but Blues are actually quite racist against white people. Perhaps this perception is wrong, but if it is not wrong then it makes no sense to demand symmetrical responses.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
The article I linked is a list of holders for the office of high priest. The last entry vacated his office in 70 AD.
Near as I can tell, there is no valid priesthood and there has not been one for nearly two millennia. There are, if the genealogical records are correct, people who satisfy the genealogical requirement to be a priest, but IIRC genealogy is not the only requirement, and there are a bunch of rituals and structures that are required as well, but are not now possible because the infrastructure is gone.
As an outside observer, it does not appear to me that the Law is being kept, or indeed that keeping the law is in any way possible. Obviously, Jewish opinion differs sharply, and that is their right.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
As we've discussed at some length, I think they are badly mistaken in this assessment.
If Red Tribe needs the approval of the press to secure political victory, political victory is no longer a viable option and we will need to find alternative paths to securing our values. We have plenty of evidence of what results from cooperation, conciliation, compromise and capitulation to Blue Tribe. There is no road forward there.
Blues and "moderates" act as though if Trump could just be disposed of, all this ferment will go away. But the reality is that Trump is the moderate, mild voice of peace. If he fails, we will escalate until either we are destroyed or until we find a way to get the outcomes we consider necessary. Trump is an expression of the wicked problem of apportioning political power in a values-incoherent society, and not the progenitor of that problem nor meaningfully in control of it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
I were a Republican representative, I'd have no issue standing to such a question because i don't self-identify as a fascist.
I don't self-identify as a fascist either, but the label has been abused to the point that it is self-defeating to cooperate with its continued use.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17d ago
my point is that believing a people are "chosen" isn't an argument for giving them whatever they want. What if they behaved badly to the God who chose them, and thus are being punished by him?
C'mon.
Wikipedia's article on the subject appears roughly two thousand years out of date, if you have information I do not. A quick search indicates claims that some group has announced that they've appointed a new "high priest" recently, but gives no indication why I should consider this appointment religiously valid.
Also, Jewish prayers refer to the sacrifices in the Temple even if actual sacrifices are not possible.
Why would references to non-existent temple sacrifices in a non-existent temple satisfy the requirements of a Covenant that explicitly specified actual sacrifices in an actual tabernacle/temple? For that matter, why haven't they just fabricated a tabernacle? Not that this would be valid either, given the absence of the ark and the spirit of God seated upon it, but it would at least be a step in the correct direction, no?
I'm sure committed Jews have many answers to such questions, but I am not a committed Jew, and I am not required to believe as they do. My understanding is that the old Covenant was broken irrevocably with the destruction of the temple and the end of covenant practice in AD 70. If modern Jews disagree, that is between them and God. Meanwhile, the new Covenant I believe I enjoy with God has a number of requirements, but none command political support for a Jewish nation. This is all slop-millenarianism nonsense.
Yahweh is not synonymous with Jews. Yahweh frequently demonstrates his supremacy by cursing and punishing the Jews, according to the Jews' own scriptures. As for the Christian perspective, "We must obey God rather than men", told to the Jewish authorities by the fathers of the Church. Nor, IIRC, did the early Christians defend Jerusalem from the Romans, and there's a solid argument that they were following Jesus's instructions when they declined to do so.
I didn't ask you to. I asked you to admit that, even accepting that we are deceived, different sorts of deception operate in different ways and have different consequences, on a purely materialistic level.
Unless I am mistaken, I have not ever attempted an argument with you in which I claimed God was real and you should believe in him. Every one of these discussions, from my perspective, has been about how logic and reason operate, and all of my arguments appear to me to work equally well if one assumes that there is no God at all. And yet, it does not seem that you have ever recognized this, so let me make it as explicit as possible: for the purposes of this conversation, there is no God and my faith in him is in fact delusional.
I don't. See above.
What I object to is your apparent belief that my faith makes me irrational in obvious exploitable ways, which is why I asked you to explain what those might be. At no point have I argued that my belief is correct, nor do I do so now. You are certain I am irrational, and that is well enough and cheerfully reciprocated. But then you go further and claim that my irrationality is of the sort that imposes immediate, obvious, unnecessary costs. This does not appear to me to be true, and I do not think I am being unreasonable to point out that you are arguing well beyond your actual evidence to make such claims.
If my beliefs are irrational, they are irrational in a way that does not appear to significantly reduce my fitness even from a materialist perspective. Certainly it does not impose costs on me of the sort that you seem to be arguing are typical of religious belief. I do not fear salt curses, nor do I donate to tele-evangelists, nor do I join novel cults. I do believe in a two-thousand-year-old religion, and shape my life by it, but even assuming that I am deceived to do so, it is not obvious where this deceit cashes out in terms of concrete, material loss, in the way your examples center on.
Is that a sufficiently engageable argument?
It seems obvious to me that you have a firm belief that Christians or other believers, being delusional, must suffer significant material consequences as their delusions wreck against material reality, while those such as yourself who do not suffer from such delusions do not incur similar costs. Would you agree that this is an accurate summary of your argument?
Your definition of delusion:
You appear to have a belief that the religious, as a class, are delusional, and that their delusions make them particularly exploitable. You appear to believe that this is an intrinsic characteristic of all religion, such that I myself must be increasingly susceptible to exploitation. Even if I and (most? All?) others here do not appear to have been exploited in any specific way you can identify, this should not be considered contrary evidence to your claims, because your theory takes precedence over our reported facts.
Sure. You can measure the people's self-assessment, and compare it to the accidents they've been in, and note the disparity. If 90% of people believe they're in the top 10% of good drivers, at least eight in ten of them are wrong. So what's the analogous measure of material outcomes for the relatively-intellectual religious mottizens?
If you say "people like you overestimate their driving ability", and I note that I think I'm actually pretty bad at driving, there's likewise a disconnect there, no? If I don't in fact overestimate my skill at driving, in what sense are these people "like me"? Alternatively, if I think I'm a top-10% driver, and can back it up with my actual driving record, there's a disconnect again, isn't there?
If you claim I or people like me are exploitable, the way to back that up is with examples of how we have or plausibly might be exploited, in the same way that overestimation of one's driving ability is demonstrated by comparison to population-level driving outcomes. If your claim is that we're exploitable despite not having been exploited, where do you think the conversation should go from there? If you've rejected empirical evidence, what would you prefer?
That is exactly the question I am trying to get you to engage with. You appear to believe that you can know that I've done, or will do, or am prone to do something stupid because of my particular, potentially-idiosyncratic beliefs. As I understand it, that's your entire thesis!
Atheism in its modern form has routinely and strongly correlated with a particular strong antipathy toward Christianity in particular, the exultation of "reason" that has consistently proved to be fantastically unreasonable, and support for revolutionary social and political changes that have proved disastrous. I'm pretty confident that Atheists as a population much more positive attitudes toward both Communism and Fascism than non-atheists of the same societies.
Soviet atheism does indeed have been upstream of their mass-murder, as evidenced by their pro-murder arguments relying heavily on atheist moral frameworks; contemplate how the term "liquidate" came to be applied to large-scale murder. I would argue that the actual flow went Enlightenment principles/exultation of human rationality > atheism > mass murder.
Explicitly atheist states produced unusually concentrated forms of it, in sharp contrast to contemporary non-atheist states. Appealing to "most of history" doesn't get you around the unusually-appalling nature of ideological totalitarianism in the twentieth century, nor the prominent role atheism played in those ideologies, nor the prominent role the Religious played in opposing them.
You are claiming that structural features of one belief system naturally incline it toward particular outcomes, even in cases where those outcomes can't be demonstrated. Then you are claiming that particular outcomes that can be demonstrated, repeatedly, at horrifying scale, are only "behavior that some members of a group happened to exhibit." You know what a Russell's Conjugation is. I am pretty sure you understand that you are not drawing a rigorous line from first principles here.
My entire point here was that it would be quite bold to claim that atheism leads to mass murder, even with the ton of examples of atheism actually leading to mass-murder that we actually have, and even with the evidence we have that the atheism does in fact appear to have been a significant part of the causal flow. Even with that evidence, I don't claim all atheists are prone to mass murder because it's a whole lot more complicated than that. But you have no problem doing that the other way, on much weaker evidence. This is foolishness.
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