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Originally Posted by Infinite_Loser
I believe Yakk said it best. You can remove religion entirely; People will simply find another rationale to base their actions on.
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Yes.
Both Communist "materilistic historical determinism" and Muslim/Jewish/Christian "omnipotent singular diety" are horribly dangerous and evil ideas.
Both place entire realms of thought into the "this is true, and if you disagree with it, you must be surpressed". They encourage fanatacism and a belief that "what you are doing doesn't really matter -- everything is going according to plan", which disassociates people from the true horror of the actions they are doing.
By providing a "greater good" to worship, they both excuse real physical evil done in the "greater good"s name.
I'm glad you understand the danger.
I am pretty sure there are monothiestic religious belief systems that aren't as dangerous as Communism is. The Dieism that was popular around the time of the American revolution (there exists a god, but we can't know much about him), for example.
Once you have generated docterine that states "You must be certain that people who disagree with this docterine deserve to be destroyed", the belief system passes the threshold into the valley of death.
On the other hand, most such belief systems have dogma that gets in the way of their believers gaining knowledge about the world. However, with the advent of nuclear bombs, the crippling features of dogmatic religion matter less -- the dogmatic fanatics don't need to figure out the laws of physics well enough to build nukes, they just need to possess them, and threaten to destroy other people unless one kowtows to them.
Sad, really.