Whenever atheism so called achieves footholds of significant power in society, it seems to spawn for itself noxious combining ideologies (Jacobinism, Communism, &c.) that then take the blame for the resultant atrocities. It’s possible that atheism is not in fact the ultimate root cause, but this degree of correlation seems to require some explanation.
You want an explanation?
Atheism is simple. It’s obvious. It doesn’t contain much information. “Why do bad things happen to good people?” “Because there is no one powerful enough and willing to stop them.”
But because it doesn’t contain much information, because it’s mere non-belief, it can only achieve widespread support in societies that are religion-dominated by riding on some other, more powerful, more viral ideology which displaces the main one - and those kinds of displacements tend to be a lot more violent.
Atheism doesn’t tell you what values you should have. The other ideology does, and uses the Atheism as a means to attack the legitimization of the previous ideological power structure.
“Atheism causes atrocities” has the causation backwards.
As for abuse, it’s certainly interesting that this is a major focus of discussion here, and not for any number of other societal institutions that have some arguable causal connection to individual abuse cases. For that matter, if you compared practicing religious with nonreligious, would you actually find individual abuse any higher? My intuition says that abuse should be higher among the latter, but I haven’t seen numbers on this topic specifically. Overall, though, I think that “abuse” is a red herring meant to legitimize attacks on religion just because it is religion.
Look, the attitude here is “HOW DARE THOSE ATHEISTS BE SO AGAINST RELIGION?”
The OP says “the new atheists are going in the camps first.”
Now, he’ll say he was just memeing or whatever, but the underlying emotion about it, about how anyone could be so against religion, they must be evil, is there.
But the Atheists see religion in ways similar to how a number of people see some forms of Communism - an oppressive ideological machine that uses and discards human beings for its own ends, composed of many interlocking components.
They want to destroy all reverence for religion like some right-wingers want to destroy all reverence for Communism, because each bit sacredness contributes some small measure of power to the aura of uncriticizability that gave religion its power in previous eras.
Many of them see it that way for reasons not so different from why some of those right-wingers hate Communism so much - it was used to excuse or legitimize violence against them.
So as long as that’s happening, you don’t need to have people be tools of the Devil to run around wanting to tear down crosses. Unless, of course, you consider those doing the abuse to be tools of the devil - but then you wouldn’t be sending the Atheists to camps, ne?
And in this particular case… Does anyone actually think that further escalation in tearing down our formerly shared symbols and destroying our erstwhile binding national identity is a good thing?
Cross memorials? No. Not a blanket on stone monuments though - no Ten Commandments for courthouses.
