A video, discovered on the cellphone of a paramedic who was found along with 14 other aid workers in a mass grave in Gaza in late March, shows that the ambulances and fire truck that they were traveling in were clearly marked and had their emergency signal lights on when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire.
Militant atheists will never cease to amaze me with the nonsense they come up with (and how they say “religion” but can only think of Christianity as an example).
What are you talking about? This is a comment in relation to an event that doesn’t have Christianity tied to it as a primary religion, and throughout world history it has been well established that religion in general will be used by those in power to accomplish their goals. sometimes those people are willing to kill in the name of said goals or beliefs.
Oh yeah fair enough, recently they use Judaism too.
Yeah but “Religion as a concept and religious states are nothing short of fascism”? “A way to suppress and mass murder anyone and anything that doesn’t please the Führer”? Setting aside the ridiculousness of this take in and of itself, it’s incredibly reductive. What’s the difference between the Abbasid Caliphate, the Holy Roman Empire and the French Empire? Well it doesn’t matter because they’re all nothing short of literally fascist!
ah sure, fair point. i kind of glossed over that lol. yeah… i wouldn’t necessarily agree with that assessment if its meant to be a genuine statement (maybe it’s an exaggeration born out of frustration?) but i can empathize with how the commenter arrived to that conclusion. i can follow the logic as an atheist myself who happens to be somewhat of an antitheist. however, i think it’s ignorant of anyone to say religion cannot be a source of good for a community or individual. religion is complicated, it isn’t a homogenous group of thinkers. you cannot have all concepts of it share one universal tenant, i.e. fascism, because there are hundreds of thousands of religions and many do not know about each other or the cultures around them. how could they all be fascist?
I don’t like cringy atheist but he’s right. Having a state religion makes you an ethnostate who threat people differently according to what one believe in.
You’re thinking of a theocracy.
But the UK has a state religion, the Church of England, but they’re neither a theocracy nor an ethnostate.
Today they aren’t, but when they first broke from Rome/The Pope, they certainly were genocidal. The English purge of Catholicism was brutal, and then the power went back and forth, both in England and France, with a brutal murderous crackdown with each regime change, all based on Protestants vs Catholics.
Eventually they wore themselves out, and evolved to the place we are now, but today’s “peaceful” state religion is built on a foundation of murder, torture, and genocide.
All true, but still doesn’t make them a theocracy or ethnostate (except for the bits where the king claimed to be appointed by God himself).
Israel is an ethnostate because they are deliberately ethnically homogenous and view Arabs as inferior on an institutional scale, not because of their state religion. A state with a religious ruling class is called a theocracy.
I see what you’re saying because religion has societal and cultural impacts that reinforce specific behaviours, but not all states that have a state religion are actually theocracies in the traditional sense.
That’s not what an ethnostate is, but either way that’s not the point. Treating people differently according to what they believe in isn’t “nothing short of fascism” and “a way to suppress and mass murder anyone and anything that doesn’t please the Führer(s)”. Having legal discrimination doesn’t make a state fascist, because that’s literally not what fascism is. It’s not even a useful way to analyze the behavior of states today or historically.
You: appartheid is cool actually.
It is litterally what fascism is. A strongman leader protecting the in group.
https://academic.oup.com/book/742/chapter-abstract/135399669
There are bad things other than fascism.
The fuck? No that’s not what fascism is. I mean even if it was that’s not what most religion-based states now or throughout history are, but even if it was that’s literally not what fascism is. The central tenet of fascism is worship of the state and active, escalating persecution of an outgroup to persuade an ingroup to willingly give up their freedom. Fascism, unlike most other state ideologies, does not seek equilibrium; it is always starved for an Enemy to exploit and persecute in increasingly harmful ways to satisfy the ingroup, which is why it inevitably collapses. This dynamic is core to fascism as a concept, and noticeably absent from most states throughout history—religious or otherwise—because running full speed ahead towards collapse just isn’t a smart way to set up a state.
To repeat: You said that fascism is a strongman leader protecting the ingroup, but that’s not true; fascism requires the strongman leader to go on the offensive in order to chase a made up vision of greatness for the ingroup and keep that up permanently.
… and this doesn’t apply to Israel?
It does, because of Zionism, not Judaism
Certainly, but Israel is Zionist.
NoneOfUrBusiness is one of the most consistent anti genocide, anti apartheid voices in Lemmy.
Enough so that I recognize their username even without tags.
They’re making a point here, and it isn’t to justify Israels apartheid or genocide.