this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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[–] sheridan@lemmy.world 10 points 19 hours ago (24 children)

I used to hand these out when I was like 10. cringe

[–] bacon_pdp@lemmy.world 8 points 19 hours ago (21 children)

My husband used to hand them out as a kid. He went full atheist but never stopped trying to live Jesus’ love for others.

Oddly often doing the loving Christian thing than proclaimed Christians (works in soup kitchens, helping deliver food to the poor, builds homes for the homeless, helping families get access to childcare and providing first aid at every opportunity).

[–] Geodad@lemmy.world 5 points 15 hours ago (20 children)

Ironically, a lot of Atheists are more christlike than most Christians.

[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io -2 points 15 hours ago (3 children)
[–] mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)
[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 1 points 6 hours ago

This is an interesting-ish article, but it's not saying what it thinks it's saying. When believing in heaven and hell and that there's only one true religion are considered marks of immorality, it's not surprise that it'll rate religious people lower than atheists. This is a measurement of how close different people and societies are to secular, Enlightenment-era European values, not how "moral" those people and societies are. None of this has anything to do with how likely these groups are to help a stranger.

[–] I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world 6 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

First search hit (there are thousands like this):

Texas pastor says gay people should be ‘shot in the back of the head’ in shocking sermon

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna32748

[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io -1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

That is literally not how that works. You said "a lot of atheists" and "most Christians". You're gonna need numbers to back that up, otherwise don't make unfalsifiable claims.

[–] I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world 5 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

Oh honey! Are you trying to validate your narrative that Christians are nice people?

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Let’s try this, show me articles about atheists committing hate crimes against minorities.

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io -3 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Is this... is this your idea of a strawman? I didn't say that, but more importantly I don't even care if that's true or not; I simply don't like circlejerking and self-fellating, so if you're going to say "we're better than them y'all!" you better back that up with evidence.

[–] I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world 3 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

I don’t know how you expect a quantification of this answer.

But examples of atheists committing hate crimes are very far and few between, while Christians, specifically Evangelicals (who are the ones with the tracts) are shockingly common.

I was searching for the story from last week of Christians encouraging hate crimes when I found the one above (from 2022). Here is the one from last week- https://www.advocate.com/news/indiana-church-execution-lgbtq-people

*Also, you can see if the person you are replying to is OP by looking at the username. I know it’s hard, babe. Do your best though!

[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io -1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I don’t know how you expect a quantification of this answer.

Exactly, which would make the initial claim unfalsifiable. To put it another way, how would you respond if a Christian made the opposite claim, that Christians are more moral than atheists? If they said that in a Christian community, would that not be a plain circlejerk?

But examples of atheists committing hate crimes are very far and few between, while Christians, specifically Evangelicals (who are the ones with the tracts) are shockingly common.

How do you know that? Most hate crime cases make no mention of the religion of the perpetrator. Atheists are probably less likely to commit hate crimes on religious grounds for obvious reasons, but most hate crimes in America aren't religious in nature so again, citation needed.

[–] I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

I would say, find me a single example of atheists committing hate crimes in the name of atheism..? Is not complicated, my love.

Evangelicals are super eager to let you know that they are calling for hate crimes in the name of their religion.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jssr.12942

Christian nationalism is both a political theology and cultural framework that seeks to amalgamate the Christian faith and a country's political life and calls for the privileging of a certain form of Christianity in the public square (Whitehead and Perry 2020b). This ideology is at once both descriptive and prescriptive: Christian nationalists believe that their countries are defined by Christianity and that their governments and citizens should take steps to keep it that way (Miller 2021). In the United States, Christian nationalism is an important phenomenon. A survey by the Pew Research Center found that about one third of American adults who identify as politically conservative believe that being Christian is very important for being American (Silver 2021). Although the Pew survey finds that more Americans support rather than oppose separation of church and state, it also notes that there remain large reservoirs of support for church-state integration (e.g., Torba and Isker 2022; Wolfe 2022). Another Pew survey revealed that 65 percent of white Evangelicals say, “if they conflict, the Bible should have more influence than the will of the people.” Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals and 45 percent of all Americans believe the United States should be a “Christian nation” (Pew Research Center 2022).

https://shs.cairn.info/revue-francaise-d-etudes-americaines-2006-4-page-107?lang=en

Numerous causes and motivations underlie hate crimes. In this article, my interest is confined to “religious” or “faith-based” hate crimes, that is to say crimes motivated by religious intolerance. Although religion partly accounts for most hate attacks, “religious hate crimes” will be taken here as a specific category, with an emphasis on the religious doctrine that motivates such acts of violence. My intention is to explore the vital role that faith beliefs and religious fanaticism play in determining respectively who falls victim to such a crime and who becomes the perpetrator of such hateful acts. In the first case, individuals and groups are attacked because they adhere to a particular faith and/or because they are open about their beliefs. In the second, hatemongers, blinded by religious fervor and fanaticism, hurt others whom they view as a danger to their own beliefs and to society at large. To both the victim and the perpetrator of religious hate crimes, one’s faith is something to be taken seriously – sometimes to the extreme.

https://www.oah.org/tah/november-5/evangelicalism-and-politics/

Evangelicalism has been a significant force in American politics since at least the nineteenth century. However, the direction of this political force, as well as the media and scholarly attention it receives, has ebbed and flowed. In recent history, several critical turns and factors have led the overwhelming majority of white evangelicals to move towards the modern Republican party. One factor in this shift was the modern civil rights era and the black freedom struggle. The Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision outlawed the segregation of public schools. In turn, a number of white evangelical communities opened private schools as a way to oppose school desegregation, framing their hostility to Brown v. Board as an expression of religious freedom rather than a defense of racial segregation. Elementary and secondary schools such as Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg Christian School and colleges such as Bob Jones University became known as “segregation academies.” In the wake of the passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, the IRS threatened to revoke the tax-exempt status of these segregation academies unless they ceased their discriminatory admissions. This, coupled with President Johnson’s Great Society programs and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, further altered the terrain of America’s legalized racial hierarchy. In all, school desegregation and busing, the outlawing of legalized racial discrimination and the threat it posed for white evangelical schools, the increased federal dollars for social welfare problems, and the sharp increase in black voters (largely for the Democratic party) changed America’s legalized racial structure. The federal government, white evangelical leaders such as Reverend Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich argued, was not only invading local autonomy, but was turning its back against whites and favoring African Americans and Latinos. The world, it seemed, was turning upside down.

Richard Nixon capitalized on this resentment. The 1960 Democratic presidential nomination of Catholic John F. Kennedy and the 1964 Republican nomination and endorsement of Barry Goldwater and his anti-civil rights platform had already intensified white southern evangelical interests in the Republican party. Coupled with anger over America’s changing legal racial structure, the south was prime for the taking. Nixon then employed a “southern strategy,” a campaign which harnessed this umbrage of white evangelicals specifically and whites more broadly who had formerly voted for the Democratic party. In this new world, the keys to political success, argued Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips in 1966, was to bring together the largest number of white ethnic prejudices into one party without fragmenting the existing coalition. “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South,” Phillips noted, “the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become republicans.” However, Phillips warned, extreme racist language had to be avoided, especially when courting white converts outside the Deep South. “When you are after political converts, start with the less extreme and wait for the extremists to come into line when their alternatives collapse.” Winning Republican converts in the Sun Belt as well as the Midwest, then, required a tempered conservatism. They employed a language of morality and decency, law and order, normalcy, family values, and self-reliance: discourse white evangelicals understood as explicitly evangelical religious values. As the Democratic party came to be identified as the party of big government and minorities of color, white evangelicals began the process of almost exclusively identifying with the modern Republican party.

[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 1 points 9 hours ago

I would say, find me a single example of atheists committing hate crimes in the name of atheism..?

You're moving the goalposts. There is absolutely no reason to dismiss atheist hate crimes done for reasons other than atheism. In the first place atheism is way too nebulous a concept for a hate crime to be done in its name; instead, when atheists commit hate crimes they either do so in the name of ideas either independent of religion or built on rejecting religion. For one example of the latter, China's desire to suppress local religion and culture in the name in the name of national unity is the direct cause of the Uighur genocide. For another example,

The Communist Party engaged in diverse activities such as destroying places of worship, executing religious leaders, flooding schools and media with anti-religious propaganda, and propagated "scientific atheism".

in the period from 1922 to 1926, 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200 priests were killed (a much greater number was subjected to persecution).[65] Most seminaries were closed, and publication of religious writing was banned.[65] A meeting of the Antireligious Commission of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) that occurred on 23 May 1929 estimated the portion of believers in the USSR at 80 percent, though this percentage may be understated to prove the successfulness of the struggle with religion.[70] The Russian Orthodox Church, which had 54,000 parishes before World War I, was reduced to 500 by 1940.[65] Overall, by that same year 90 percent of the churches, synagogues, and mosques that had been operating in 1917 were either forcibly closed, converted, or destroyed.

-Wikipedia

[–] Geodad@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)
  • Gestures broadly at the Christian nationalist movement that has taken over the US. *
[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I mean, if we're gonna talk politics then on the other hand we have literally the entire history of China and the Soviet Union. I mean you have an explicitly anti-religious genocide going on in China right now.

[–] Geodad@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Those were done by atheist rulers, but not in the name of atheism.

The current Zionist situation in Palestine is a different story.

Also, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, various witch trials across Europe and the US colonies, etc...

[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Those were done by atheist rulers, but not in the name of atheism.

Atheism is way too nebulous a concept to be its own driver of atrocious conduct so the latter is straight up not a thing, and it doesn't need to be. Crimes committed by people in the name of ideologies which explicitly reject religion (something something "religion is the opium of the masses") are equally potent in refuting the idea that atheists are more moral than religious people. Otherwise, most hate crimes in America are not, in fact, explicitly committed in the name of Christianity; race is by far the most common motivator.

[–] Geodad@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Atheism is way too nebulous a concept

No, it's not.

Atheism is simply the disbelief in a god.

Most hate crimes are done by conservatives, who happen to be overwhelmingly religious.

[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Atheism is simply the disbelief in a god.

Yes, and? That's simply not enough belief to fuel a hate crime, or really anything good or bad. That atheism isn't the explicit and sole motivation of most hate crimes is nothing more than a consequence of the fact that atheism isn't the explicit and sole motivation of any radical action.

Most hate crimes are done by conservatives, who happen to be overwhelmingly religious.

Are they?

Most conservatives are religious, but some back of the napkin math tells me you're looking at about 33% of Democrats and 20% of Republicans being religiously unaffiliated, so while this is a significant difference it's not as big as you imply; the majority of both parties is religious because the majority of Americans are religious. The only two groups I'd describe as overwhelmingly conservative here are white evangelicals and Mormons; everyone else is either more even or straight up Democratic-leaning.

[–] Geodad@lemmy.world 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Your link basically proved me right.

The exceptions being Jewish and Muslim.

[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Uh... did you see the rest of my comment? Again, about 66% of Democrats are religious too, so your point only holds in the sense that both parties have religious majorities. "The majority of conservatives are religious" makes only slightly more sense than "the majority of criminals are right-handed".

The exceptions being Jewish and Muslim.

Uh... no? You have black Protestants and Hispanic Catholics too, with Hispanic Protestants being evenly distributed. As soon as you start correcting for race, the "religious people are bad" hypothesis loses credibility fast. Whatever is poisoning religious communities in America is clearly race-based, rather than religion-based.

[–] Geodad@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago

It's the religious right doing the bulk of the hate criming. The left tend to have more empathy and compassion, and tend to embody more humanistic views.

Conservative religious people tend to be more selfish, egotistical, and less emphatic.

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