Psychology and Religion

[Vexari]

People are very strange: murder edition

by Ian Welsh
2015 January 20


I have a simple question for those who read this:

Why is it not OK to kill people in the name of a religion, but it is OK to kill people in the name of a nation?

I’ve always had a great deal of trouble with the way most people run their morality and ethics. Objectively, the Iraqi blockade of the 90s killed vastly more people than 9/11. I once got to see an Iraki pediatrician writing in real time about all the children who died in the 90s, whom she could have saved, if she had had the medicine the West was denying Iraq.

The Vietnam war killed more people. The Chechen war killed more people. The (insert war here) killed more people.

I can run through the intellectual arguments, but on a fundamental level I don’t understand: why is it ok for nations to kill on a mass scale but no one else can? (Well, except some corporations. See Bhopal, India and Union Carbide).

The true decline of religion in the West is, in fact, indicated exactly by the fact that many people think it isn’t OK to kill in the name of your religion. The Crusades, and the religious wars of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation would like to chat with you about that.

For that matter, austerity has certainly killed more people in the West than religious-based terrorism has. Heck, practically everything that does kill people, kills more.

Humans are just very odd. Very, fundamentally, stupid and foolish. Barely conscious.

Spend some time thinking about this. Because it’s a question that is more important than it seems (and it should seem important enough as is)..

from ? How to think

http://www.ianwelsh.net/people-are-very-strange-murder-edition/