Thread by @QueerSatanic

There is a common atheist aphorism about how evil people will do evil for any reason but good people will only do evil in the name of their religion.

But this is doubly nonsense.

Most fundamentally, people aren’t essentially good or evil; we’re people.

We are not so important as to have a soul with its own character. We fit into systems and act; then we are what we do repeatedly

However, it’s also ridiculous to think that a good person only behave badly, evily, harmfully in the name of religion

The atheist jailer still swings his club just as hard; the agnostic social worker still tears children from their parents. The Satanist grifter…

What is & isn’t religion is already terribly fungible

But in the name of pure reason, of utilitarian benefit or—say—the immortal science of eugenics we have no paucity of examples of atrocities performed w/o any reference to gods, and many intended even to stamp such belief out

The banality of evil is that you can swap out a given party-line Nazi for a German shopkeeper trying to make their way, and the extermination camps run at an uninterrupted clip

Most Nazis didn’t believe every bit enthusiastically. “Going along” was plenty.

So too the rubber merchants in King Leopold’s Congo, or the crews of Dutch East India Company ships, or slavers and mutilators in the Americas

The phrenologists and “race scientists” weren’t overly zealous. They were terribly boring.

But horrors did not rely on their enthusiasm