ARMY DEBATE Religion Bad

ROWLES _1_ OF _15_

Religion Impacts

Totalitarianism.............................................................2
Child Abuse/Violence Against Women...............................4
Patriarchy.....................................................................8
Racism/Heterosexism...................................................10
Nietzsche (Christianity pretty much sucks)......................13
ARMY DEBATE Religion Bad
ROWLES _2_ OF _15_

Totalitarianism

1. Religion causes world war, famine, and collapse into totalitarianism and genocide

Bagnell 1999
DONOR SERVICES REPRESENTATIVE 1999 – LINDA, “POPULATION, ENVIRONMENT, ABORTION,
RELIGION AND FATHERHOOD” http://rivervision.com/pearf/index.html

Population Miracles: The religious right (Catholicism plus the Christian Coalition and
others) is confident God will provide for the world's growing
population problems, even perhaps in the form of a miracle!
However, governments are responsible for recognizing
problems and acting to contain them; should our Congress rely on miracles
to solve our problems? What a quaint idea! That is another reason for the
separation of Church and State! The most likely "miracle" to
reduce populations will be uncontrollable disease, famine and
starvation, religious wars, or population-related wars involving
"innumerable multitudes of people" of China, of India, and
other nations of the world, who will face shortages of food,
water, and other resources. Our country has already been accused, by some, of
a war for oil, and religious frictions are rampant in the world today.
Please note that a part of the problem in Kosovo is that the
Kosovars (Islamic) reproduce much faster than the Serbs
(Orthodox), and were rapidly outnumbering them in a country which
the Serbs consider their homeland, and which was overrun centuries ago by the Islamic
Thus - a war caused by overpopulation of Albanians,
Ottomans.
ethnic hates, and religious differences; but made a horror by
ethnic cleansing in the evil traditions of Hitler and Stalin!.
 ARMY DEBATE Religion Bad
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2. Totalitarian must be rejected at all costs – a new Hitler and Stalin would be the
result.

Kohn 02
[Jerome, International Quarterly of Social Sciences, Volume 69, Number 2, Summer

the judgment and

The beginning called for here, if there is to be one, will arise from
actions of men and women who know the nature of
totalitarianism and agree that, for the sake of the world, it
must not occur again--not only in the specific forms in which it
has already occurred, which may be unlikely, but in any form
whatsoever. The significance of the story Arendt tells in Origins is political, not only
because she wanted to destroy what history conserves, but also because her "method" of
storytelling goes against the grain of social scientists who purport to explain totalitarianism
objectively, that is, in terms that for Arendt explain away its meaning. (9) Reflecting some 20
years later on the moment in 1943 when she first learned about Auschwitz, Arendt said: "This
ought not to have happened." That "ought" is not based in transcendent moral "values" but
rather constitutes as strong as possible a statement that there was something irremissibly
wrong with the world in which Auschwitz could and did happen, and that that wrong must be
righted.

Reconciliation to the world requires that totalitarianism be

judged, not by subsuming it under traditional moral, legal, or
political categories, but by recognizing that it had no
precedent, that its elements still persist, and that every
indication of its reemergence can be resisted. Such judgment is possible
for beings "whose essence is beginning," and reconciliation may follow only if new roots are
struck in the world. Judgment is "the other side of action" and as such the reverse of
resignation. It seeks to destroy but not erase totalitarianism, for then the historical processes
that did not cause but led to its emergence would remain intact and "the burden of our time"
be reaccumulated. (10) A quotation from Karl Jaspers that struck Arendt "right in the heart"
and which she chose as the epigraph for Origins stresses that what matters is not to give
oneself over to the despair of the past or the utopian hope of the future, but "to remain wholly
in the present," the temporal dimension of action.
Totalitarianism is the crisis
of our times insofar as the demise of the regimes of Hitler and
Stalin becomes a turning point for the present world, a felt
political need for the construction of a new world fit for the
common habitation of all human beings.
 ARMY DEBATE Religion Bad
ROWLES _4_ OF _15_

Child Abuse/Violence Against Women

1. Religion is child abuse on a grand scale

Dawkins 2005
Richard, ethologist, evolutionary biologist, Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford
University, atheist and all-around badass, http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=48252

scientist and evolutionist Richard Dawkins, dubbed

Controversial
calls religion a "virus" and faith-based
"Darwin's Rottweiler,"
education "child abuse" in a two-part series he wrote and appears in that begins
airing on the UK's Channel 4, beginning tomorrow evening.

Entitled "Root of All Evil?," the series features the atheist Dawkins visiting Lourdes, France,
Colorado Springs, Colo., the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and a British religious school, using
each of the venues to argue religion subverts reason.

In "The God Delusion," the first film in the series, Dawkins targets Catholicism at the
pilgrimage site in Lourdes. "If you want to experience the medieval rituals of faith, the candle
light, the incense, music, important-sounding dead languages, nobody does it better than the
Catholics," he says.

Dawkins, using his visit to Colorado Springs' New Life Church, criticizes conservative U.S.
evangelicals and warns his audience of the influence of "Christian fascism" and "an American
Taliban."

The backdrop of the al-Aqsa mosque and an American-born Jew turned fundamentalist Muslim
who tells Dawkins to prepare for the Islamic world empire – and who clashes with him after
saying he hates atheists – rounds out the first program's case for the delusions of the faithful.

Dawkins attacks the teaching of

In part two, "The Virus of Faith,"
religion to children, calling it child abuse.

"Innocent children are being saddled with demonstrable

falsehoods," he says. "It's time to question the abuse of childhood
innocence with superstitious ideas of hellfire and damnation.
Isn't it weird the way we automatically label a tiny child with
its parents' religion?"

"Sectarian religious schools," Dawkins asserts, have been "deeply

damaging" to generations of children.
ARMY DEBATE Religion Bad
ROWLES _5_ OF _15_

2. Child abuse leads to violence against women

Jadwero 2002
Jennifer, representative to conference on Preventing discrimination against children: ensuring inclusion for all children,
http://www.disabilityworld.org/04-05_02/children/discrimination.shtml

The role of boys and men is important in ending gender-based

discrimination. If we girls and women want, we can make them
part of the solution and not the problem and if we do that then
we will soon can and have a world where all are equal, where
all enjoy full human rights and a world without gender
discrimination or violence.
ARMY DEBATE Religion Bad
ROWLES _6_ OF _15_

3. Every year violence against women kills as many women as people who were lost
on 9/11

Johnson 2003
Jennifer R, Editor-in-Chief, Santa Clara Law Review, J.D. Santa Clara University School of Law

Every year in the United States, violence by men kills women in

numbers equivalent to the lives lost in the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001. 2 In fact, three of four women in the United
States will be victims of at least one violent crime in their
lifetimes. Yet, few of those who commit such violent acts are
ever brought to justice. Such injustice is the result of a system
4

that discounts the harms of violence against women by taking

it less seriously than other crimes, characterizing it as "family
law," and offering little to no monetary relief to redress these
harms. 5
 ARMY DEBATE Religion Bad
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4. Eliminating structural violence against women is the precondition to resolving

international violence.

Sterba 1994
James P., Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame “Feminist Justice and the pursuit of peace” Hypatia,
Spring 1994,

First of all, to achieve peace we must put an end to the overt

violence against women which takes the distinctive form of
rape, battering, sexual harassment, and sexual abuse. This
overt violence is in every way as destructive as the other forms
of violence we oppose in our pursuit of peace. So we cannot in
consistency fail to oppose this form of violence done to women
in our society. According to one cross-cultural study of ninety-five societies, 47 percent
of them were free of rape (Miedzian 1991, 74). What this shows is that it is possible to
eliminate, or at least drastically reduce, overt violence against women.
ARMY DEBATE Religion Bad
ROWLES _8_ OF _15_

Patriarchy

1. Religion leads to patriarchy

Saint Paul’s First Epistle to Timothy, date unknown

(1 Tim. 2:8-15 New International Version)

I want men everywhere to lift up holy hands in prayer, without

anger or disputing.

I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and

propriety, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive
clothes, but with good deeds, appropriate for women who
profess to worship God.

A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do

not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man;
she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And
Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was
deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved
through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and
holiness with propriety.
ARMY DEBATE Religion Bad
ROWLES _9_ OF _15_

2. Patriarchy is the root cause of all forms of war, violence, and oppression.

Reardon 1985
Betty – director of peace education Columbia Univ. Women and Peace: Sexism and the War System, p.7
 ARMY DEBATE Religion Bad
ROWLES _10_ OF _15_

Racism/Heterosexism

1. Religion is the perpetual enemy of moral, social, and human progress, has
repeatedly been the cause of cruelty and torture, and has continually opposed
attempts to stop slavery, racism, and heterosexism

Russell 1927
Bertrand, philosopher, logicial, mathematician, advocate for social reform, Nobel Laureate, and heathen Why I am Not
a Christian, March 6, 1927

That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It
seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely
You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been
wicked.
the religion of any period and the more profound has been the
dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse
has been the state of affairs. In the so-called Ages of faith,
when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its
completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures;
there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches;
and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of
people in the name of religion.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of
progress of humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal
law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step
toward better treatment of the colored races, or ever
mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been
in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized
churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the
Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and
still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
 ARMY DEBATE Religion Bad
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2. Unchecked racism embeds sovereign power with the will to indiscriminately

annihilate others – this is the key enabler for global atrocities and extinction.

Mendieta, 2002
[Eduardo Associate Professor SUNY SB, PhD Philosophy ‘To make live and to let die’ –Foucault on Racism Meeting
of the Foucault Circle APA Central Division Meeting –Chicago, April 25
4-25-2k2 www.sunysb.edu SUNY at Stony Brook]

This is where racism intervenes, not from without, exogenously, but from within, constitutively. For the emergence of
biopower as the form of a new form of political rationality, entails the inscription within the very logic of the modern
state the logic of racism. For racism grants, and here I am quoting: “the conditions for
the acceptability of putting to death in a society of
normalization. Where there is a society of normalization, where there is a power that is, in all of its surface
and in first instance, and first line, a bio-power, racism is indispensable as a condition
to be able to put to death someone, in order to be able to put to
death others. The homicidal [meurtrière] function of the state, to the
degree that the state functions on the modality of bio-power, can only be assured by racism
“(Foucault 1997, 227) To use the formulations from his 1982 lecture “The Political Technology of Individuals” –which
incidentally, echo his 1979 Tanner Lectures
–the power of the state after the 18th century, a power which is enacted through the police, and is enacted over the
population, is a power over living beings, and as such it is a biopolitics. And, to quote more directly, “since
the
population is nothing more than what the state takes care of
for its own sake, of course, the state is entitled to slaughter it,
if necessary. So the reverse of biopolitics is thanatopolitics.” (Foucault 2000, 416). Racism, is the
thanatopolitics of the biopolitics of the total state. They are two sides of one same political technology, one same
political rationality: the management of life, the life of a population, the tending to the continuum of life of a people.
And with the inscription of racism within the state of biopower, the long history of war that Foucault has been telling in
these dazzling lectures has made a new turn: the war of peoples, a war against invaders, imperials colonizers, which
turned into a war of races, to then turn into a war of classes, has now turned into the war of a race, a biological unit,
Racism is the means by which bourgeois
against its polluters and threats.
political power, biopower, re-kindles the fires of war within civil
society. Racism normalizes and medicalizes war. Racism makes war the
permanent condition of society, while at the same time
masking its weapons of death and torture. As I wrote somewhere else,
racism banalizes genocide by making quotidian the lynching of suspect threats to the health of
the social body. Racism makes the killing of the other, of others, an
everyday occurrence by internalizing and normalizing the war
of society against its enemies. To protect society entails we be ready to kill its threats, its
foes, and if we understand society as a unity of life, as a continuum of the living, then these threat and foes are
biological in nature.
 ARMY DEBATE Religion Bad
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3. Lesbian and gay liberation is critical to undermining heterosexism—specifically

the cult of heterosexual masculinity is the root cause of all domination and violence,
and ensures the genocidal extermination of all minority groups

Tatchell 89
[Peter, Leader of OutRage! “Gay Liberation Is Central To Human Emancipation” May/June 1989,
(http://www.petertatchell.net/)

Lesbian and gay liberation is of critical importance to the broader

project of human emancipation. It is not merely a minority issue, nor
purely a question of civil rights and sexual freedom. The ultimate
aim is a cultural revolution to end heterosexual supremacism and the
concomitant cult of heterosexual masculinity which underpins all
relations of oppression and exploitation. This was the revolutionary agenda of the lesbian and
gay liberation movement which emerged 20 years ago following the Stonewall Riots in New York in June 1969.In contrast to earlier
liberal-oriented movements for homosexual equality, the lesbian and gay liberation movement
did not seek to ape heterosexual values or secure the acceptance of homosexuals within the existing sexual conventions. Indeed, it
repudiated the prevailing sexual morality and institutions - rejecting
not only heterosexism but also heterosexual masculinity with its
oppressive predisposition to rivalry, toughness and aggression (most
potently symbolised by the rapist and the queer-basher).In contrast the "radical drag" and ''gender-bender" politics of the Gay
Liberation Front glorified male gentleness. It was a conscious, if sometimes exaggerated, attempt to renounce the oppressiveness of
masculinity and subvert the way masculinity functions to buttress the subordination of women and gay men.
Lesbian and gay liberation is therefore truly revolutionary because it
specifically rejects the male heterosexual cult of masculine
competitiveness, domination and violence. Instead, it affirms the worthwhileness of male
sensitivity and affection between men and, in the case of lesbians, the intrinsic value of an eroticism and love independent of
heterosexual men.By challenging heterosexual masculinity, the politics of lesbian and gay liberation has profound radical implications
for oppressed peoples everywhere: it actively subverts the male heterosexual machismo' values which lie at the heart of all systems of
domination, exploitation and oppression. Lesbian and gay liberation is therefore not an issue which is peripheral. It is, indeed
absolutely central to revolutionary change and human liberation in general.Without
the successful
construction of a cult of heterosexual masculinity and a mass of
aggressive male egos, neither sexual, class, racial, species, nor
imperialist oppression are possible. All these different forms of oppression depend on two factors
for their continued maintenance. First, on specific economic and political structures. And second, on a significant proportion of the
population, mainly heterosexual men, being socialised into the acceptance of harsh masculine values which involve the legitimisation
of aggression and the suppression of gentleness and emotion. The embracing of these culturally-conditioned macho values, whether
consciously or unconsciously, is what makes so many millions of people able to participate in repressive regimes. (This interaction
between social structures, ideology and individual psychology was a thesis which the communist psychologist, Wilhelm Reich, was
attempting to articulate nearly 60 years ago in his book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism).In the case of German fascism, what
Nazism did was merely awake and excite the latent brutality which is intrinsic to heterosexual masculinity in class societies. It then
systematically manipulated and organised this unleashed masculine violence into a fascist regime of terror and torture which
the masculine cult of toughness and
culminated in the holocaust.Since it is the internalisation of
domination which makes people psychologically suited and willing to be part of oppressive relations of exploitation and
subjection, repressive states invariably glorify masculine "warrior" ideals and legally and ideologically
suppress those men - mainly homosexuals - who fail to conform to
them.Given that this internalisation of masculine aggression within the male population is a prerequisite for injustice and tyranny,
love and tenderness between men ceases to be a purely private matter or simply a question of personal lifestyle. Instead, it objectively
becomes an act of subversion which undermines the very foundations of oppression. Hence the Nazi’s vilification of gay men as
"sexual subversives" and "sexual saboteurs" who, in the words of Heinrich Himmler, had to be
"exterminated- root and branch."
 ARMY DEBATE Religion Bad
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Nietzsche (Christianity pretty much sucks)

1. Religion is the root cause of every slander against the world, every lie about the
beyond, and curses humanity with instincts of decadence, cowardice, and perpetual
nihilism in a war against life, nature, and the will to live

Nietzsche 1895
Friedrich, German philosopher, and man with a serious mustache, Antichrist published 1895

The Christian conception of God—God as god of the sick, God as a

spider God, as spirit—is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the
divine ever attained on earth. It may even represent the low-water mark in
the descending development of divine types. God degenerated into the
contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and
eternal Yes! God as the declaration of war against life, against
nature, against the will to live! God—the formula for every
slander against "this world," for every lie about the "beyond"!
God—the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness
pronounced holy!

That the strong races of northern Europe did not reject the Christian God certainly does no
credit to their religious genius—not to speak of their taste. There is no excuse whatever for
a curse lies
their failure to dispose of such a sickly and senile product of decadence. But
upon them for this failure: they have absorbed sickness, old
age, and contradiction into all their instincts—and since then
they have not created another god. Almost two thousand years—and not a
single new god! But still, as if his existence were justified, as if he represented the ultimate
and the maximum of the god-creating power, of the creator spiritus in man, this pitiful god of
This hybrid product of decay, this mixture of
Christian monotono-theism!
zero, concept, and contradiction, in which all the instincts of
decadence, all cowardices and wearinesses of the soul, find
their sanction!
ARMY DEBATE Religion Bad
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2. Christianity is equivalent to anarchy and will inevitably poison and destroy

everything that allows life to exist

Nietzsche 1895
Friedrich, German philosopher, and man with a serious mustache, Antichrist published 1895

Indeed, it makes a difference to what end one lies: whether

one preserves or destroys. One may posit a perfect equation
between Christian and anarchist: their aim, their instinct, are
directed only toward destruction. The proof of this proposition
can easily be read in history: it is written there in awful clarity.
If we have just become acquainted with a religious legislation whose aim it was to "eternalize"
the highest condition of life's prospering, a great organization of society—Christianity
found its mission in putting an end to precisely such an
organization because life prospered in it. There the gains of reason, after
a long period of experiments and uncertainty, were to be invested for the greatest long-term
advantage and the harvest to be brought home as great, as ample, as complete as possible;
here, conversely, the harvest was poisoned overnight. That which stood there aere perennius,
the imperium Romanum, the most magnificent form of organization under difficult
circumstances which has yet been achieved, in comparison with which all before and all
afterward are mere botch, patchwork, and dilettantism—these holy anarchists
made it a matter of "piety" for themselves to destroy "the
world," that is, the imperium Romanum, until not one stone remained on the other, until
even Teutons and other louts could become masters over it.

The Christian and the anarchist: both decadents, both incapable

of having any effect other than disintegrating, poisoning,
withering, bloodsucking; both the instinct of mortal hatred
against everything that stands, that stands in greatness, that
has duration, that promises life a future. Christianity was the vampire of
the imperium Romanum: overnight it undid the tremendous deed of the Romans—who had
won the ground for a great culture that would have time.
 ARMY DEBATE Religion Bad
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3. Christianity is the worst of all possible evils, and offers no blessing whatsoever.
It creates distress and torment only to perpetuate its existence, and it is the one great
curse on humanity which is the cause of all its harms

Nietzsche 1895
Friedrich, German philosopher, and man with a serious mustache, Antichrist published 1895

I condemn Christianity. I raise against the

With this I am at the end and I pronounce my judgment.
Christian church the most terrible of all accusations that any accuser ever uttered.
It is to me the highest of all conceivable corruptions. It has had the will to the last
corruption that is even possible. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by
its corruption; it has turned every value into an un-value, every truth into a lie,
every integrity into a vileness of the soul. Let anyone dare to speak to me of its
"humanitarian" blessings! To abolish any distress ran counter to its deepest
advantages: it lived on distress, it created distress to eternalize itself.

The worm of sin, for example: with this distress the church first enriched mankind.
The "equality of souls before God," this falsehood, this pretext for the rancor of all
the base-minded, this explosive of a concept which eventually became revolution,
modern idea, and the principle of decline of the whole order of society—is Christian
dynamite. "Humanitarian" blessings of Christianity! To breed out of humanitas a
self-contradiction, an art of self-violation, a will to lie at any price, a repugnance, a
contempt for all good and honest instincts. Those are some of the blessings of
Christianity!

Parasitism as the only practice of the church, with its ideal of anemia, of "holiness," draining all blood, all love, all
hope for life; the beyond as the will to negate every reality; the cross as the mark of recognition for the most
subterranean conspiracy that ever existed—against health, beauty, whatever has turned out well, courage, spirit,
graciousness of the soul, against life itself.

This eternal indictment of Christianity I will write on all walls, wherever there are walls—I have letters to make even
the blind see.

I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great innermost corruption, the one
great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, stealthy, subterranean,
small enough—I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.

And time is reckoned from the dies nefastus with which this calamity began—after the first day of Christianity! Why
not rather after its last day? After today? Revaluation of all values!