The way I’m thinking this is that all of the religious people in the world should be executed. Now I’m aware that there are a lot of religious people in the world - probably the majority. So if the population of the world is 6 billion I would estimate that about maybe 5 billion of them have some sort of religious belief.
So they would be the ones for the chop.
I’ve anticipated that there may be some problems with my strategy. For one thing - what about a remote tribe in say South America or Africa where everybody holds unquestioningly to shamanic or animalistic beliefs? I posit that in most of these tribes there will be one person who says “Hmm I dunno about all this stuff. We pray that we’ll kill a big animal today and some days we do and some days we don’t - just seems random to me”
Now he/she wouldn’t be an atheist according to strict western definitions but I would say - him, we allow to live. The rest of the tribe are executed.
Admittedly the population of the world would be thinned out dramatically. There would be far fewer people in the world, only 1 billion, but what a billion - quality not quantity. We can finally proceed without having to accede to the insane wishes of religious groups all the time.
I acknowledge that what I’m proposing is a fairly extreme measure and not without it’s difficulties but imagine what the world would be like after. We may still have political differences but at least the supernatural is out of the equation.
There are not enough atheists to carry out the executions.
One would have to have a lot of faith to be convinced that this is the right thing to do. Athiests are notoriously short on faith.
I’m guessing there is a very high correlation among political and religious conservatives and gun owners. Many of them actually mean it when they say, “You can take my gun out of my cold dead hands.” I am not interested in a lifetime of firefights, nor getting rounded up myself and put up against the wall when these folks get organized.
So, no.
Better off convincing them that God wants them to die and join him in paradise. How would one go about removing the stigma from suicide?
If you used a high-enough power rifle, you could line them up three deep or so and use one bullet. This would significantly cut the number of bullets needed.
You’d need a team of atheist professional wrestlers to keep them in line, or atheist medical teams to sedate them. I do recall there have been some problems getting trained medical prople involved in executions.
I’ve moved this from In My Humble Opinion to Great Debates. I don’t think it yet rises to the level of a Pit thread, but it certainly invokes more bile than is generally allowed for IMHO.
Given that numbers and disposing of the bodies are a problem; the solution is obvious: zombies! Kill your first batch of believers, then raise them up as zombies. Use half of them to hold your next targets in place, and arm the other half of your zombie force and have them perform the executions. Repeat as necessary, your force expanding exponentially until all of Earth is zombiefied except for the atheists. Well, OK let’s be generous and let the agnostics live too.
You’ll want to keep some herds of believers around for a while though, as brain-fodder for the zombies. Logistics you know.