Religion. Discuss ( or should that be argue )

To be fair, I'm not religious and I haven't killed anyone yet.

Which is kinda' the point I was trying to make.

But . . . if you split the world into the religious and the non-religious - and then group everyone in each bracket as a single entity - it can then be said that someone in the non-religious group did XXX (insert a suitable crime here) and even though you yourself might be in the non-religious group you might not share any of the values, mores, morality (etc etc) held by the person or people who committed XXX.

That is essentially the what the "look at all the 20thC non-religious deaths" argument seeks to do, to describe everything outside of religious as a homogeneous whole, so the people who work on the Ferries at Calais and Dover and WHSmith in Cardiff are ascribed the same values as the leadership of North Korea and a polygamous tribe deep in the South American jungles.

Now let's imagine that tribe are at war with another tribe and their conventions tell them that the way to be victorious over their enemy is to kill everyone and bring back the heads of the enemy's women, to be cooked in a victory feast - and let's say that's exactly what they do and the story of this tribal conflict and head soup makes it's wey the the newspapers of Cardiff.

Some years later the bloke who works in WHSmith tells some vicar that he thinks the claims made by religion are stupid, to which the vicar responds by saying . .

The last century has seen a stupidly large number of women's heads cooked as a result of non-religious philosophies.

. . to which you can only really say, I think the claims made by religion are stupid and I think the actions of that South American tribe are reprehensible.

If the vicar sticks to the flawed logic of the non-religious death count argument, by this time he'll be thinking to himself:

". . . yeah, but it's your lot that did it".