The person you replied to said nothing anti -Semitic or anti religion and I’m not sure why they suggested that they did.
I think they were just trying to be historically accurate.
They’re not being historically accurate.
They’re being accurate to one take of a mythology which happens to have caste the Jewish people in a bad light for millennia.
There is no record of this story happening past word of mouth.
I could make up an equally plausible story right now for why the competing religious faith would caste the other predominant faith in a bad light but not want to raise the Ire of the governing authority, “Roman’s didn’t do it, it was the other religion?‽!!”
If we do a venn diagram their hatred of the Jewish religion (antisemitism) is completely enclosed within the larger circle of hating all religion. Does drawing a larger circle around the smaller circle fundamentally change the smaller circle?
It’s the old “I’m not racist because I hate everyone equally” statement. But somehow I doubt they actually hate all people. Just those that are different from them.
In the end it’s splitting hairs. They are promoting the same ideas that are promoted by the antisemitic crowd. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, how much effort should we make debating over whether it’s a duck simply because the duck has more enemies than a normal duck?
There are a LOT of very good reasons for someone to hate religion as a whole that have absolutely nothing to do with being antisemitic. And I’m saying that as someone who doesn’t hate religion myself, though I can understand why some people do, especially since I’m a member of the lgbt community.
Hatred is hatred, it’s never acceptable.
I mean if someone said “I hate gays” is that not homophobic? Is it no longer homophobic if that person later says they hate “liberals” and in the ignorant worldview “liberal” encompasses all the minority groups they hate? So while that person does hate gay people they also hate a lot of other groups of people they just broadly defined to be “liberals.” So does that make their statement no longer homophobic?
I don’t think it works that way because even when someone is in a group every person is an individual. If someone expresses hatred towards you, the effect is no different if the person also expresses hatred towards other groups too.
Same goes when someone is spreading antisemitic “Christ killer” kind of narratives. Is the effect of the words different if the person spreading it also hates Christians, Muslims, Buddhists as well as Jews? I don’t think there’s a difference in the effect of that narrative no matter how many other religions the person that’s spreading it hates.
Atheists can have a problem with religious bigotry. Obviously not all atheists have this issue, but it should be called out when it happens. Not believing in God doesn’t grant someone a free pass to be hateful towards people that have different beliefs from them. Religious bigotry is religious bigotry even when the bigot doesn’t believe in God. “Christ killer” narratives coming from atheists should be treated no different from when that same narrative is coming from a Christian.