Body-count asymmetry is morally indeterminate. Higher civilian deaths on one side do not, by themselves, establish: - unjust intent, - disproportionate force, - or moral equivalence / non-equivalence. They often reflect variables like population density, defensive strategy, evacuation capacity, media access, or who is fighting from among civilians. Outcome-based morality doesn’t map onto causation. Moral responsibility in war—if it’s to mean anything—has to track choices under constraint, not raw outcomes abstracted from context. “More dead civilians” does not equal “more immoral” unless you smuggle in assumptions you haven’t defended: - that both sides had comparable alternatives, - that harm-minimization costs were symmetrical, - or that intent and foreseeability are irrelevant. Most public discourse quietly assumes all three and then treats the conclusion as self-evident. Structural inevitability forces a shift in moral vocabulary. If civilian harm cannot be reduced below a certain floor without abandoning the war aim entirely, then: - either the war itself is judged illegitimate as such, - or civilian harm must be assessed relative to necessity, alternatives, and responsibility for the structure of the battlefield—not as an absolute metric. What makes Gaza so morally destabilizing for modern observers is that it exposes a contradiction we’d rather not face: we want wars of annihilation against enemies we define as existential, while also wanting zero civilian blood guilt. History suggests you don’t get both. Ancient societies were brutally honest about this; early modern ones could occasionally finesse it; modern humanitarian language tries to deny it altogether. That denial produces moral claims that feel profound but dissolve under scrutiny—because they rely on numbers standing in for judgment. So it's not that civilian deaths “don’t matter.” It’s that they don’t mean what people insist they mean, absent a serious accounting of structure, strategy, and constraint. And once you take those seriously, a lot of confident moral posturing turns out to be empty.

Excuse the low quality production values on my channel. There are other videos on the subject of atheism on my YouTube channel other than this. I'll be posting one which shows there can certainly not be any Gods who have freewill soon, my latest argument. This is an older one: https://youtu.be/BnzG7r709JI?si=3rfLSn5j2iH1bRwU This is Armin Navabi's version of the above: https://youtu.be/kwCsMKlZpL4?si=-ZGq8c62mCxnAUZu

Here is something I wrote a couple of months ago. The numbers have changed slightly since but if you swap out the numbers and do the math, they still don’t add up to any objective evidence for a genocide. The other criteria for genocide under the terms of the Geneva convention requires evidence of intent. Given the historic increase in the population of Gaza plus the use of Hamas’ own people as human shields during this war means that using Hamas’ own numbers which fail to disaggregate terrorists and men of fighting age, still leads to the obvious conclusion that Israeli policy has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid a genocide. I’m aware that most of the people in this community are aware that there is no evidence of a genocide, as tragic as the war is and as devastating. However, I think I made the argument well. So I’m posting here to help in answering those who continue to use this blood libel against Israel. In other forums where I’ve posted this argument, I also pointed out that the use of the term “genocide” against Israel when even the figures given by Hamas (who obviously have a motive for inflating their figures), do not objectively support the accusation clearly has only one purpose. The goal is to raise the emotive tone of the debate. The result of this and other similar accusations has been a major contributor to the rise of violent antisemitism worldwide and is another example of how those with a jihardist goal rally support for a false narrative by invoking emotional language that hijacks the rational brains of well-intended but ignorant people. Article copied below… Is it a genocide? How can we know what’s true? I’m going to ask you to reserve judgment and read to the end. Let’s examine the evidence together. I understand how it can be hard to work out the difference between what’s true and what’s not. Information is unreliable. There is so much back and forth; he said, she said. Who to trust? How to know? Do you just throw a dart and go with that? Do you go with the story that SEEMS likely, as unpalatable as it may be?