PZ Myers. 2005 Dec 10. So let's make sure it doesn't get that bad here. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/so_lets_make_sure_it_doesnt_get_that_bad_here/>. Accessed 2008 Dec 04.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Saturday, December 10, 2005
So let's make sure it doesn't get that bad here
I give American Christianity a fair amount of grief here, but man, Islam can be far, far worse.
I think that if I had a time machine, I wouldn't do anything as trivial as using it to take out Hitler before he caused all that trouble. I'd go all the way and pick up Abraham. I wouldn't kill him, oh no—since I've got a time machine, I'd just drop him off in the Permian while I was on my grand temporal tour.
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So that science can eventually discover a Permian hominid? J.B.S. Haldane would shudder. The obvious place to stash out-of-place people is the future, not the past.
#: Posted by Wesley R. Elsberry on 12/10 at 12:35 PM
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Oooh, yeah, I love time machines too.
Here's another idea. How about we offer to take Dobson, Hannity, Limbaugh, and all those true believers on an all-expense paid trip to the Yucatan? And drop them off about 20 minutes before the end of the Cretaceous? -
So that science can eventually discover a Permian hominid?
The probability that a given specimen will fossilize is vanishingly low, so you don't have to worry about that.
I think that if I had a time machine, I wouldn't do anything as trivial as using it to take out Hitler before he caused all that trouble. I'd go all the way and pick up Abraham.
What makes you think Abraham existed? You'll need to pick up Constantine, or maybe several of the early church fathers, such as Peter and Ignatius. -
For years now, I've wanted to use my time machine to go back and save Jesus' life. But my pesky time machine only travels forward at ordinary rates.
#: Posted by on 12/10 at 01:01 PM
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For years now, I've wanted to use my time machine to go back and save Jesus' life. But my pesky time machine only travels forward at ordinary rates.
Mine, too. Just because I am too cheap to pay for the upgrade. -
Hmm, I think mine's accelerating as I get older. Pesky cheap time machines!
#: Posted by on 12/10 at 01:56 PM
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While a single human cannot reproduce, we carry a lot of passengers on us. I don't know how you'd estimate the chance of intestinal bacteria or skin mites turning out to be invasive exotic species in the Permian, but it sounds like a heck of a risk to take.
#: Posted by on 12/10 at 02:05 PM
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Not to mention whatever seeds he might happen to excrete over the first few days in exile. Isn't this about the time flowering plants were just getting started?
#: Posted by on 12/10 at 02:08 PM
- Defintely drop him off in the future, preferably as an infant so he can be raised by a nice secular couple (maybe gay).
- If Abraham existed, then the Permian didn't - the world began 6000 years ago.
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The thugs in Bangladesh attempting to force all women to wear burqas, are in principle breaking Bangladeshi law. But what about Saudi Arabia where that is the law, and the government (thugs) enforce it? Let's remember where that leads to, for a moment :
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2002/03/15/saudia3801.htm -
I wrote a short story in 1992 about that exact proposition. A well-intentioned scientist going back in a time machine to kidnap Jesus and bring him to the future to show him how his influence had shackled and impoverished the world.
It didn't work, of course. The sands of wars and power merely shifted about. None of them would work. You'd never get to the bottom of the pile even if single men were literally founders.
And let's not forget that mere politics kills at least twice as many people as war and religion. -
Pft. Imagine xianity today without its self-imposed doctrine of martyrdom. Maybe the world would be worse, maybe it would be better, who knows? It would certainly be different. I'd be willing to chance it.
Now if only this time machine of mine would stop blinking 12:00. Lousy radio shack electronics.#: Posted by on 12/10 at 03:43 PM -
Perhaps a campaign to secretly arm women in Bangladesh would help in this situation. I doubt that these dick-waving cretins would be nearly so bold if they were looking up the barrel of a gun when they accosted a woman for not wearing a veil.
-jcr#: Posted by on 12/10 at 03:44 PM -
I agree with you, except that I wouldn't abduct Abraham. He's a nobody. I would abduct Plato, and I'd drop him off some time before the evolution of photosynthesis just to be sure. The dark ages, Christianity, and Islam are all his doing.
#: Posted by Adam Ierymenko on 12/10 at 04:08 PM
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The bizarre thing about this happening in Bangladesh is that this is really new. That whole area never used to be this way at all. In fact, a mere 20 years ago Bangladesh used to be one of the more moderate Muslim countries. So if the radicals there think they're restoring some golden era of Bengal's past from before the West and secularism messed everything up, they're very sadly deluded. Women have worn burkas there for about as long as they've worn them in Yorkshire.
The sad part about this is that Bangladesh's real problem is hideous poverty and overcrowding. (As well as the fact that rising ocean levels could someday drown out about half the people living there.) That's what really makes people's lives so shitty there, and it's a safe bet that radical Wahhabism won't improve that in the slightest. But no doubt that's a big part of why the radicals are finding an audience who'll listen to them.#: Posted by on 12/10 at 04:40 PM -
The probability that a given specimen will fossilize is vanishingly low, so you don't have to worry about that.
wasn't there a church-of-sorts whose main purpose was to maximize its members' chances of fossilizing? ISTR something like that, except it never took off the way the FSM did.
anyway, one of these days i shall have to take a class or three about geology and fossilization, just so i'll be able to pick my burial site properly come that time. i've been mediocre all my life so far, i'll be damn if i'll settle for an average death as well!#: Posted by on 12/10 at 04:44 PM -
Wrong metric, jinx.
No 20th century political movement achieved even 10% kill rate, except in Cambodia. Religion has many times managed 100%. Met any Guanches lately?#: Posted by on 12/10 at 04:59 PM -
I'd go all the way and pick up Abraham
Some other asshole would just come along and fill the same niche.
Yeah, I'm the guy that looks at history that way.#: Posted by Jason Malloy on 12/10 at 05:05 PM - Corrupting Mr.Nice is a very good and very funny SF novel by John Kessel. The main character goes back in time and smuggles back a baby dinosaur. He is interested in demonstrating heterochrony and stuff. In the future, Jesus is a lawyer - someone brought him back from the past. IN the trial of the century Jesus and Lincoln are attorneys for the opposing sides - who is more truthful and trustworthy? The audience votes for the sentence by pressing the button...
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... a mere 20 years ago Bangladesh used to be one of the more moderate Muslim countries. So if the radicals there think they're restoring some golden era of Bengal's past from before the West and secularism messed everything up, they're very sadly deluded.
Back-to-the-past types of every stripe don't like the look of the future, and so they cling to a past that in most cases never was. What's interesting is who takes the hit first: Are things moving too fast for you? Whiz-bang new science and culture got your back up? Want to put the brakes on? Then lock up the women!#: Posted by on 12/10 at 05:36 PM - George Cauldron, flybyone, Bangladesh is changing not because it is poor and overcrowded - it has been so for a long time - but because Saudi money is pouring in to be used to indoctrinate people. Indoctrination also works in the West (e.g., http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3184 ).
- Also see point 10. of http://www.saag.org/%5Cpapers17%5Cpaper1643.html .
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George Cauldron, flybyone, Bangladesh is changing not because it is poor and overcrowded - it has been so for a long time - but because Saudi money is pouring in to be used to indoctrinate people. Indoctrination also works in the West
That doesn't really contradict what I said. I'm aware these are new external influences. Along with Saudis, there's probably also those loony vets of the Soviet/Afghan war, who seem to be going all over the middle East spreading this sort of dysfunction (see Algeria).
However, I think the poor and overcrowded part is relevant, because if the Bangladeshis didn't have such huge social and economic problems, they probably wouldn't be so susceptible to ideological movements like Wahhabism. If they had some modicum of security and societal stability, they probably wouldn't feel as much of a need for such an extremist movement. However, extremism, religious or otherwise, finds a more receptive audience when people are stressed, starving, and feeling like they have no future.
Anyway, my main point really was just that this back-to-the-burkas nonsense in Bangladesh really has no historical foundation in that country. (Ancient Arab culture now seems to be getting reinterpreted as pan-Islamic culture.) Extremist religious movements always seem to demand the return of an idealized past that never really existed, yet which embodies every way in which they think things have gone wrong. Christians do this too.#: Posted by on 12/10 at 07:34 PM -
However, I think the poor and overcrowded part is relevant, because if the Bangladeshis didn't have such huge social and economic problems, they probably wouldn't be so susceptible to ideological movements like Wahhabism.
It was ever thus. The very basis of Christianity (per Bertie Russell, and I agree) is the lack of political & other power. In fact, in "History of Western Philosophy" which may have its weaknesses whatever they are *but*
(breath) Bertie says that the Stoic philosophy (IIRC) became popular at a time when the Greeks did not have power over their own destiny; thus the focus turns elsewhere, to the next world or whatever, to the superior virtuous will, not the present worldly position of whoever we're talking about. And Christianity is the inheritor of such, and has much the same doctrine for much the same reason.
I've just been through the "HWP" but was unable to find the section I'm looking for. It only reinforces my prejudices anyway, I suppose. But part of those prejudices is that those people who feel themselves to be powerless, to be caught up in circumstances & politics & realities they can never hope to control, will turn to the next world as a place where they can redress grievances, and where they can, since they have Superior Virtue(tm), come it over the elite & those who denigrate the Virtuous for whatever reason.
I feel that this comment is very confused. I hope it reads better than I think. If not, I believe I might try again if that is not too painful.
Shell#: Posted by on 12/10 at 08:27 PM -
re: "Wrong metric, jinx."
Communism alone got upwards of 100 million in the 20th c; it's getting more in North Korea every day; and China just this afternoon. Religion's grand total for the last 2,000 years is in the neighborhood of 5-25 million depending on what stats you accept.
A few women stoned to death makes great news days while millions starve or die of diseases that could be remedied with a few boxes of salt tablets. And, in point of fact, the horrible religious practices that go on today only continue because of the politics that give it legal weight. Without political force behind it, fanatical religion is nothing but an unarmed lynch mob.
As detestable as I find the current Right-sided political climate in the U.S., I find equally distressing the lack of objectivity in the otherwise scientifically minded who have faith that the Left has anything better to offer and throw their support there, willfully blind to the endless lessons history offers on the matter. -
Prof Myer's "Abraham" is a fit metaphor for the three most repressive patriarchal religions ever; barely distinguishable in their misogyny and misanthropy.
What is it about the ethics of tribal society that arose in the Middle Eastern desert - more accurately the Semites of the Arabian Peninsula - that made it so rapid an infection in otherwise reasonable Mediterranean society?
None of the "purity" and self-sacrifice and chosen ones stuff chimes with how I know people to be. It induces hypocritical thought and double-speak.
Which makes it a perfect tool for those who want to control.
I think I might have answered my own question.
Most certainly send Abraham's Jews, Christians and Muslims back to the Permian; they can make a sacrificial contribution to the oil basins. Is the Gulf oil Permian?#: Posted by on 12/10 at 09:23 PM -
PZ, to the thesis in your post, I ask the question, "What good would it do?"
Seriously, you've spent some time in a micro lab. You've at least read about microbial resistance to antibiotics. Put into a different situation, your plan above reads to me like, "Yeah, well, since this bacterium has caused this particular disease in this particular susceptible population, if I had my way, I'd have annihilated that bacterium early on when it was first mutated with an antibiotic." And my disbelief in your plan would be likened to knowing full well that some other bacterium with pathogenic properties would at some point achieved advantage.
My analogy suffers (and has some implications that I don't particularly stand behind), but my point is that you can't go back and eliminate individual entities (Hitler, Abraham, the first staph with vancomycin resistance, etc.) thinking that you'll have generally achieved victory for all time. Rather, the fight over emerging infections is one of preventing disease in susceptible populations, just like the fight against fundamentalism is better thought of as preventing susceptibility to fundamentalism in a population.
All this is to say, do you really think that Abraham is the root of all evil? Do you really think that stopping that first MRSA organism would have prevented MRSA for all time?
While you're wisfully wondering how cool it would have been to have used daptomycin on that first patient with MRSA, I'll be taking my time machine back to that era and telling doctors to not prescribe vancomycin at the first fever and to wash their hands between patients. And while you're taking your time machine back to the dawn of time hijacking some variably named nomad, I'd like to have inseminated enlightenment and furthered the idea that, no matter what one calls God, there is a role for allowing science to inform belief.
BCH#: Posted by Burt Humburg on 12/10 at 09:44 PM -
Anyway, my main point really was just that this back-to-the-burkas nonsense in Bangladesh really has no historical foundation in that country.
Yes, and building on that point was my point that women are convenient targets for whatever anxiety this sort of nonsense indicates. Why back to burkas, after all? Why not back to--I don't know, village wells, eschewing automobiles in favor of camels, zero interest--what have you. Why target women?#: Posted by on 12/10 at 09:45 PM -
Well. While everyone is having fun nitpicking my cunning plan to bits, I have a confession to make.
I don't really have a time machine.
Sorry. -
Well. While everyone is having fun nitpicking my cunning plan to bits, I have a confession to make.
I don't really have a time machine.
You bastard! And I already maxed out my credit cards and told off my boss!#: Posted by on 12/10 at 10:11 PM -
I think one could base a religion on Galaxy Quest that would be better than christianity, judaism, and islam.
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I think one could base a religion on Galaxy Quest that would be better than christianity, judaism, and islam.
That would be trivial. Being better than the three-way tie for worst isn't that tough.#: Posted by on 12/10 at 10:54 PM -
"I'd go all the way and pick up Abraham. I wouldn't kill him, oh no—since I've got a time machine, I'd just drop him off in the Permian while I was on my grand temporal tour."
The problem with that is that someone as bad or worse would probably take his place.
If you also had a translator, you could visit various patriarchs and encourage them to add certain things to their teachings, that could clear up modern bullshit. Add something about evolution, an old universe, the big bang. Drop something in the Bible about illness being caused by unseen organisms.
Just tie some smouldering brush to the outside of your time machine, and tell the priests yourself.
You might also drop by Philadelphia in 1776, to strongly suggest that they make clear the whole separation of church and state thing. Maybe show the Founders some of Bush's escapades, so they can preemptively correct for such behavior in the Constitution.#: Posted by on 12/11 at 01:36 AM -
Be careful of time machines. I invented one, stepped on a butterfly and now PZ is not religious. Who could have guessed that? At least he doesn’t have that morbid fear of squids anymore.
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I have to agree with Wesley: Drop 'em off in the future. It's only fitting with so many of our leaders currently living in the past..
#: Posted by on 12/11 at 08:49 AM
- I disagree that poverty and social problems cause susceptibility to Wahabbism, or why are the Saudis, who are not so poor,etc., enslaved to that ideology?
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Actually Saudi Arabia does have a big problem with poverty (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2503845.stm for a recent BBC news story on the issue). It may have a lot of oil, but the problem is that (a) the revenues are mostly kept by the country's princes for their own enrichment and (b) the revenues that go to the government have largely been squandered. Radical Wahhibism has been spreading in Saudi for just this reason, which is why the country now has a big problem with al Qaeda.
The situation at the moment is strikingly similar to that of Iran at the end of the 1970s - you have the same mixture of a corrupt royal family, dictatorial government, mass unemployment and poverty, and a radical Islamist movement agitating against all of the above. If I was to bet on which Middle Eastern country would be the next to have an Iranian-style revolution, I'd put good money on Saudi Arabia.#: Posted by on 12/11 at 09:42 AM -
Social causation is such a thorny, difficult and important problem. It does seem to me that religious extremism spreads best where there is wide disaffection of other kinds. As for Islam, be careful if you're using your time line to eliminate it, as Islam did transmit and preserve Greek philosophy and science. (And add to it, I might add, in a few places.) One interesting intervention to do (assuming an "undo" button!) would be to persuade the Chinese court c.1430 that their voyages of discovery and all the rest should continue. Zheng He didn't visit the Americas like that nut Menzies thinks, but I suspect if the Chinese hadn't looked inwards just as Europe looked outwards life would be rather different. I just wonder if the scientific revolution would have occured. There is a decent case to be made that only Greek philosophy had the right ingredients to lead to one, after all ... Chinese natural philosophy as far as I can tell got more and more divorced from the practical pursuits of the alchemists. (And Confucianism hardly has a natural philosophy at all.) Then again, I think an underappreciated part of our actual SR was Boyle's insistence on talking to both the philosophers and the chymists.
How would Zheng He's followers interacted with Montezuma? Think that one through. (And incidentally, this is where religion vs. secular authoritarianism is of note. It is true that the secular authoritarians have probably killed more people than the religious ones. But proportionately? I think the blood-balance sheet is on the religious side: they are responsible for actual, complete, genocides.)#: Posted by Keith Douglas on 12/11 at 09:59 AM -
Oh, yes, it is also interesting to recall that Zheng He, while a Chinese subject, was, as I recall, a Muslim ...
#: Posted by Keith Douglas on 12/11 at 10:00 AM
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I disagree that poverty and social problems cause susceptibility to Wahabbism, or why are the Saudis, who are not so poor,etc., enslaved to that ideology?
and
[Saudi oil] ... revenues are mostly kept by the country's princes for their own enrichment ...
The rich export the ideology and the poor take it up. What a deal for the rich guys! They get to keep "their" women and a large portion of the rest of the population back in the Bronze Age, while they themselves go out and party. Ho hum. What's new?#: Posted by on 12/11 at 11:33 AM -
Not only the wrong metric, jinx, but a bogus count.
The Thuggees (we were talking about thugs here last week) murdered around 4 million/century for at least several centuries, thus using up all or nearly all of your count to its upper limit, and that was just a minor cult in one place.
Heck, even the Jews killed by the Germans and their Orthodox henchmen, which should properly be ascribed to religion, not politics, use up your lower limit in just 12 years.
Religion is the worst and most fatal idea humans ever had.
There are two great categories of religion: the merely propitiatory (Shinto, Cybele, Pawnee) and the doctrinal.
The first class could be personally dangerous -- you wouldn't want to be a Pawnee maiden in spring -- but generally bumped people off in small numbers and didn't bother the neighbors too much (Aztecs an exception on both counts).
The second class offers a range of dangerousness, but the really, really bad news comes from a doctrinal cult that is monotheistic, salvationist and universalizing.
Hindus are salvationist but not monotheists or universalizing, so they are not after you a(in general, within Hinduism there are Aztec-like subcults).
Buddhists are universalizing and salvationist, but not monotheistic, so they usually won't kill you for believing in somebody else. (On the other hand, as the Japanese demonstrated in 1931-45, that religion has no objections to murder as such.)
Jews are monotheistic and salvationist but not universalizing; nevertheless, they have been very dangerous to their neighbors in the past, if you believe the OT. But they don't offer you the choice of convert or die as a matter of doctrine.
Christians and Muslims are always dangerous and never can be trusted.
Communism is also universalizing, salvationist and if not monotheistic, it does worship an outside force (determinism). So we would expect it to be very dangerous and it is.#: Posted by on 12/11 at 12:37 PM -
Did anyone think to forward a link to this article to Vox Day? Given the contortions and parsing he's going through lately over the whole "can't rape the willing and every woman who smiles is" post, he might learn something from these thugs.
Just a thought. -
Buddhists are universalizing and salvationist, but not monotheistic, so they usually won't kill you for believing in somebody else.
Maybe, maybe not; but if sufficiently wound up they'll find some reason to do the deed. See Aum Shinrikyo.#: Posted by on 12/11 at 01:17 PM -
Buddhists are universalizing and salvationist, but not monotheistic, so they usually won't kill you for believing in somebody else. (On the other hand, as the Japanese demonstrated in 1931-45, that religion has no objections to murder as such.
I think it's specious to say that Buddhism had much of anything to do with the massacres the Japanese committed during 1931-45. Keep in mind that a big part of Japanese domestic policy during that whole time period was a suppression of Buddhism in favor of a state-sponsored Shinto, which to the nationalist authorities had the advantage of being a purely Japanese belief system, uncorrupted by foreign influences. And of course, with Buddhism they ran up against the strictures against hurting or killing others, which the militarists must have found inconvenient.
I really can't think of a war that ever arose from Buddhists trying to force their religion on others. When you see wars in Buddhist nations, there are other causes -- the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia were virulently antireligion (they murdered thousands of monks), and the civil war in Sri Lanka is really more a problem of rival ethnic/language groups, and of dominance issues left over from the British colonial period.#: Posted by on 12/11 at 01:18 PM - Actually, the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka routinely use Buddhism as a way of rallying people against the Tamils; although the original cause of the oppression is ethnic rather than religious, both sides rampantly use religion to buttress their ranks of fanatics.
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The most violent of all Buddhist sects (and one of the most violent religious movements of all time) was the Nichiren (Pure Land) movement, of purely Japanese origin.
Of course, that was a long time ago and after being decimated by the secular authorities, the Pure Land Buddhists of today are quiescent.
State Shinto had not very much to do with traditional Shinto, and because Japanese Buddhism is syncretistic, most Japanese were simultaneously Shinto (old kind) and Buddhist, but it was Buddhism that held their emotional attention. The popular religion of Japan, as demonstrated by widespread public devotions and sodalities, is Buddhism. State Shinto never displaced it.
The murderousness of the Japanese in the Showa Era was not caused by Buddhism -- I never said that. But Buddhism offered not the slightest barrier to recruiting the masses of Japanese to the most heinous crimes organized by men whose religious sincerity is, to put it mildly, opaque to outsiders.
Similarly with Christianity. Maybe Christianity did not cause the slaughter of the Jews (although I believe that Naziism was nothing by applied Lutheranism), but it didn't cause anyone to think twice about it either.
We know exactly how many German 'Aryans' objected to the murder of Jews for being Jews: 4, all Catholics (White Rose Group; Bishop Galen), no Lutherans.
When Christians preen themselves on their morality, they should ask themselves: Why, in societies that had been Christian for a thousand years or more, was Christian belief no barrier to creating the hecatombs of 20th century Europe?
I believe Christianity is actively evil. Christians, presumably, do not. But even if you accept their view of themselves, they have to admit that their ideology is perfectly useless.#: Posted by on 12/11 at 02:59 PM -
... with Buddhism [Japanese militarists] ran up against the strictures against hurting or killing others, which the militarists must have found inconvenient.
The God of Abraham also had some fairly piquant things to say against hurting or killing others, but His followers haven't let that slow them down. Properly torqued Buddhists are equally dangerous.
The notion that religion is evil but Buddhism is OK is fairly common. Why are so many otherwise perfectly fine skeptics in such a hurry to give Buddhism a pass?#: Posted by on 12/11 at 03:22 PM -
The notion that religion is evil but Buddhism is OK is fairly common. Why are so many otherwise perfectly fine skeptics in such a hurry to give Buddhism a pass?
Perhaps because Buddhism has been responsible for far less violence than any other major religion, or, for that matter, major socioeconomic movement?#: Posted by on 12/11 at 03:43 PM -
The most violent of all Buddhist sects (and one of the most violent religious movements of all time) was the Nichiren (Pure Land) movement, of purely Japanese origin.
Nichiren and Pure Land are not the same thing. They are two different sects. The Pure Land sect arose in China in the 5th century but was elaborated greatly by Shinran in Japan in the 13th century. Nichiren is a completely Japanese creation (just about the only sect of Buddhism you can say that about), created about a century later by a crazed monk named Nichiren who actually based his new sect on an attack against Pure Land. From that point on and til the present day, they've been separate sects and had separate histories. The Nichiren sect has always been very militant and had a bad rep in the old days of deliberately antagonizing the Japanese establishment and getting smacked down for it. The modern Sokka Gakkai movement arose out of Nichiren after WW2, and quickly became very politicized, militant and cultlike, tho it's softened somewhat recently.
The modern Pure Land movement, or Jodo Shinshu is very different. It's much more peaceful, and is in fact the form of Buddhism followed by the vast majority of Japanese-Americans who are Buddhists. It has a very different feel from the Nichiren movement, and does not proselytize anywhere near as aggressively as the Nichirens do, mostly being a family, devotional form of Buddhism. It's always attracted very few white converts.
Zen is a third, also completely separate subgroup, which like Pure Land also arose in China, but with heavy influences from India. It's very different in turn from Nichiren and Pure Land. For one thing, meditation is heavily emphasized in Zen, but greatly de-emphasized in Nichiren and Pure Land.
There's a lot more to it than this, but this is already pretty severely off-topic as it is...#: Posted by on 12/11 at 04:15 PM -
... Buddhism has been responsible for far less violence than any other major religion, or, for that matter, major socioeconomic movement ...
So the argument simply is one of degree: Not "Buddhists are immune to religious violence" but "Buddhists are less prone to religious violence."
So has it come to this? We're rating religions as more or less evil based on body count? That's one approach to comparative religion, but not one that interests me much. From my perspective, any secular or spiritual manifestation of the religious impulse is bad because it is so easily used to consolidate power, which then can be used against the "other." YMMV.#: Posted by on 12/11 at 05:24 PM -
So has it come to this? We're rating religions as more or less evil based on body count? That's one approach to comparative religion, but not one that interests me much. From my perspective, any secular or spiritual manifestation of the religious impulse is bad because it is so easily used to consolidate power, which then can be used against the "other." YMMV.
So... a movement that kills almost no people to you is morally the same as one that's killed millions? Alright, fine... Not much anyone can say to that.
I never said this was an 'approach to comparative religion'. As a matter of fact, it would be my guess that you know extremely little about comparative religions, but essentially make up for this with animosity. I would urge you actually learn more about these things, and not assume that everything in the world fits your pre-existing categories.#: Posted by on 12/11 at 05:35 PM - Since the title is "So let's make sure it doesn't get that bad here", let's ask - is the resurgence of the Christian right in the US primarily because of the poor, deprived, etc.? Is poverty making Americans more susceptible to religion? Is the resurgence in the poor, crowded inner cities?
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To the gentleperson who mentioned Thuggee,
http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/imperial_watch/thuggee_law.html
and this
http://content.cdlib.org:8088/xtf/view?docId=ft8s20097j&chunk.id=ch2&doc.view=print -
Is poverty making Americans more susceptible to religion? Is the resurgence in the poor, crowded inner cities?
No, it's because people feel adrift. They'll grasp at anything that seems to promise stability.#: Posted by on 12/11 at 07:00 PM -
"What is it about the ethics of tribal society that arose in the Middle Eastern desert - more accurately the Semites of the Arabian Peninsula - that made it so rapid an infection in otherwise reasonable Mediterranean society?"
Greece and Rome were not reasonable. They had their inherent misogyny and bloodthirst and whatnot as well, before Christianity as well as afterwards.#: Posted by on 12/11 at 07:39 PM -
' . . . provisionality of its own categorization. . . .,' Arun? Sheesh. Give me a break.
On the other topic, not only were Greece and Rome not reasonable, but there were competing religious ideas in western Asia as well.
E.R. Dodds tried to correct the first error in his lectures 'The Greeks and the Irrational' over 50 years, with almost no success. The problem is that the irrationalists left no body of documents like the dialogues of Plato that people can read.
The Christians so successfully suppressed the alternative religious theories of western Asia that we know little about them, but they were not all as antifemine as Judaism, Christianity or Islam. Far from it. In the earliest document that reveals any specific religious belief, 'The Hymn to Innana,' god is a ;rotective woman. Until the discoveries at Nag Hamadi, the only things we knew about Gnosticism were lies told by Christian priests.
How Christianity triumphed (and was then trumped itself by Islam)in western Asia is susceptible to an analysis that does not depend on doctrinal interpretations, as for example, R.L. Fox, 'Pagans and Christians' and Peter Brown, 'Rise of Western Christendom.'#: Posted by on 12/11 at 09:03 PM -
That christians are not as bad as the idiots in Bangladesh is not because christianity is more humane or rational. In the U.S. and perhaps europe it´s because they don`t have the actual power they would like. For a clue as to how a good christian society in the U.S. could be like check out the rules, regulations and enforcements used by our puritan forefathers in the north eastern colonies. All that for jesus (who loves you, and don`t you forget it!) Now imagine an america where fudementalist christians could totally implement what they felt was necessary to "express" their true traditional christian values.....
All religions in practice and history are about power, oppression and who´s having sex with who and preventing it. Poverty, war, injustice dignity are all minor unimportant question to all major practiced religions.#: Posted by on 12/12 at 03:30 AM -
Ah! so it was YOU, NatureSelectedMe! "I invented a time machine and stepped on a butterfly" you say! You caused PZ to became an atheist instead the Lutheran pastor he was supposed to be, and I, who should be banquetting with the King of Sweden (you know, the 2005 Nobel), am here dog paddling in fluid mechanics! It is not funny...!
#: Posted by on 12/12 at 06:05 AM
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Towards my point that something other than poverty and overcrowding is responsible for the growth of Islamist extremism:
http://www.time.com/time/asia/covers/501051212/lky_intvu3.html
Interview with Lee Kuan Yew
TIME: The 2002 plot to blow up seven embassies in Singapore using truck bombs—our sense is that you were taken completely by surprise.
LEE: Of course. How could we, in this most cosmopolitan and open of cities, where 15% Muslim Malays are completely mixed up with Chinese, Indians, Eurasians and others, go to English-language schools, do similar jobs, live in similar homes, produce 30-plus would-be jihadists?
TIME: You had no idea?
LEE: No idea at all. It was a stroke of good fortune. Our intelligence had under surveillance a few religious types [in Singapore]. One of them left for Karachi and went on to Afghanistan, soon after the country was bombed by the Americans [in late 2001]. He was captured by the [anti-Taliban] Northern Alliance. He was of Pakistani descent. So we found that this wasn't just a religious study group. If that fella had not gone off to Karachi to fight with the Taliban, we would have been hit with seven truck bombs. The nitrates were sitting [across the causeway] in [the Malaysian state of] Johore.
At the same time that this Pakistani, born and bred in Singapore and English-speaking, was caught by the Northern Alliance, another Pakistani born and bred in Bradford, U.K., was caught in Iraq and sent to Guantánamo Bay. I watched his father on the BBC, and thought to myself: two Pakistani families left Pakistan, one for Bradford, the other for Singapore, produced children, brought up in two totally different environments, quite distant from the Islam of Pakistan, and yet they both end up fighting in Afghanistan. This Islamist pull is more powerful than that of communism. The communists never fully trusted one another across racial boundaries. The Vietnamese communists never trusted the Chinese communists and so on. But with the Islamists there is total trust: You are a warrior for Islam, so am I: We swear to fight together.
- Eager, read it through. Thuggee is kind of like WMD in Iraq.
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I did read it through, without much comprehension. I'm monoglot in English.
Read the first one, too. As a father of married daughters, I'm not buying the idea that sati is just a social hiccup, so I found it unpersuasive.#: Posted by on 12/12 at 11:33 AM -
How could we, in this most cosmopolitan and open of cities, where 15% Muslim Malays are completely mixed up with Chinese, Indians, Eurasians and others, go to English-language schools, do similar jobs, live in similar homes, produce 30-plus would-be jihadists?
Is he lying, or does he really believe this? There's clear and present discrimination in Singapore against Malays and Indians. The government here sweeps ethnic issues under the carpet even more than the governments of Western Europe, but it doesn't make the Malays socially equal to the Chinese here. -
But my pesky time machine only travels forward at ordinary rates.
It's a little-known fact, but if you turn a time machine upside-down, it turns into a transmogrifier. You can transmogrify yourself into a creature clever enough to figure out why your time machine doesn't go backward in time. (Ignore any sarcastic tigers you may meet, though.) -
But with the Islamists there is total trust: You are a warrior for Islam, so am I: We swear to fight together.
Time to go and read Robert Jay Lifton.#: Posted by on 12/12 at 07:51 PM -
Greece and Rome were not reasonable. They had their inherent misogyny and bloodthirst and whatnot as well, before Christianity as well as afterwards.
A brief response but with no strongly held position on anyone's definition of the terms:
Reasonable is used by this poster in the sense of not being crazy. One God Chosen People ethics are crazy is what I am saying.
Misogyny and bloodthirst are variable in all societies. I don't see where I suggested this was not so.
I don't mean Greece and Rome when I say "Mediterranean society", but still I don't think they were crazy governments.
Thanks for reading this one
#: Posted by on 12/13 at 11:48 AM - Doesn't that idea strike anyone as a bit, well, antisemitic? Eliminating abraham doesn't merely eliminate the idea of monotheism (leaving polytheism, so why would you be any happier fighting widespread Zeus Design), but eliminates both the Jewish and Arabic peoples, who argue they decend from Abraham.
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The hate-filled, pathetic excuse for a human being Myers strikes again with insane comments. I shudder to think that you teach young people. I'm not even sure you can possibly teach with all the hate clouding your view of everything.
#: Posted by Joshua Taj Bozeman on 12/22 at 07:51 AM
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Josh, Josh, Josh.
- I don't have a time machine.
- If I did, my plan would be defeated by temporal paradox (Ol' Abraham was my many-times-great-grandfather, you know), or if the 'many worlds' idea is correct, would be ineffectual.
- I don't actually believe that taking out an individual would thwart the spectrum of historical forces.
It's a joke, son.
Being afflicted with religiosity doesn't mean you have to be so bloody literal-minded. Or does it? - pduggie: You don't actually believe that Abraham was the solitary ancestor of all semitic peoples, do you? Otherwise, see my comment to Josh.
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Ohhh. It's a joke! I get it! (duh me!)
It's merely a joke to call these religions evil. Say that kidnapping Abraham would be a great idea, but stopping Hitler would be "trivial" That it would be better to rid the world of religion than Hitler. I got ya. Silly me. I guess I left my sense of humor back in the real world where we work on common sense.
This from the same man whose idea of a joke is posting to a video of Jesus being beaten with the Benny Hill music in the background! Who knew you were such a comic genius?! I mean I ca hardly stop laughing.
Come back to the real world professor, your 'I was only kidding' garbage doesn't cut it.
Take out Abraham and insert (the first black), or (the first gay). No doubt, you wouldn't find this sort of hatefulness funny, but oh well- it's chic for you to attack religion.
And the comments with this post are just as hateful. I bet they're all jokes as well, huh? Man oh man, where did my sense of humor go? I'm telling ya, you should take this act to the road...You'd put all the others to shame with this brillant material.#: Posted by Joshua Taj Bozeman on 12/22 at 09:38 AM -
You have trouble seeing it as a joke because the target of the humor is that poisonous bit of cultural baggage, religion. And no, I wasn't "kidding" -- I think the judeo-christian nonsense afflicting humanity is a bad thing, and am happy to poke fun at it.
Just out of curiousity, were you as appalled at that sadistic pornography Mel Gibson was marketing as you are of a brief clip mocking it? This is something I honestly don't understand: it's like the christian fanatics demand that the Jesus myth be treated with absolutely humorless reverence, but at the same time, lingering closeups of meat being ripped and torn sold at $7.50 a showing and viewed while wolfing down popcorn are perfectly A-OK. -
Dear Sir
I find you statement about Hitler very offensive. I am not a Jew (you would no boubt decribe as a fundamentalist creationist evangelical something or other.... probably somewhat snidy from the tone of your site) but I think that what Hitler did to the Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Trade Unionists and yes, Christians, is far worse than what Abraham is supposedly guilty of. The fact that you seem to revel in this sort of stuff does no favours for your attempts to put yourself forward as a scientific voice speaking out against bigotry, bad science and the rest. personally, I have no problem with science... like money not being the root of all evil (its the love of money in the text), science is not godless or atheistic, only some of its proponents. Likewise there are some poor representatives of religion (and yes there have been and no doubt will continue to be such folk).... don't rubbish the idea of religion or (IMHO better) faith because of them.
Sorry this post is somewhat rambling but please remember that to offend is acceptable, to set out to offend and relish the idea is not. If we all listened more and talked less there would be less intolerance, war and discord I am sure. Hope you have enjoyed Christmas and that 2006 proves to be a year full of blessings and joy.#: Posted by Steve Dale on 12/27 at 05:04 AM -
I came across this article, which is scary if true, and scary in another way if false:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=20646
"Western Muslims' Racist Rape Spree"