How Religion Can Lead to Violence

[trotsky]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/opinion/how-religion-can-lead-to-violence.html

Both Islam and Christianity claim to be revealed religions, holding that their teachings are truths that God himself has conveyed to us and wants everyone to accept. They were, from the start, missionary religions. A religion charged with bringing God’s truth to the world faces the question of how to deal with people who refuse to accept it. To what extent should it tolerate religious error? At certain points in their histories, both Christianity and Islam have been intolerant of other religions, often of each other, even to the point of violence.

This was not inevitable, but neither was it an accident. The potential for intolerance lies in the logic of religions like Christianity and Islam that say their teaching derive from a divine revelation. For them, the truth that God has revealed is the most important truth there is; therefore, denying or doubting this truth is extremely dangerous, both for nonbelievers, who lack this essential truth, and for believers, who may well be misled by the denials and doubts of nonbelievers. Given these assumptions, it’s easy to conclude that even extreme steps are warranted to eliminate nonbelief.

You may object that moral considerations should limit our opposition to nonbelief. Don’t people have a human right to follow their conscience and worship as they think they should? Here we reach a crux for those who adhere to a revealed religion. They can either accept ordinary human standards of morality as a limit on how they interpret divine teachings, or they can insist on total fidelity to what they see as God’s revelation, even when it contradicts ordinary human standards. Those who follow the second view insist that divine truth utterly exceeds human understanding, which is in no position to judge it. God reveals things to us precisely because they are truths we would never arrive at by our natural lights. When the omniscient God has spoken, we can only obey.

...

Does this mean that Islam is evil? No, but it does mean that it has not yet tamed, to the extent that Christianity has, the danger implicit in any religion that claims to be God’s own truth. To put it bluntly, Islam as a whole has not made the concessions to secular values that Christianity has. As President Obama recently said, “Some currents of Islam have not gone through a reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to modernity.” This adaptation will be long and difficult and require many intellectual and socio-economic changes, some produced by outside forces, others arising from the increasing power of Islamic teachings on tolerance and love. But until such a transformation is achieved, it will be misleading to say that intolerance and violence are “a pure betrayal” of Islam.

Certainly how much Christianity has been "tamed" is up for debate, but the author makes a good point to note that the dangerous elements are still there, and have always been.

[rug]

1. Gary Gutting (born 1942) is the holder of an endowed chair in philosophy at Notre Dame.

The University of Notre Dame is not known as a hotbed of religious violence.

Other essays by Prof. Gutting:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/atheism-scientific-versus-humanist/

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/11/on-dawkinss-atheism-a-response/

[Moostache]

2. Religion has no meaningful place in the public realm

It is a private behavior that is best kept inside the churches and homes of the believers and left out of secular society. It absolutely has no place in governance at all.

Theocratic regimes are all the same - zealots obsessed with telling other people how they are apostates or heretics that must be purged to avoid the vengeance of an all powerful, all watching, all judging sky daddy.

1) There is no god "up there".
2) There is no devil "down there".

The concepts of "up" (Heaven) and "down" (Hell) are rooted in a time when human understanding attributed lightning to sky gods and angels and earthquakes to the displeasure of the deity of the locality. These ideas are ludicrous in light of scientific discoveries over the past 300 years, when man's understanding of the planet, the galaxy and the universe, and his increasingly small place in all of it, has expanded exponentially.

3) Salem Witch Trials
4) Current day ISIS/ISL/Al Queda

These are similar hysterias that lead the religious mind to commit atrocities in the name of their phony god over other's concept of a phony god. The situation has been playing itself out for millennia. The spread of fear - fear of the other, fear of the different, fear of the outside - is ALWAYS used to keep the faithful in line and to insulate them from the truth that they are dupes in a power struggle that has been going on since we left the trees and the savannas of Africa millions of years ago and began to replace the fear of predators with fears of the unseen to maintain social cohesion beyond the clan or family levels.

5) The reformation of Christianity was less "reform" and more "splintering" than anything else.

Starting with Luther and the reformation in Europe, the Catholic Church, which had been the primary vehicle of Christianity for 1100 years largely unchallenged, came apart at the seams. There are now more than 30,000 denominations of "Christian" across the globe, whereas previously there had been one primary "faith" (ok...I cop to it...there were more than one denomination in the ancient world, but starting with the Council of Nicea and Constantine's adoption of the faith as the Roman Empire's dying gasp to retain primacy, there was only one politically backed faith for a good while in Europe, and it metastasized freely for centuries).

A "reform" of Islam is not what we really need globally...at the local levels, they may want to retain their ancient superstitions to maintain order in their repressed societies but in the West what we need is a reaffirmation that religion is anathema to a free society when it is hauled into the public square.

When we allow people to call the USA a "Christian nation" without blow back and without clarification of the fact it is NOT and NEVR was...we allow the crazies to go back to their own people in Islamic nations and promote the fallacy of a clash of religions and civilizations.

Bottom line...ISL/ISIS/whatever is a movement of repressive conservative Islamists. Our own home grown morons in the conservative movement here make common cause with these zealots every time they attack a Democrat or a non-believer or a separate denomination as apostates or worse.

Get religion out of politics or watch the world burn in response. I know my choice, but I also recognize that too many disagree and would rather believe the comfortable lies than face an uncertain truth.

[rug]

4. What other opinions do you think have "no meaningful place in the public realm"?

[Buckeye_Democrat]

3. There's a bunch of disturbing text

In the Bible and Torah, much of which go against modern sensibilities of human rights.

At the present time, there aren't as many fundamentalist Christians and Jews who take that text seriously -- e.g., Moses urging his followers to take little girls as brides after battles.

What's interesting to me is Turkmenistan. For a predominantly Muslim country, it has a low rate of terrorism. Coincidentally, their government also doesn't promote Sharia Law and it largely controls the education of their Islamic clergy.

[trotsky]

5. Agreed.

As this author notes, the biggest problem is with the entire notion of a revealed religion, which is coincidentally a theme I've harped on for years. While it's nice that secularism has tempered much of the extremist elements of Judaism and Christianity, the elements are still there, and there are still plenty of fundamentalist nuts who take them seriously BECAUSE THE BOOK TELLS THEM TO.