The Violent Underpinnings of Religion Thread

Thanks for starting this thread, but I wouldn't feel comfortable posting here, Jake. Perhaps if you'd said "The violent bronze age religions of Abraham" or something, but I'm uncomfortable singling out Islam for it's violent underpinnings at least. They are no more violent than the Torah or the Bible

Anyway, I've stated my case for today. I'll return to not talking about religion for the next few weeks

Insha'Allah.

Jake, I think this thread should be titled "The Violent Unperpinnings of Religion Thread". Kate's been pretty consistent with disdain for all religions.

Actually, that's a really good idea. I could talk about that fucking subject all goddamn day.

Welp.

This should go well.

Oh, c'mon! It'll be fun!

I planned on starting some shit in here this weekend but Peter seems to need something to do so I'll start some tonight but I ain't playing til later this weekend.

Islam is the so-called religion of peace. In well over 90% of the shooting conflicts around the world, Muslims are one of the main factions. Muslims are increasing European enclaves where Sharia law is being pushed as a viable alternative to local laws and courts. Often they are being allowed this "privilege."

Is Islam the religion of peace that it claims to be or is the true heart of the believer, even if outwardly a "peaceful" believer, compelled to something similar to the above quote from Marx.

Considering that Islam has tenets within it that allow for intentional lying to infidels in order to advance the spread of Islam is the "religion of peace" something that Islam can only become when there is an "absence of opposition to [Islam]."

Discuss.

I can't claim to be a scholar of Islam, but I met a hell of a lot of Pashtun during my stay in Kabul when that city was in the middle of a Taliban RPG firing range. Much of the bullshit that goes on there stems from the cultures of the local feuding tribes, none of whom place much significance on their shared devotion to Islam.

By bullshit, I don't mean perfectly reasonable things like not being excited at the sight of foreign yankee occupiers. That, I can understand. I mean Pashtun and Taliban going to war with each other over a city that's wealthy only because it once sat on the old Silk Road back in Marco Polo's day. Imported satellite TV dishes on the roofs of mud huts, because they've lost the infrastructure to build with steel. Burning down children's schools, so that the Muslim children from the rival tribe can't learn to read unless it's under cover of darkness in a climate of fear. Dynamiting Buddhist sculptures that predate the advent of Judaism. Fuck, just for that, we should have invaded. Those statues belonged to the whole human race.

You know the Saudi assholes behind Al Qaeda, the Wahabbi sect? The jackass Sultans who run Saudi Arabia now are only able to rule a Muslim population that despises them because of oil dollars. Their Sunni Muslim subjects would overthrow them in a heartbeat if they could get away with it, and the same goes for the Shi'ites suffering under Ahmadinejad in Iran. This is the monolithic Islamic conspiracy that U.S. politicians have turned into a boogeyman; ordinary human beings, hillbillies essentially, living under crooked rulers who can't lead their way out of a paper bag, but who can sure enrich the shit out of themselves at the expense of the citizenry. This should sound familiar.

The Muslims didn't wipe out the developing culture of my ancestors in Germany and force them to convert at swordpoint; Charlemagne did that. From the civil war in Ireland to the Spanish Conquistadors in South America to the oil fields of Iraq, Christianity is used to promote peace only until it's time to pillage a weaker people in Christ's name. And for their part, the local Native Americans here in New England used torture techniques on white settlers that sound like something out of a Cracked article. There's nothing uniquely Islamic about violence against women, or sabotaging the next generation, or despising the outsider. The violent underpinnings are in human nature, in our primate DNA.

Portions of this post have been rearranged in order to dress my 2AM stream-of-consciousness rambling as something coherent. Caffeine is a hell of a drug.

False. I don't know from where this narrative of a Europe besieged by the Muslim hordes slowly giving up civil liberties in favor of Sharia law came from, but it's complete bullshit. And having personally lived for years in regions with a Muslim majority this is something I have experience with.

It may seem strange to you but living along with Muslims means only that you have to listen to prayer calls along with the church bells and that many of the women wear hijabs.

And all the problematic city areas that have sprung up are no different than the similar areas where Greeks, or Italians, or Irish, or Puerto Rican, or Chinese etc moved in when they emigrated.

This is true, but only to the degree that it is true that any assertive ideology can be at peace with a subservient or non-opposing ideology. The ideologies of Puritanical Europeans effectively spread throughout the Americans on this basis, as have the ideologies of continental-Europe's humanism, as has Asian nationalism. We get into problems by assigning a value to religion that differs substantially from values of cultural or economic hegemony.

Islam co-exists alongside other religions just fine when it is the dominant religion, so long as majority muslims are calling the shots. This is a critical point, because it is absolutely nothing any objective person should be surprised by. Where Islam exists in a minority (such as, hey, the US) it gets along okay. People will point to 'Eurabia' and 'Londonistan' as oppositional examples and hey, I hear that. But I think it's overblown and ultimately predicated on one very important point: muslims do not call the shots in muslim-majority lands. At the very least, there is the appearance that this is the case, and that appearance is heavily influenced by fact. Israel is the largest single recipient of U.S. foreign aid, followed closely by Egypt. Pakistan is in the top five. U.S. armies are in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are close and far-reaching security relationships between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia (the Keeper of the Holy Mosques), Syria, Turkey, etc.

If, someone - say - muslims (or anyone else - Hindu, socialist, black . . . you see what I'm saying?) were to somehow gain control of a majority Christian land (like God Bless the U.S.A.) . . . well, there sure as hell would be a lot of noise about it, don't you think? And if foreign armies were deployed in the heartland, there would sure as fuck be civilian casualties on all sides.

And that is why there is not peace in the Middle East. Not because Islam is a religion of violence - all religions are, really. And don't give me no bullshit about Hindus, cause the BJP in India has sponsored pogroms in the recent past, and the Naxalite rebellion sure as fuck dont worship the Buddha, and if the Buddha renounces violence why is Nepal such a damned mess, etc . . .

It's because the Middle East is popular territory. There are a lot of cooks in that kitchen, and it's a fucking mess as a result.

On topic here, couldn't a lot of these holy texts be traced back to times when your tribe was pretty much at war with the other tribes for good grazing/planting lands and clean water? In which case a take no prisoners, smite thy enemy attitude made sense -- it was either you or them. And which, of course, is in no way justified today.

That's the problem though, IMHO: A bunch of crazy desert hatred got written down in book form (pouring boiling water over someones head only to torture them with hooks? That's seriously demented), and now thousands of years later, when those "teachings" have absolutely zero revelance to modern society, they're still being labeled as the official word of god

It doesn't matter that most people know that such despicable nonsense can't really be applied to the here and now, the passages inciting violence still wait like a time bomb for a fanatic to use it as his justification for mayhem. No one theologian can prove the fanatic wrong either, because officially, the boiling water stuff is just as much the "word of god" as the "do onto others" portions.

(and that's not even getting into the rest of the content)

EDIT: Jake, thanks for changing the thread title

That's an incredibly unnuanced way of looking at it.

When people are getting stoned to death by their family and friends because it's the officially sanctioned punishment in their holy book, I'd say there is little room for nuance.

I know you disagree, and that's where I have to pull out my "agree to disagree" thing, because I think there is just a fundamental difference of opinion here that cannot be bridged.

Fun fact: The word "Stoning" is not mentioned once in the Qur´an, but several times in the OT and Torah. So there is little room for nuance indeed.

This is what happens when you get all of your information from articles on the internet.

I tried reading the Koran a number of years ago & my immediate impression was that it was an instruction manual for surviving & prospering among warring tribes in the desert circa 600AD. Much in the way that the Bible is regional folklore plus theistic one-upmanship against oppressive Roman rule.

[disclaimer: I may almost certainly be mistaken]

Do you want me to be nice, or would you like me to go back talking about your dad punching Hitler? Meet me halfway, for the love of God.

Rath,

Well, no, I'd rather you not do that.. I am not really looking to get into another big discussion on religion, I feel I've done that enough lately. Jake was nice enough to retitle the thread though and so I wanted to just offer up my brief take on the violent content found in most holy books. My point about stoning is that I don't think there is a context that would make me feel differently about the threat of religion. There exists no nuance that would change my opinion that religion is dangerous and does more harm than good. Rather than argue with you about that (which I think would lead to hurt feelings), I'd rather just agree to disagree. You know where I stand. I know where you stand. There is not much left to discuss from my perspective other than merely restating our thesis again and again

Hope you have a great Saturday, Rath, and hope there are no hard feelings

But goddamn this is so stupid. Humanity is dangerous. Trying to ascribe that inherent danger to some 'outside' force, such as religion, is just wankery. Why is it so hard for people to comprehend that human beings are awesome and total shit is fairly equal measure? You don't need religion to be a monster. Sure, it helps. So does badass facial hair.

It's really quite staggering how many intelligent, thinking people miss this essential truth.

Not crazy about Religion, but name a Human Endeavor that does NOT have Violent Underpinning. Certainly Politics and Economics are out.

Exactly - humanity has 'violent underpinnings'

I'll kill you for saying that.

I'm usually awesome and don't want to. But uh... my god told me to.

It'll be a sad day when Donald Glover must kill... Donald Glover...

Saw the thread title and remembered a couple of things that I saw that might be of interest:

Debate: Islam is a religion of peace

Debate: Religion is a force for good

Nothing like some good old Oxofrd style debating, is there?

Anyway, I think it's awfully immature to say that humanity is inherently violent, and even more so to accept this as the defining tribute of human kind. For every piece of evidence of the fact of man's violence, there is equal evidence of man's innate empathy and compassion. Now, I'm not saying that man is not inherently violent but is instead inherently compassionate, I am saying that man possesses both drives, and in certain contexts both drives are proper. Without a drive to "violence", how could one ever assert oneself for a good cause? Winning an argument is a violent act, in a way, and I would say the same for protests. Without the "drive to violence" there would be no women's suffrage, and none of the labor reforms that created an objectively better way of life in the West in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.

Religion reflects these two drives. You can point to horrible actions taken by religions in the past, but can point to just as many other times that religious institutions acted as forces for good in the progression of human culture. I mean, I'm an atheist, but Saint Francis of Assisi is still a personal hero, and even I would argue that his faith allowed him to turn his assertive energies toward providing a pure example for a corrupted monastic system in Catholic Europe.

Brave, but unfortunate person trapped in a land ruled by religion

He was mocking Islam on facebook.. now his family says he should be jailed for life, and his neighbors want him burned alive in public.

For saying this about Islam: The irony of wanting to burn someone to death for saying that the god of Islam is like a "primitive Bedouin" is clearly lost on these religos (that is just a word I've invented, a combination of religious and wacko)

I thought that this may be of interest to the thread. Photographer Aaron Huey has a beautiful photo study of Islamic Mysticism called "Sufism" that I discovered today. His purpose with the study?

"Collectively we have a violent image of Islam branded into our brains, it is time to find a different image to take its place . . . My hope is that my images of Sufism around the world can help to balance out all the images of burning effigies, violent protests, IED attacks, and suicide bombers that consistently appear on the covers of our newspapers and magazines. These images will be a window into a world of music, dance, poetry, and, above all, love in Islam, something we rarely see in the western press."

It's a very beautiful and moving study. I think it's definitely worth a look. More information and discussion here.

Muslims still stone people to death. Don't act like that requires some kind of nuance that requires we accept fucking retarded old superstitions-plagiaries of the Bible at that, which themselves were fabrications and which borrowed from the myths of their day.

Once you cede that faith is a virtue, you cede that you have license to believe in things for bad reasons. All religion holds this at its core. To the extent that a religion is reasonable, it is no longer religious.

All religion is a waste at best.

Indeed. But religion is the permission we give ourselves to believe in things that reason doesn't permit. An atheist can be all kinds of terrible things since being an atheist really describes nothing about a person, not even their reasonableness. And religious people may be very nice-so nice and reasonable that they're hardly religious. But there is every secular reason to be a nice, reasonable person. Religion at best provides superfluous or specious reasons for being a decent person, and when religion does its worst (or best, as it were) it provides reasons for decent people to do bad things.

You can apply that to a lot of non-religious philosophy too. Communism isn't inherently a bad thing, but Stalin was insane. It all goes back to: People are dangerous.

Religion is uniquely dangerous when it becomes unassailable from criticism because it comes from a higher power. Communism doesn't claim that.

Communism relies on a higher power too, its just that it relies on "science" instead. Not that science is wrong but communists use all sorts of wacky pseudo scientific crap to justify themselves, and that is based in belief as much as religion is.

My point was that communism isn't inherently dangerous, but people like Stalin are.

Got that for you.

The first Emu in the holy city of Najaf


Absolutely incredible story, I got choked up reading this

PS She is so right, emu is much more sophisticated than emo! I admire her dedication to establishing her own vocabulary