Fifteen Questions, Part #1–War and Peace
Last week in the “War on Science” debate, I brought up Escow’s article in The Huffington Post as a reply to some of Brian’s remarks after he mentioned Sam Harris’s book. For those of you who have not yet read Escow’s article, now’s the time to do so, since I will be quoting from it later, but not re-referencing it.
What this series of articles is going to discuss are the fifteen questions that should be, in Escow’s opinion, answered by the anti-religious people before a serious campaign to remove religion from humanity is launched. To the best of my ability, I will attempt to use a scientific or recorded historical approach.
To those of you participating in the discussion, I’d like you to follow the following rules to the best of your ability:
Define your terms. If you are talking about jihad, *explain* the several meanings that it has in religious and historical terms.
Do not use I FEEL as an argument. It doesn’t wash. If you cannot prove something, keep your mouth shut. It is perfectly acceptible to admit that you cannot explain something or do not know the facts in a case. It may be possible that you may not have an opinion on a question. If a question hasn’t been examined in a scientific manner, suggest some experiments, thought or otherwise that could prove a hypothesis either way.
If you make a judgment, list the criteria for that judgment. In the first question, I will give an example of how this is done when I list the criteria for deciding whether or not a war is of a religious nature.
Ok, here we go:
Question #1: “Were the wars so often cited by militants (the Crusades, etc.) primarily religious in nature, or did their root causes stem from other factors such as economics, nationalism, and territorial expansion – as many experts in the field suggest? Or is the truth somewhere in between?”
I decided that the best way to answer this question would be to look at the past five thousand years of warfare as listed by
http://www.warscholar.com/Timeline.html
I soon found that this is the wrong question to ask. From the writings of contemporaries, it is nearly 100% certain that the Crusades were religiously motivated, as well as the early part of the 30 Years War. A better question would be this one–”What percentage of wars of the historical total are actually CAUSED by religion and how do they compare in numbers killed to those that are NOT caused by religion?”
To determine the best way to decide whether or not religion is a cause for a war I will borrow from Matthew White’s criteria in his Historical Atlas of the 20th Century (with additions to his #4 and the substitution of my #5 for his):
Five criteria
1) Were the perpetrators members of a religion?
2) Were the perpetrators from a traditionally religious society?
3) Was the religion of the perpetrators mainstream?
4) Was the conflict between two groups with differing religious beliefs in an attempt to impose the perpetrators’ religion on the attacked?
5) As a result of the war, was there a demographic change in the religious nature of the losers?
I would call a war religious if four or more of the questions are answered yes.
We can use the standard wiki definition of religion for answering those questions: “Religion is the adherence to codified beliefs and rituals that generally involve a faith in a spiritual nature and a study of inherited ancestral traditions, knowledge and wisdom related to understanding human life. The term “religion” refers to both the personal practices related to faith as well as to the larger shared systems of belief.”
I’ve spent a part of last week going over the “timeline” wars and I have come up with a percentage of 11% of the wars listed meeting all five of the criteria. Wars with 4 out of 5 of the questions answered yes increase the total number to 14% of the total wars fought over the last 5000 years.
The actual numbers become even more lopsided if you look at the wars and democides of the 20th Century (which totalled 170 million from all causes), I’ll get to that in answering question #3.
I therefore conclude that religion has a minor role in the causation of warfare. The number of people’s lives that would be saved by removing religion at this time is minimal, at best.
Question #2–”Historically, has terrorism been driven primarily by religion – or by other forces?”
Escow goes on to mention Robert Pape’s excellent book on the subject, “Dying to Win–the Logic of Suicide Terrorism.”
I would recommend that you all, at this time, read the summary, http://tinyurl.com/b8xlm if not the complete book.
His main premise is that terrorism is a tool of nationalists, rather than the religious, and is used primarily in forcing democracies away from imperialistic ventures.
My counter claim is that religions, rather than serving as a large part of terroism, instead are responsible for much of the non-violent protest that has resulted in social change.
The leading proponent of non-violent social change, Mohandas Gandhi “was born a Hindu and practised Hinduism all his life, deriving most of his principles from Hinduism. As a common Hindu, he believed all religions to be equal, and rejected all efforts to convert him to a different faith.” (wikipedia)
In the United States, religious-affiliated groups such as the Quakers opposed wars during the 20th Century. The civil-rights movement, led by men like the REVEREND Martin Luther King, and groups like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern CHRISTIAN Leadership Conference (SCLC) used non-violent forms of protest to help desegregate first the South, then the rest of the United States.
The Berrigan brothers, as well as other Catholic priests led a non-violent wing of the anti-Vietnam War movement, saying that it was due to their faith that they must opposed war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Berrigan
Therefore, historically, religion is much more likely to result in non-violent social demonstrations than terrorism.
Question #3–”Does the historical experience of nontheistic countries challenge the notion that religion is a major factor in causing internal oppression or external military conflict?”
I think the best way to quantify this is to look at the 20th Century, the first period in which non-theisic nations could really be considered as existing. As I said above, the total deaths from war and democide during the 20th was at least 170 million.
Relgious Wars and Democides with casualties:
Holy Wars of the Mad Mullah 27,000
Armenian Massacres: 1,500,000
Arab-Israeli Wars 65,000
India-Pakistani Wars (including formation war) 500,000
Holocaust 5,500,000
Northern Ireland conflict 3000
Iran-Iraq War 1,000,000
Total: less than 9 million
Let’s compare this with the numbers from the warfare and democides within the Soviet Union and China, two inarguably non-theistic states during this same period:
Soviet Union:
Civil War 9,000,000
Stalin purges 20,000,000
WW 2 Military 9,000,000
WW 2 Civilian 7,000,000
Deported nationalities (Chechens, Kalmyks, etc) 1,000,000
Total 46,000,000 people dead
China:
Warlord Era 800,000
Nationalist era 3,100,000
WW 2 Military 2,000,000
WW 2 Civilian 8,000,000
Chinese Civil War 2,500,000
Mao’s Purges 40,000,000
Korea 2,800,000
Total 58,300,000
So, in these two non-theistic nations alone, over 10 times as many people were killed during the 20th century as were killed in religious wars.
Therefore, I hold that non-theistic nations are much more likely to cause large casualties due to democide or warfare compared to religious nations.
Oh, bonus question for all readers–What cause was responsible for the most premature deaths during the 20th Century (300 million)?
Tom
Brian adds: Random coincidence: Lee Feder’s DI column today addresses this very issue, coming to the opposite conclusion Tom comes to without any of the social science research.
Comment by JayBandit on 12 February 2007 at 4:55 pm:
The bonus question has to be the >1 child tax in China. It’s the only country that could lose 300 million and people wouldn’t even notice.
Comment by kofi the bigpox on 12 February 2007 at 5:02 pm:
smallpox?
Comment by erik on 12 February 2007 at 5:09 pm:
can’t we the massive toll of state socialism under religion? i have no vested interest or real opinion in either side. maybe i should read those articles, but hard-and-fast party line faith in the ultimate good of some far-off cause without personal accountability, etc, seems to be religious in all aspects except the supernatural. same for neoliberalism, only with less direct massacres and more market-based slaughter.
and thats why i’m an anarchist! personal accountability!
Comment by tet on 12 February 2007 at 5:47 pm:
Kofi wins.
Erik, sorry about that, but state socialism is as atheistic as you can get. “Religion is the opium of the masses” is the first thing that comes to mind. Marx would turn over in his grave at the thought of being compared to a religion. State socialism is an economic system.
If you eliminate belief in the supernatural, you’d have to say that both science and atheism are religions and I think that would insult Brian’s intelligence.
Comment by Brandon on 12 February 2007 at 6:37 pm:
Tres interesting Tom. My simple answer is that if you compare the number of people killed in the name of god to those killed in the name of satan, we should all be wondering which polemic deity is really the beneficent one ;-).
Comment by tet on 12 February 2007 at 6:47 pm:
What the evidence seems to point to, Brandon, at least in the 20th Century, is that the ones killed in the name of Mammon seem to outnumber the ones killed in the name of God by about 10 to 1.
Economics kills and Satan is as much as religious figure as the Christian God. Is what you are suggesting with that statement that some religions are more harmless than others?
You seem to be indicating is that 9 million killed in religious warfare is too many.
I counter this with the proposition that religion is PREVENTING the non-atheistic nations from committing murder on the tens of millions scale. [I'm temporarily leaving abortion out of this, since when life begins is still a matter of theological argument.]
How could we test if this is the case? The raw data seems to point in that direction, but correlation does not prove causation.
Anyone have some suggestions on where to look for proof?
Tom
Comment by tet on 12 February 2007 at 7:24 pm:
Let’s go a bit further, now and break down the 9 million killed in relgious wars and democides by religion responsible.
Mad Mullah War: 27,000 Islam
Armenian massacres: 1.5 million Islam
Arab-Israeli Wars 65,000 split evenly between Islam and Judaism
India-Pakistani Wars 500,000 split evenly between Hinduism and Islam
Holocaust 5.5 million Nazi “Religion of the State”
Northern Ireland Conflict 3000 Christianity
Iran-Iraq War 1 million Islam.
Actually, Brandon, it seems that so few people have died in the 20th Century in the name of the Christian God that followers of Satan might actually have killed a few more–I don’t have any accurate numbers on that.
Let’s do a quick numbers check. 170 million dead, check. 3000 in internecene Christian battles, check.
The ratio is currently running about 30,000:1 non-Christian wars to Christian ones for the 20th, Brandon.
Tom
Comment by Brandon on 12 February 2007 at 9:55 pm:
Technically you’d have to count all Abrahamic religions. They all worship the same god. I never said there were more killed in the name of god than any other cause, way to knock out the argument I never made.
Comment by tet on 12 February 2007 at 10:13 pm:
Brandon, what I am asking is whether or not you can, as someone trained in sociology, present us with some kind of test to see if there’s a good reason for the number of people killed in non-religious wars and democides outnumbering those from religious wars by a factor of 10 in the 20th Century?
I mean, seriously, an order of magnitude in Chemistry and Physics is seen as fairly significant. Isn’t that also true in the soft sciences?
How about a constructive contribution?
Tom
Comment by kofi the haha if i laugh this off and disown the claim it won't really exist on 12 February 2007 at 10:16 pm:
Scotch, I don’t believe he was addressing anything you explicitly said, but rather the more general argument often made by atheists, “Organized religion has caused more suffering, wars and violence than any other cause” or “More people have been killed in the name of God than saved in it” or other such inflammatory, inaccurate bullshit.
But then I don’t know why I’m bothering to respond here. Your first comment to this post was an obvious dismissal of Tom’s post. You really don’t care. Religion is a sham, a hoax, and atheism is right – the number of consequential deaths is irrelevant. Atheists (maybe not you) use their inflammatory rhetoric not because its true or because they believe it, but because it makes a great sound bite and is the perfect length for attention deficient teens.
Comment by kofi the haha if i laugh this off and disown the claim it won't really exist on 12 February 2007 at 10:16 pm:
Scotch, I don’t believe he was addressing anything you explicitly said, but rather the more general argument often made by atheists, “Organized religion has caused more suffering, wars and violence than any other cause” or “More people have been killed in the name of God than saved in it” or other such inflammatory, inaccurate bullshit.
But then I don’t know why I’m bothering to respond here. Your first comment to this post was an obvious dismissal of Tom’s post. You really don’t care. Religion is a sham, a hoax, and atheism is right – the number of consequential deaths is irrelevant. Atheists (maybe not you) use their inflammatory rhetoric not because its true or because they believe it, but because it makes a great sound bite and is the perfect length for attention deficient teens.
Comment by kofi the haha if i laugh this off and disown the claim it won't really exist on 12 February 2007 at 10:16 pm:
Scotch, I don’t believe he was addressing anything you explicitly said, but rather the more general argument often made by atheists, “Organized religion has caused more suffering, wars and violence than any other cause” or “More people have been killed in the name of God than saved in it” or other such inflammatory, inaccurate bullshit.
But then I don’t know why I’m bothering to respond here. Your first comment to this post was an obvious dismissal of Tom’s post. You really don’t care. Religion is a sham, a hoax, and atheism is right – the number of consequential deaths is irrelevant. Atheists (maybe not you) use their inflammatory rhetoric not because its true or because they believe it, but because it makes a great sound bite and is the perfect length for attention deficient teens.
Comment by Karen Pierce on 12 February 2007 at 10:24 pm:
Just a couple of questions, Tom
1. In a previous post you said something about taking into account the advanced technologies of the 20th century. Do you think that in any of the pre-20th century wars, religious or otherwise, the killing could have been as great if they had had our modern weapons. Or, if the current Islamic extremists got a hold of WMD, could they match the numbers of the non-theist wars?
2. In the wiki definition of religion, does “faith in a spiritual nature” mean a supernatural being? If not, what else would it mean?
3. In the five criteria, would you say the first three apply to us in the Iraq war? And, this might be too quirky, but I have friends who believe Bush got us into this war because he believes “God wants us to spread democracy”. If the result of the war was that we did manage to bring democracy to Iraq, would this qualify as a religious war? (five of the five would have been met).
4. Where would the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights fit into all of this? It seems to be secular and the reason the UN is so reluctant to go to war.
Comment by kofi the ^10 is like this big [-------------||-------------] on 12 February 2007 at 10:35 pm:
Although Tom does need to account for more efficient killing, it’s an impossible task.
1) What percentage of the world was at war for what percentage of time? A world war involving more than half the world’s population for five or six years versus a local war raging dozens of years? Perhaps our more efficient methods of killing actually saved lives by shortening the length of wars?
2) Tom would also have to account for advancements in medical technology. How many of those who died in ancient wars would have lived in modern wars? It’s an extremely relevant question. Just compare Iraq to Vietnam, and that’s just in the past 30~40 years.
3) There is also the problem with recorded history. Ancient death tolls are not necessarily accurate (high or low). There may be whole slaughters of innocents that went unrecorded because they weren’t “battles” or wars gone unrecorded because they killed eachother into obscurity.
Essentially, it’s an impossible task. Pick a fair margin of error and assign it to Tom’s estimate. Unless Tom is purposely hiding or misrepresenting data, I doubt any ‘fair’ margin of error could close the gap in a power of ten disparity.
Comment by Brandon on 12 February 2007 at 10:55 pm:
Tom – Gee I can’t really answer that perfectly. Honestly, even so-called “religious” wars have political and power subtexts that would exist with or without religion (whether or not those subtexts would have resulted in war is another matter ). To say that any war is purely religious or secular is tricky since motivations vary by group and even by individual.
Karen –
“I have friends who believe Bush got us into this war because he believes “God wants us to spread democracy”. If the result of the war was that we did manage to bring democracy to Iraq, would this qualify as a religious war? (five of the five would have been met).”
Actually if you poke around a bit (probably wikipedia or google would do) you’ll actually find that a number of evangelicals believe that the Iraq war is part of God’s plan because it’s part of securing the holy land for Armageddon, so you could also qualify it that way as a religious war. After all the place mentioned most in the bible was Israel, but the place mentioned second most was Babylon.
Kofi – was playing devil’s advocate. I actually agree with Tom’s general post although I was a bit surprised due to my bias. In regards to the inflamatory speech thing, I’m actually waiting until things calm down a little before writing a piece on Evangelical Atheism (which I think is silly by the way)
Comment by Billy Joe Mills on 13 February 2007 at 11:23 am:
Tom,
I thought this was an excellent post, probably your best so far. I agree with your conclusion and reasoning. I also read this as a counter to a lot of the BS that Brian would prefer to believe about how evil and scary Christians are.
Karen Pierce,
I’m assuming you read the comments that followed Brian’s last post. I’m curious how you feel about Brian being ashamed of his hometown and his roots?
Comment by Brian on 13 February 2007 at 12:30 pm:
Billy,
I’ll let my mom speak for myself, but regarding the “BS” I would “prefer to believe about how evil and scary Christians are,” I’ve never asserted any such thing. What I will assert is that religion–Christian or any other kind–does not comport with rational thought, and has inflicted harm on societies from time immemorial.
On this particular question of war and peace, I trust Tom’s analysis overall and congratulate him for a point well made. The only thing I would say is that if he is implying that the greater number of non-religious wars (and the greater number of deaths in those wars) are caused by the lack of religion, then I would take issue. Tom didn’t directly make this assertion, though it kind of felt like he was making that implication when referring to the massive number of deaths under the Soviet Union. I fully admit that violence motivated by politics and economics can and does exist both inside and outside the realm of religion, but if anybody is going to argue a causal link between the absence of religion and violence, I am going to object.
That, I think, is the relevant point. There are, as Tom points out, a large number of wars throughout history that have been fought in the name of religion (even if those wars constitute a small proportion of the total number of wars). In those cases, there is a direct causal link between religion and violence. I think Tom would be harder pressed to come up with the same amount of violence being CAUSED BY the absence of religion (rather than simply occuring without any religious motivation).
Comment by Brian on 13 February 2007 at 12:31 pm:
Gah! Speak for herself, HERself. I hate myself.
Comment by tet on 13 February 2007 at 1:29 pm:
Good points, Brian, which is why I wanted to enlist you and Brandon in the “scientific” portion of this.
One problem that we have in our analyses is that the “Atheistic State” has not really existed until the 20th Century. [The only notable exception I can think of is Revolutionary France, and that didn't last very long before it collapsed.]
What this means is that the number of situations that we can examine to look for proof is only about 2% of recorded history. Since there were many, many other changes in the human populations during the 20th (technology, communication, overall population, rise in standard of living, as just a few examples) it is difficult to unwind the atheistic properties of the 20th’s major states from other affects.
One question we could ask that might be a clue:
Is a causal connection between atheism and nihilistic behavior by governments shown by recent history?
In the case of the French Revolution, there is absolutely a connection, since the same people who instituted the Revolutionary Constitution (which eliminated religion from public life to such an extent that they renamed the months and days to remove references to the Gods and Goddesses) were responsible for the Reign of Terror and the subsequent degeneration into the Napoleonic Era.
So, how can we test this hypothesis for the 20th Century?
Tom
Comment by tet on 13 February 2007 at 1:33 pm:
Oh, one other question for Brian:
If it can be shown that religion has provided more good than done harm over the past 5000 years, would you accept it as a positive force even though it is not a product of rational, but mystical thought?
I think this is an important question, since if your answer is no, then little that I can do will make any difference in the long run. If you answer no to the question, you will have placed the concept of rational thought *above* the long-term good of humanity.
Tom
Comment by Billy Joe Mills on 13 February 2007 at 2:00 pm:
Brian and Tom,
I second Tom’s last post. What’s important is not the amount of harm caused by religion, but the net benefit or harm caused by religion when you sum its massive and incalculable influence. If we accept Tom’s thesis that religion has mostly been used as a pretext for war and not the main motivation for war itself, then we should assume that those nationalists and kings would have found a different pretext if religion did not exist. So we’d have to weigh the evils of religion against all the hope and cheer and humanity it has given to billions of people throughout time.
Comment by tet on 13 February 2007 at 3:03 pm:
Uh, Billy Joe, no offense, but incalculable influence doesn’t help us here–what we want is calculable influence.
[I understand you're using incalculable as a synonym for really effin' big, but I couldn't restrain myself.]
Tom
Comment by Brandon on 13 February 2007 at 3:30 pm:
“Is a causal connection between atheism and nihilistic behavior by governments shown by recent history?”
Interesting premise for research Tom. Off the top of my head I’d say that you’d have to pull together some impressive data sets that I’m not sure exist. To start, you’d have to ask something along the lines of: “how many people, as a proportion of population have been killed in religiously inspired wars versus non religiously inspired wars?” For the purposes of balance you would probably have to include all wars in which religion was a significant, though not necessarily the primary factor.
Even better might be to examine how many people as a proportion of the overall population participated in wars rather than casualties since casualties have been made worse by improved military technology and on the flip side mitigated by advances in medical technology. The problem with that analysis is that war has, over the 20th century, increasingly become a field of specialists in which only a small proportion of the population is involved in at any given time (at least in industrialized nations).
Aside from this, it might to do look at the socio-economic impact of warfare on the populous because for every person killed in battle several are killed by famine, disease, and devastation that won’t necessarily show up in casualty numbers.
Honestly to answer your original question I think it might do better to examine your so-called “atheist” states and compare them with “religious” states in the 20th century alone (since all data prior to about the revolution is sketchy at best). Basically what that would entail is taking casualties, economic devastation and probably a few other factors I’m missing and putting them into a data set and compare them with the population, previously existing economy, etc to get proportional results and then compare the sets with one another.
These ideas are far from perfect, but it’s what I could come up with in ten minutes. I suspect there will be a pro-religious bias for several reasons: 1) most “theistic” states are ethnically and culturally homogenous leading to less internal strife, 2) most “atheistic” states are Marxian modelled which by its very nature is a violent ideology, 3) There just haven’t been that many openly religious states in the 20th century, 4)It is extremely difficult to separate out religion from cultural or political beliefs and conversely a lack of religion from cultural or political beliefs so there’s a problem of causation.
Comment by Brandon on 13 February 2007 at 4:00 pm:
Actually you know I just thought of a potential problem with the whole model being discussed. If you count all violence perpetrated by “atheist” states then it would only be fair to count all violence by “religious” states. A religious state would be a majority of the world where a majority of the population is religious.
Comment by tet on 13 February 2007 at 4:15 pm:
Imperial Russia versus the Soviet Union would be good other than the Marxist factor.
You’ve got an non-homogeneous population with an emperor and a state relgion with a great deal of power and tradition.
Now that the Soviet Union has fallen, we have some pretty good figures for economic dislocations, deportations and famine deaths for the post-revolutionary period.
Prior to the 20th, though, even the more “secular” states had a religious foundation. Has there actually *been* a non-Marxist atheist state on earth?
The Nazis substituted a pagan-type “Church of the State”, but they were also a socialist government, although non-Marxist. Would their cult be considered a religion–it fits most of the definition from wikipedia.
I find it an interesting coincidence that the only two non-religious government types that comes to mind immediately are also inexorably linked to violence. If we had a couple dozen more, we might be able to make a generalization.
While I’m at the computer, let me look up the democide/warfare figures for the 19th/20th Century in Imperialist Russia versus the 20th in the Soviet Union.
I get a total of about 2.64 million deaths by warfare or democide in Imperialist Russia during the entire 19th Century and the Romanov era up to the revolution in 1917.
Is the inherent violence of Marxism alone responsible for the higher total of 46 million *after* the state became atheist?
Ah, another thought–is there a religious state with a Marxist economic system?
Are Cubans still Catholic?
On second thought, Cuba may be a horrible example, because there’s no unbiased sources for information on how many people died before and after the revolution.
Any others?
Tom
Comment by tet on 13 February 2007 at 4:21 pm:
Brandon, for the 20th Century, those numbers are really easy to come by, although a lot depends on whether or not you consider the Nazis a religious nation.
There was a total of 170 million people killed by war or democide during the 20th.
94 million were from/by atheistic states, not counting the Nazis.
This leaves a total of 76 million from all of the other states COMBINED, with the assumption that the Nazis be included with the religious. If the Nazis are included with the atheist states, the number becomes even more lopsided, Brandon.
So, no matter how much you raise the bar, the “atheist” states still end up responsible for the majority of the deaths during the century.
Tom
Comment by tet on 13 February 2007 at 4:25 pm:
As far as Lee’s column goes, it sure as hell is easy to come up with an opposite conclusion if one hasn’t done any of the QUANTITATIVE research and makes lots of emotional arguments.
Send Lee Feder over here. If he can refute any of my arguments, I’ll send him a cookie.
His column is vacuous.
Tom
Comment by Brandon on 13 February 2007 at 6:44 pm:
I just realized that we may be asking/answering the wrong question. If we want to discover how much religion will restrain violence, then looking at how/whether a government is religious doesn’t give us a clear picture because governments are only part of the equation. It might be better to look at the number of people who are religious within a given country (granted this would be arbitrary like saying what % of the population attends some sort of religious service weekly/monthly, etc). You might find a correlation between decreased church attendance and increased violence.
Oh and as for religious communist states: Poland.
Comment by J. Prescott on 13 February 2007 at 10:05 pm:
Brandon – The task of ascertaining if something or someone is religious, is in my mind, a fool’s errand. The best definition of religious, that doesn’t include the term “religion” in it, is “to be scrupulously faithful, conscientious.” Faith is inherently an internal question which can be gauged by no social scientist. A person can lie to themselves and other about being religious, but that doesn’t make it true. Faith can only be revealed in the most dire or most exceptional of circumstances, which social scientists can’t create. For example, I can go to church everyday and do good works, which according to my faith would make me religious. However, I could do those things just because they are “what I am supposed to do,” and not based on any true faith, which would in turn make me not religious. So the idea that we can quantify religous-ness (?) as if it were some characteristic like height and weight seems impossible. Therefore, the entire question “religious state v atheist state” can’t be measured and gauged, because just because a country claims to be a people of faith, or not, doesn’t mean they are.
Tet – Communism is a religion. Whether Marx admits it or not is irrelevant, especially since he stole his entire theory from Christianity. “The meek [the proletariat] shall inherit the earth.”
But I get ahead of myself.
Marx said that he wanted to overthrow god and capitalism. You don’t get rid of something without replacing it with an alternative that satisfies the roles that the previous part fulfilled.
Religion is “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, esp. when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.” Marx was the son of a man who had not one religion in his life, but two (Judaism and Roman Catholicism). Marx knew the importance of religion and he wouldn’t just cut it out, even if he believed it to be an “opiate”, without replacing it with something else.
Communism establishes its own deity, or “superhuman agency,” in the trinity of history, power, and class, for Marx believes that it is these three forces in tandem that establishes the “nature and purpose” of the human universe. While it may have began as a social economic theory, it also establishes a moral code in its ten commandments, or “ten planks,” which establishes a basic code of conduct by which states should abide. And for the whole devotional observances and shrines, Marx’s graves, the numerous statutes, and May Day satisfies those requirements.
In other words Communism walks like a religion, talks like a religion, but Marx said its a socio-economic theory which hates religion, so therefore it is not religion. I don’t buy it. Communism, in my mind, is a religion, just a different brand of vodka to what us old-schoolers are used to.
Maybe I am missing something, though, in the translation.
Comment by Karen Pierce on 13 February 2007 at 10:10 pm:
Billy,
All of my kids turned out to be snobby, liberal elitists–they must take after their dad or something.
Comment by Jameel on 13 February 2007 at 10:38 pm:
A new approach:
To what extent can we assume that fundamentalists make the most noise at the governmental level in inducing these conflicts; that is, is the decision making group in a religious state a religious representation of the actual population. It’s been mentioned that 20% of religious populations are fundamentalist; is this also true of civil servants, especially at the higher ranks? Perhaps the reason why radicals are heard in government is because moderates are not as aggressive in taking strong positions.
Accordingly, what percent of the population of a religious state agrees with their governments decisions, rather than just does what its told (lets NOT go into IQ distribution statistics *cough*tom*cough*).
So, death tolls have to do with the types of weapons used, how many people had those weapons…etc., as it has been said, it’s not just death toll that should be looked at, but conflict is very multifaceted (perhaps we should devise a technology multiplier that relates normal death rates of a particular time with death rates of conflicts).
Also, what if we tried to approach it from a ‘to what extent has this states decision to engage in conflict subjected a population to a form of oppression (in areas of lifestyle, personal freedoms, etc).’ I can imagine that some religions have been very oppressive at times, but killed few, and vice versa. Do the history books talk about how accepted certain governmental choices are? Does the action of the government necessarily reflect popular opinion and can be taken as a literal CHOICE for the populous whether they believe in God or not? The media has gone to great lengths to demonstrate American and world opposition to the Iraq war, but is this sort of data collected regularly from independent groups and recorded?
Comment by tet on 14 February 2007 at 10:54 am:
Prescott, we can extend the analogies that you make for Marxism to atheism, substituting science and reason.
The Universe in atheism was created by physical forces, the moral code is that of liberalism, in which the intelligensia protects those who are less talented, less intelligent or part of a disadvantaged minority and worship is done in universities, where science and liberalism is studied.
Heretics who disbelieve in tenets like Global Warming or Political Correctness are to be removed from their jobs or public offices….
Sorry. If you can make your kind of logical jump for Marxism, NO HUMAN is without a religion of some kind.
I’m not sure if I want to come to this conclusion, how about you, Brandon, Brian, Karen? Is Atheism a religion, too?
Tom
Comment by J. Prescott on 14 February 2007 at 11:31 am:
Tet -
Funny you should mention atheism as religion. I actually believe it is.
Atheism only precludes the belief in God or a Supreme Being, not in superhuman forces, like science, etc., so it can still qualify.
The two difficulties I have with it is that it lacks its corresponding Revelation portion (sorry for the continued Christian analogies, but go with you know), and its rituals and ‘church.’
Under marxism, its a worker’s paradise. For most other religions it is the banishment of evil and the arrival at some sort of heavenly plane. I don’t know if atheism has anything that corresponds to that. The triumph of reason. I don’t know, the native atheists are going to have to help me out whether there is anything like that on their side of the aisle, so to speak. Same thing with rituals and holidays. The Commies have mayday and mao’s tomb, but I don’t know if the atheists have anything equivalent. Again, maybe I just don’t know.
But I do believe that all humans have a “religion” of some sort, as defined in my previous post, whether they care to define it as such. I think that some people who disdain conventional, traditional religion are hesitant to call what they believe in as religion is due to the historical excesses of those institutions that came before. However, I think if you boil down these belief systems to their basic tenets, and compare their structures, if not their beliefs, you will find more similiarities than differences.
Comment by Brandon on 14 February 2007 at 12:06 pm:
Well Tom, as I explained to Prescott I think the comparison with religion is fair in some respects, however, I would say there’s no smoking gun. At best I’d say it’s a pseudo religion because it lacks a number of the essential elements of religion.
For reference I’m tossing in some definitions of religion from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/religion
re·li·gion
–noun
1. a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, esp. when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.
2. a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects: the Christian religion; the Buddhist religion.
And from American heritage (also found on dictionary.com)
1.
1. Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe.
2. A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship.
2. The life or condition of a person in a religious order.
3. A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.
4. A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.
So having given you a few definitions I can explain. Atheism lacks a generally agreed upon set of beliefs. Whereas most Christians for instance can say “there is a god, he sent his son down to die for us…” and so on. Pretty much every single Christian would find that statement unobjectionable. The only response is that atheists say “I don’t believe in a supreme being, a god” etc. but this isn’t an affirmative belief, it’s simply a lack thereof.
Also there is no moral code. Tom, liberalism is not a moral code every atheist follows (besides I’d like to see the definition of liberalism for that purpose). As my back and forth with Josh (was it?) over atheistic morals demonstrates, we don’t agree on too damn much.
You could say there’s “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe” and that’d be fair because I’m sure most atheists believe in the big bang and evolution (though of course even that’s up for debate). There is no per spiritual force or great leader.
The similarities essentially end at cosmogony. There is no “purpose” for most atheists I’ve met, at least not one a majority could agree upon. The closest thing you can get to a text explaining who we are and where we come from is “Origin of Species” but even that is only part of the story.
So basically, no I don’t think atheism is a religion and I don’t think it’s the right comparison. At best it’s a pseudo religion because it explains cosmogony but lacks so much that to call it religion (outside perhaps of the Dawkins fanatics) is inaccurate at best.
Comment by J. Prescott on 14 February 2007 at 12:26 pm:
In response to brandon, based on our conversation we had outside of the blog.
I have to stipulate to most of arguments. While I have done a decent amount of research and reading into most major conventional religions (buddhism, hinduism, etc.), I don’t have any real knowledge of atheism outside of incidental contact with actual atheists. This is primarily because Brandon is right, there is no atheist book which is recognized as a source that I can go to, to read.
That being said, I have to disagree, as a matter of opinion as opposed to fact, that I do think that Atheism does have a universal belief system. Brandon points to the lack of a ‘ten commandments’ or bible as a means of demonstrating this lack, I think that this requirement is needlessly complex. To be a GOOD christian, you need to follow the biblical precepts. However, to just BE a christian, all you need to do is believe in the father, son, and holy ghost. I think atheism has such a base line belief, and thus satisfies the requirement. I also thinks a negative belief still qualifies as a belief, but that is a difference of opinion as opposed to a difference in fact.
As for all the other stuff, I have to capitulate to Brandon, cause again, I have no factual basis from which to argue.
Comment by tet on 14 February 2007 at 1:17 pm:
Hold on to that statement, “atheism has no moral code”, Brandon. I have a feeling it’s going to be important in the later articles.
I agree with you that it’s not a religion, nor is Marxism. In both cases, there’s no belief in the supernatural, which I consider to be a necessary requirement for a religion
Tom
Comment by Karen Pierce on 14 February 2007 at 5:53 pm:
I would agree atheism is not a religion. There is no belief in the supernatural, no rituals, no church, no organization, no sacred book, no holidays, no fundamental set of beliefs.
I guess you could say atheists have faith that there is no god and that could make it a religion. But, I would probably call myself an agnostic in that I don’t feel strongly one way or the other. It is something I feel indifferent about. Maybe to call it a religion you have to at least have a strong belief, a strong feeling that there is no god. I don’t have that.
I am curious as to what you’re going to say about a moral code, though, Tom. And, stick to your format of defining the terms–whatever this moral code is (liberalism???), make sure to define it.