Unless the populations are otherwise identical, it’d be difficult to isolate religion as a variable, vs. everything else that affects an individual’s behavior.
Why are you limiting it to modern times? Surely, if Islam is inherently more violent than other religions, then we can compare Islam to other religions at any point in history, and Islamic cultures will always be more violent.
Right?
We won’t ever be able to analyze perfectly identical populations, we are dealing with clusters of human beings living in different nations with different histories and ethnic lineages. But I still think there is value in seeing how religious group X responds in different countries vs religious group y.
In the US for example the muslim population outperforms the rest of the nation in terms of things like average income. Most of that is likely due to the sample of muslims who enter the US are not random, they tend to be the cream of the crop. They are also far less radicalized and violent than other subsections around the world. Even so, if you count the number of terrorist attacks in the US involving murder and death, the muslim population is over represented. Not the Buddhist population, not Hindus, not atheists, muslims.
Nidal Hassan
the underwear bomber
the Tsaernaev brothers
the Chattanooga shotings
etc etc
If in country after country, with different ethnic makeups and different histories and all sorts of other variables consistently show disproportionate numbers of muslims going ape shit and murdering people… does that not suggest there may be something in the theological waters that is adding fuel to the fire?
Because I live in modern times.
The black death killed an enormous number of people during its hay day centuries ago, the populations that survived were more resistant to that destructive strain and so the black death plague, whatever pathogen it’s caused by, is inherently less destructive today. Should I be more concerned about the black plague in modern times or things like hiv/ebola? Pathogens where we don’t have a solid immunity/resistance/treatments built up?
Ok, our treatments for hiv and even ebola are better now, but you get the general point.
I don’t care about the relative toxicity of the religion as it has existed in history, I care about the CURRENT impacts of religious belief in modern times, because we live in the here and now. So even though the black death was even MORE destructive Centuries ago… that’s not what’s killing people in 2015.
That’s fine, and it’s certainly worth looking into the surrounding facts and issues of why a disproportionate amount of terrorist violence seems to come from certain Muslim-majority countries.
But there’s been a hypothesis that there is something special, unique, and intrinsic to Islam and the Koran that causes this disproportionality. It seems to me that the fact that, at many times in history, Christian countries were far more violent than Muslim countries, disproves this hypothesis. Therefore there must be issues aside from the fundamental tenets and nature of Islam and the Koran that are responsible for this disparity.
But if you want to know if the religion is inherently worse, don’t you need that data? Let’s say we look at Islam today, and we see that across the board, Islamic societies are more violent and less tolerant than their neighbors. But if we look back a century, and we see that across the board, Islamic societies were less violent and more tolerant, is that not significant evidence that the problems in Islamic societies are coincidental to their religion, and not caused by it?
(FTR, I’m not claiming that Islamic cultures are all more violent today, nor am I claiming that they were all less violent in the past. That statement was made for illustrative purposes, and was not intended as a statement of fact.)
I don’t actually know for a fact if Islam is inherently more likely to produce bad results, but I don’t rule out the possibility like some do. To do that last presumes that all theological beliefs are essentially interchangeable and that there is essentially zero differential effect from theological tenants.
Does the fact that there is a line in the bible that says render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s make it EASIER for christians to cede civil secular authority to the state than say muslim populations? It might, that is a possibility. I find it a greater “sin” to presume that theological ideas effects essentially go to zero in the face of culture/circumstance rather than them having real impacts on how different populations interact with the world. It seems far more reasonable to err towards the latter view.
Sure, it’s possible…but again, how do you go about isolating that factor in particular? For instance, during the time period under discussion, the United States invaded two Muslim-majority countries on dubious grounds, and anti-Muslim sentiment spiked after the 9/11 attacks. Couldn’t it be this, rather than some sort of inherent drive to the sorts of violence that Americans find unacceptable? If American troops were bombing and shooting Buddhists overseas, and Buddhists were subjected to increased levels of hostility and discrimination over here, it’s quite plausible that there’d be a violent pushback from some non-zero number of American Buddhists.
It is not unreasonable to explore the question whether there is anything in Islam that makes a society dominated by Islam more prone to violence. What would be unreasonable is to look at violence arising from one specific reason of the world and let that be enough to draw a conclusion.
If Islam actually had the efect of making a society more violent, that effect should be observable. In other words, if you look at two nations in the same part of the world and with similar socio-economic development one of which is predominantly Muslim and the other predominantly Christian, the effects should show.
[ul]
[li]Sudan in Muslim - South Sudan is Christian[/li][li]Azerbaijan is Muslim - Armenia is Christian[/li][li]Malaysia is Muslim - the Phillipines are Christian[/li][/ul]
I am not aware of a fundamental difference in violence, gender inequality, tolerance for minorities … etc. between those nations. (Which is not to say there is one - if you know of one, enlighten me.) But if Islam had the toxic effect attributed to it, there should be one, right?
We do need data, of course. Much has been said about Islam during the middle ages about being less violent and more tolerant. But this is where I find the use of a pathogen such a useful comparison. It’s difficult to tease out whether a pathogen is more destructive if you just look at the naked results.
If a group of people infected with hiv in the US was analyzed for their detrimental health effects, but this population had access to and was taking the latest drug cocktail, that would show that the impact of hiv was incredibly minimal. If we only looked at the effects of hiv on this population, it would seem relatively benign. Shift towards Africa where drugs are less available and you get a very different picture. Looking at the state of Christendom and Islam centuries ago seems like a similar thing to me, we can’t easily tease out whether Islam potentially being more tolerant during the middle ages was under aberrant conditions (like people with hiv taking a drug cocktail), or a credible and easy path for the faith to take.
To get a true test would be impossible. We would need to rewind the clock of history, having Islamic populations becoming christian instead, and christian populations becoming muslim, and see how things played out differently, if at all. Unfortunately, we can’t run that experiment, so what other imperfect test can be made to test whether one faith is better or worse with handling modernity?
What would satisfy you all?
I’m not really that impressed by your viral analogy. I don’t see sufficient points of similarity between a disease and a religion to make the analogy useful in understanding either religion, or disease.
But you don’t see any problem with only looking at Islam in the narrow context of contemporary events? How can you tell if Islam is not currently under the influence of one of those “aberrant conditions” right now, that’s making it more violent than other faiths? Looking at Islam at different times and places throughout history can, at least potentially, show if there are any patterns here. If we look at Islam throughout history, and find that 90% of the time, it’s more enlightened than other religions, that’s pretty strong evidence that the religion is not inherently more violent than other religions. On the other hand, if history shows that 90% of the time, Islam is more violent than other religions, then that’s pretty clear evidence that there is a problem inherent in Islam. Of course, the truth is probably that there won’t be any such clear pattern either way. Which doesn’t make the data useless, it just makes it harder to interpret. But regardless, you’re still going to be arguing from a more informed position if you take the entire historical context of the faith into account, rather than arbitrarily limiting your sample to one comparatively small slice of Islam’s entire history.
Actually knowing, talking to, and having Muslims intimately involved in my life has done more than enough to satisfy me that Islam is not inherently hostile to Western liberal enlightenment ideals.
What would it take to satisfy you?
Hardly a nitpick. I have no idea how I grabbed the name Boko Haram when I was trying to type Lord’s Resistance Army, but I certainly got that wrong.
Well, before (Muslim) Syria moved into Lebanon, the Christian militias of Lebanon carried out several massacres of Muslims.
Learning what % of their dotrines/faith needs to be rejected to be like the muslims you’ve encountered personally.
We’ve spent a long time domesticating christianity in the US and elsewhere. Part of that process involves getting believers to flat out reject and stop believing what the faith clearly teaches, or explain it away. I imagine that process is easier or more difficult depending on the scale of crap that needs to be dealt with and deactivated.
An Example Sam Harris uses is that it would be really really hard for a Jaine to contort their minds and religious understandings to think it was OK to murder other people, they don’t even want to harm animals to an almost insane degree. It just requires more WORK in that faith with that set of beliefs to justify harming others physically.
Is it just as hard to justify using Christianity? Islam? I don’t think so. I can’t give you a point by point analysis of the relative scale of garbage that needs to be rejected and thrown out to get people to be functional, but I DO believe the muslims and yes even modern christians and Jews we interact with today that seem decent, have systematically rejected and abandoned large swaths of their own religious dogma, they kind of HAVE to to thrive in modern times.
To extend that, the Christian majority in the Philippines has carried out a fairly long term persecution of the Muslims, there. The secular governments of Iran and Indonesia each suppressed Muslim worship for several decades. When Yugoslavia fell apart, the worst massacres were those perpetrated by Christians against Muslims. The Central African Republic and Uganda see persistent Christian persecution of Muslims. Chechnya often gets reported as a place of “Muslim terrorism,” but the history is that after the U.S.S.R. broke up, one of the forced member states, Chcehnya, attempted to gain its independence in the manner of Ukraine, Georgia, Belorus, and similar states. When the Russians moved in to suppress the independence movement, only Muslims (many of them trained in the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan), responded to calls for help. The Hindu/Muslim conflicts of India go back many years, but much of the current violence began when, prior to independence, the nationalist movement, originally composed of Hindus and Muslims, began edging out the Muslim members.
Question (impending Godwin):
Was Nazi Germany evil because of Nazism or because of German culture?
Is it wrong to impugn “good Nazis” based on the actions of other Nazis?
Replace Nazi Germany with “Muslim-majority Afghanistan/Yemen/Saudi Arabia/Libya/etc.” and ask yourself why, in one instance, the philosophy (and all its adherents) is to blame and in the other it is the ever-vague “culture,” to the neglect of the ruling ideology.
In other words, the ideology influences the culture, and liberals cannot (in good faith) distill the human rights atrocities prevalent in Islamic-majority nations from the underlying Islamic justification.
They attempt to frame them as two separate entities because they feel guilty criticizing a religion other than Christianity.
Christianity fueled the Inquisition. No speck of doubt on that. Islam is fueling willful evil now.
Is Islam a “more evil” religion than Christianity?
In 2015, the answer is unequivocally “yes.”
Comparing Islam to Nazism is begging so very, very many questions.
I think you can totally draw meaningful conclusions by comparing a political movement that existed in one country, for a hair over ten years, to a global religion that’s existed for over fourteen centuries. There’s absolutely nothing, so far as I can tell, that would invalidate such a comparison. It’s just totally apples to apples.
What’s far more important then the render unto Caesar bit is the fact that Christianity is rooted in OT Judaism, which has always separated the functions of Prophet, Priest, and King as three separate offices. In various times and places throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition, those roles have often been interrelated, to be sure, but rarely identical. At various times and places, some Christian groups have supported and advanced the interest of the government, and at other times and places other Christian groups have actively opposed or resisted or just attempted to remove themselves from the state. Christianity began as a minority sect within a minority religion in a much larger empire, and spent its early centuries as a persecuted minority, evading and occasionally defying the secular state. There was no such thing as a “Christian nation” until Constantine.
In contrast in Islam as it was originally envisioned and practiced in early centuries there is no such clear distinction between Prophet, Priest and King. Mohammad is called “The Prophet,” and he was, but he also fulfilled the functions of mediator with Allah as well as temporal ruler (and military general to boot). In later centuries, other Muslim groups did things differently, but for Muslims of the 7th and 8th centuries there was no distinction between church and state.
Obviously, there are nonetheless Christian theocrats, and Muslims who endorse the idea of a secular state. But one is farther removed from the original teachings of their religion than the other is.
Nobody could respectably claim that the horrors perpetrated in the 30s and 40s were due to “German culture” and not Nazism. That Nazism were an innocent bystander.
Yet, with Islam-majority nations where oppressive and inhumane practices abound, we blame “culture” and not the ideology.
Why do we blame ideology in one instance and “culture” in the other?
Is evil done in the name of Islam different than evil done in the name of Nazism?
Is it different solely because there are many good Muslims? Weren’t there good Nazis as well?