JTC, I have said I will try to provide an honest estimate. Give me a break. I mean what I say.
I will in fact try to provide numbers by cause and era.
I will start with the recent. There are about 4 million school aged girls in Afghanistan. All of them denied an education due to religion beliefs. I would count that as 4 million people directly wronged under the banner of religion. That is a pretty reliable number.
About a half million women denied employment by same. This number is a bit fuzzier. There are about 4 million working aged women in that country. How many would have worked if not prevented?
3000 Americans actually killed by 9/11. But how big is the number actually terrorized or directly harmed? All those children without father or mothers, and partners without their spouses seem fair to include. Businesses lost, people out of work, and other harms that the people who suffered them would attribute directly to the attack seem reasonable to include to me. Is 100,000 to large for you? A million? I’ll say 250,000, but I’m open to suggestion.
Still have at least 3000 years of history to go through, but this is a place to start.
Just because I disagree with you does not make me not an dishonest broker. If I fail to approach a number in the 100 million range, I will concede the point.
scotth I think you’re being a little unfair in your characterization of religion and science, at least in regards to the original question.
First, please forgive me if I have gotten your position wrong. Your answer is that you would prefer a world without religion over a world without science. Your justification is that science has been the source of much that is good, and religion has been the source of much that is bad.
When it is pointed out that science has also been the source of much bad, you seem say: no it’s people who do bad things with science. When it is pointed out that religion has been the source of good, you seem to say: people could still do good in a world without religion.
I don’t think anything compels you to change your answer to the original question about science and religion, but I do think you need to be a bit more fair. If you credit science with a “feather in its cap” for every good thing done using science, or made possible by science, then you also have to give it a “black eye” for the bad stuff made possible by science.
And if you blame religion for all the bad things done in its name, then it also gets credit for the good. It is admirably optimistic to think that without religion we would eliminate all the bad things you lay at religion’s feet, yet somehow evolve an “ethical framework” allowing us to still keep the good. Or, flip it around: if you think humans are inherently capable of making good ethical decisions without religion, then they are also inerently capable of making bad ethical decisions without religion, no?
Finally, I know you’re still adding up the numbers, but I’m not sure that I agree that “Clearly, religion has caused more grief and suffering than any other single cause in recorded history. Nothing to debate here.”
And, even if that were true at this instant (again, which I don’t believe), doesn’t the last century convince you that the balance is rapidly tilting the other way? At some time, “secular” grief and suffering (perhaps due merely to an increasingly secular world) will outweigh all the past religious suffering? At that point would you consider trading science back for religion?
The mistake you make is you credit any violence or suffering caused by anyone who espouses a religion to the category of “religion” (yet, conveniently, Stalin and Pol Pot were just “assholes”). Do you really believe that in a world without religion, nobody would ever find a reason to crash planes into buildings? Do you see the conflicts in Israel and Ireland as a “religious” conflict, or as a social-political-ethnic-religious conflict? Maybe it’s just that you’re an optimist and I’m not, but I know of enough shitty people that don’t need very good reasons to do shitty things; and I think that without religion, the 4 million school aged girls in Afghanistan would still have been denied an education under some pretext, half million women still denied employment, 3000 Americans still killed on 9/11, and cetera.
I meant to add, but forgot, that I agree with scotth. If given a choice between a world without science and a world without religion, I’d choose the world without religion.
And Mangetout, there’s no question that I would rather live in a world without balloons than cheese. Absolutely no question.
I think we need to be a bit careful here. I wouldn’t rush to characterise the 9/11 murders as religiously motivated. I can’t (happily) speak for the perpetrators, but it is entirely possible that they would say that their motivation was resistance to the policies of the US government, which they saw as being hostile to their community – the Arab world. The Arab world is largely, though not entirely, an Islamic world, and the perpetrators would (presumably) have seen their actions as justifiable within the terms of their religious beliefs (although, if I recall correctly, the available evidence doesn’t suggest that they were particularly devout or observant Muslims) but I don’t think that’s enough to characterise their actions as motivated by religion. After all, if a particular scientist happens to be religious, and sees his scientific enquiry as compatible with his religious belief, does that make his scientific enquiry a religiously-motivated act?
You mention Afghan women denied educational and employment opportunities on religious grounds. As agains this I think you need to set the very much larger numbers of women who, historically, were denied similar opportunities in western countries, not on religious grounds but on the grounds that a woman’s nature best fits her for homemaking and childrearing, and it is right and natural that this is what women should do. This seems to be me to be a scientific ground (a bad scientific ground, to be sure, but a scientific ground) rather than a religious ground.
In an earlier post you mentioned slavery. I think we would all agree that the basic motivation for slavery is human greed. Those who practice slavery may justify it with bogus religious reasons (“these people are not Christian (or whatever), and therefore are not deserving of freedom”) or with bogus scientific reasons (“these people are genetically, or morally, or emotionally, inferior to us, and do not need and cannot handle freedom, and it is best that we should control their lives”) or both. But in neither case is the act of enslaving somebody either a religious or a scientific act. It is just greed and opression.
This line of thinking leads me to suggest that it is probably fair to say that more evil has been perpetrated in the name of religion than in the name of science, because religion does seek to tell us how to behave, whereas science does not; so people are more likely to invoke religion to justify their actions than they are to invoke science. But by precisely the same reasoning, more good has been perpetrated in the name of religion than in the name of science. So this is not a useful way of trying to decide whether science or religion is more beneficial to humanity. By the same token you can say that science has enabled us to do enormous good (medical advances) and enormous harm (nuclear weapons), but this observation is useless in trying to answser the question as to whether it is more beneficial than religion. The bottom line is that science and religion have different objectives and serve different ends. The best we can say is that religion seeks to do good but is often perverted to doing evil, while science is indifferent as between good and evil and has often been applied to both good and evil purposes.
The horrors of the holocaust are a good example of the complexities we get into here. We may say that it was a religious act because (a) the primary group against which it was directed was a group defined by religion, the Jews, and (b) it was motivated by a (quasi-) religious belief in the manifest destiny of the Aryan people, or some such nonsense. As against this, the architects of the holocaust would indignantly deny that it was a religious act; they would say it was an attempt to eliminate races and groups which they considered on scientific grounds to be inferior and.or dangerous. (Their scientific grounds were entirely bogus, of course, but for the most part they accepted them.) And it is certainly true that the effects of the holocaust were magnified by the scientific and technical ability which the perpetrators brought to bear upon the task in hand. So is the holocaust the perversion of religion or the perversion of science? Or both? Or neither? Or has the question any real meaning?
PS on the really important question, I’d take cheese before balloons any day.
Ok, that is a fair criticism. I’ll rephrase.
Looking at the reductions in infant mortality and the general increase in life span, especially with the general increase in good health brought about by medicine, it will take ALOT more black eyes than have been handed out to make the contest even close.
True, but doesn’t quite hit my point. People as individual can run the full gamet from angelic to Hitleresque. As an organizing principal, religion is central in systematically relieving people of their civil/human rights. Looking at the Christian religion, persecution of many groups is specifically endorsed. Many people of the faith do not adhere to these. Bravo to them, they are developing good ethics in spite of their religion. They distance themselves from the “fundies” who don’t. I truly appreciate the difference and think better of them for it. But, truth be known, the fundementalist are in fact practicing the religion the way it was intended to be practiced. No where in the Bible does it suggest that passages should be ignored in the future as they are discovered to be socially abhorent. I am glad it is happening anyway.
Completely incorrect, or I would not attibute the holecaust to religion. Hitler was just a shit head. I am only attributing where religion was a key motivator, not incidental. I still hold this position even though religious motivation was specifically mentioned in his propaganda.
Less people would, hopefully. If two things cause a problem, should one not be fixed unless they both are?
Some of both. I wasn’t planning on using this strife in my figures, too hard (for me at least) to sort out.
Maybe so, then it would be time to go after that reason. That doesn’t remove the guilt for this act from the Taliban and AQ.
** I would disagree with this. But, am willing to negotate on those numbers.
**
**Depends on the specific instance. Him having a religious faith could be incidental, is he persuing science in the service or name of religion?
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**I think if you check, these traditional roles were in fact religioiusly based. At one time women’s right to vote was specifically denied by the Supreme Court and couched in traditional biblical gender roles.
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**I was vague on the slavery part. I should not have been. I do not lay American slavery at the feet of religion. Though, there were many attempts to justify in religous terms as well.
**
**
I will quote myself from above for this:
"*I am not comparing science to religion.
I am making two comparisions. Religion to no religion and science to no science.
Science is science… and I for one am glad we have it.
Religion is not science. It is an ethical framework. It is not the only type of ethical framework. Where things get muddy is that I only compare science with the lack of it, but compare religion to a replacement ethical system.
I don’t know what to replace science with except a lack of science. Religion does have a substitute. Twisting the question this way, If I had to chose between a world with no science or no ethical framework entirely… that would be tough. No ethical framework would be a horrible thing, but taking religion away would not cause that effect. Removing religion would not create the void that science would. There are alternatives.*"
**
**This is covered in a previous post, twice I think.
**
I agree with you here, that was the motivition for my answer to the OP.
So are governments. Do you also advocate the abolition of government? Perhaps only specific (totalitarian, authoritarian) forms of government? Would it be appropriate to refine your criticism of religion to “forms of religion”.
Looking at the Christian religion, persecution of any group is specifically prohibited. I wonder if we’re both looking at the same Christian religion?
I’m curious how you can know it is “in spite of” and not “because of”?
Nowhere in the bible does it say that all spiritual truth is contained in the bible. Nowhere in the bible does it say that everything contained in the bible is spiritual truth. I would say that the way that Christianity was intended to be practiced is not “biblical literalism”, but “as Christ intended”. Certainly that’s a more difficult row to hoe than biblical literalism. It’s probably somewhere in between your two characterizations (I think it lies closer to “rejecting the abhorrent”).
**
Yes, certainly. What I am asking is: “does eliminating religion fix anything?”
The arounder we go, the confuseder I get. Let me try this: earlier you claimed that religion was merely a human construct, when you said: “Utter nonsense. Religion is created by man. The ethics created in the religion are created by man. Many of the best treatises on morals and ethics are written by non-religious, non-believing men.”. If I grant you that, my question becomes: how does eliminating a particular human construct attack the problem of “bad” human constructs?
It seems your answer is: “there would be one less bad human construct”. My answer is: “humans would merely find another convenient construct, either an existing one or a new one”. You can’t win in my world, because you would have to eliminate every human construct and forbid the creation of any new ones.
I think that any attack on “religion” misses the mark. There are all kinds of bad things about and in religion. But eliminating religion is not a way to eliminate bad things. Eventually, you’ve got to stop going after the places where the bad people hang out, and go after the bad people themselves.
So, I’m not generally in favor of eliminating religion or science. If forced to choose, I would reluctantly go with (eliminating) religion.
If you acknowledge those conflicts as too complicated to sort out what’s religiously-based and what’s politically-based, why are you certain that so many other conflicts are simpler?
Oops, I was planning on skipping Ireland only… Not Isreal.
Maybe I shouldn’t skip it.
Ireland definitely has a religious theme to the strife, but the other many factors are quite important as well, maybe as important as the religious element by my understanding. But that is where it sits at the moment.
Isreal’s situation is primarily a religious issue. There are other factors, but they are not key to the struggle.
Perhaps it would. But I don’t know any form that encourages questioning of its central beliefs and is interested in changing them over time.
I am looking at the Christian religion that is used to justify suppression of others, every day. This is probably done by people that you consider nut cases. (I happen to agree, but that is not the point)
When I show moderate people the exact lines in the Bible that are claimed as justification for abhorent behaviour and ask why they don’t behave as directed by them, the best answer I’ve heard is they just “don’t believe that part.” I admit there are fantastic moral lessons to be learned as well. How does one pick the good ones lessons? It is all the Bible. Some of the “taken out of context” reasons are valid, but sometimes things are quite specific and can’t be swept under the rug that way. Not believing/practicing the bad part is “in spite of”.
I live in the heart of the Bible belt. That is not the predominant view around here. I like your view much better.
Very good question. I hoped my answers above made this clear. There is a very distinct difference to me. Once an ethical framework achieves the status of religion, it (in my opinion) moves it out of reach of question or revision. It has the seal of approval of a diety. But, the point I was making with the statement you quoted was this. Many people claim that without a God, how would we know what is right or wrong. I think this is silly. I think man created religion, but as an ethical framework it is stuck in the period of its creation. In direct response to your question, I think ethical frameworks are a wonderful and desirable thing. They should always be a work in progress. Once something becomes a religion it is no longer a work in progress. That is its flaw to me.
I hope we get smart enough try to frame a good and just ethical system in which to live and never give it the mark of a “holy writ”.
I don’t agree, but that is ok. So far your arguements are reasonable, and leave me no reason not to hold you in high regard.
I don’t dissagree that good things have come of religion. I just believe a better idea exists. I only point out the harm caused by religion to point out the possible need for change. It is even likely that religion has done more good than harm. I don’t believe that is a reason to not consider a possibly better approach.
That’s a very astute observation, Nm. Here in this very forum, people have been quick to blame religion for all manner of suffering. When it comes to Stalin, Khruschev and company though, they are quick to say, “Well, atheism can’t be blamed for that. Atheism was just a convenient tool which they used.” It’s a subtle and insidious double-standard.
Sure there was. If you say that religious authorities have no interest in promoting education, except for their own purposes, then that is an obvious accusation.
That wasn’t what you said earlier though. You said that historically, most religions have not encouraged learning. (The question of “vested interest” is another issue altogether.)
Not at all Your post asserted that, but offered no substantive evidence. Since you’re the one who’s making the claim, the burden of proof is yours.
I see that you’re lowering the goalposts. Your earlier remarks simply said that religions have not encouraged learning – with no reference to any time period. As we have already seen, Christianity has a very solid track record of encouraging education.
Well, duh. Secular universities are themselves a relatively recent institution. And even if they weren’t, that still doens’t show that religions did NOT encourage education in centuries past.
I live in the heart of the Bible belt . . . Once an ethical framework achieves the status of religion, it (in my opinion) moves it out of reach of question or revision . . . Once something becomes a religion it is no longer a work in progress. That is its flaw to me.
Ah. I think I’m beginning to see the source of our misunderstanding here.
I don’t live in the Bible belt, and my understanding of what it’s like comes from the opinions of other, and portrayals in literature, etc, so it may be flawed. But here’s a hypothesis.
The particular manifestation of religion to which scotth has been most exposed in the Bible belt seems to him to be narrow, dogmatic, fixed and unwilling to contemplate or address alternative concepts or visions, etc, etc. He is generalising from this, and assuming that this approach is characteristic of all religion, or at any rate of mainstream religion.
If so, I think he’s wrong. I have yet to meet a mainstream Christion who thinks that Christian knowledge, philosophy or theology is beyond the reach of thought or revision. On the contrary, a constant reappraisal of religious knowledge and belief is called for, and a constant engagement with the signs of the times, and with the modern world. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of knowledge about fundamental truths. This is the case in the mainstream of religions which are based on some kind of sacred scripture – Judaism, Christianity, and I strongly suspect Islam – and I imagine that it is much more the case for religions which are not scripturally based at all. If nothing else, scotth will accept that it is inaccurate to accuse “religion” of necessarily giving an ethical framework “the mark of holy writ” when many relgions have no concept at all of holy writ.
This might also explain scotth’s perception that religious support of education has been largely motivated by a desire to exert control over people’s minds. There may be some truth in this accusation if levelled against more fundamentalist tendencies but, so far as Christianity is concerned, mainstream thinking is clear. The natural world is the created work of God. As such it is good, important and deserving of respect and attention. It is right to study it and try to understand it. Similarly with the human mind and with all aspects of human culture, a manifestation of the human mind. These things are deserving of study for their own sake. I suspect we will find that mainstream Islamic thinking is similar. How else are we to explain the astonishing advances in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry and medicine produced during the golden age of the Islamic world? If religious thinking was fundamentally opposed to independent enquiry, it is doubtful if such a strongly religious society could have led the world in these areas.
Erm <checks post>I didn’t notice JThunder or Newton meter mention Hitler, they named Stalin, Khruschev and Pol Pot, but not Hitler; could you therefore clarify whether your statement above was made in agreement with JT and Nm or otherwise?
Fundementalism is very mainstream from Ohio down through TN, and KY… MO, OK, AR, and TX.
However, I suggest you go read my first post in the thread. What got me into this thread was my correction of the assertion that the church was against learning. I pointed out the support of church for many advances in mathematics, physics, and astronomy.
I would not even accuse the church of being against learning today. However, when it comes to certain subjects where what has been learned by science runs counter to church teachings there is a large movement afoot to suppress that information. But, none of this is the point.
The point is this. Except in a few areas of America and it sounds like most of England, holding a difference religion than the majority where you live in the world practices is a good way to get treated poorly. People in this country see how well different religions live side by side. I have news for you. That is something special about our culture. That is not the norm around the world and certainly not historically. In many countries, just being of a different flavor of Islam than the majority is enough to put a target on your back.
But we digress. I made my statement to make a different point entirely.
If they point out that it is convenient by me to classify those guys as assholes for the main motivation for what they did. I point out that I did the same thing for Hitler as well. I did not try to saddle the religious camp with the crimes of Hitler just because he happened to be religious. “Hitler was a Nazi shithead as many important historians have pointed out.” (10 points for recognizing that exact quote) His religious beliefs were incidental. That is, they were not his motivation.
You’re making my point for me. Ohio to Texas is a broad swathe of North America, but it’s not really “the world”, and the OP asked about a world without religion. The experience of Ohio to Texas – indeed, the experience of the entire United States – is not normative for the rest of the world.
Again, I think you’re generalising from US experience. The “creationism -v- evolutionism” debate springs to mind, but it’s really not a big issue in the rest of the world.
Hi scotth
Ohio to Texas is a broad swathe of North America, but it’s not really “the world”, and the OP asked about a world without religion. The experience of Ohio to Texas – indeed, the experience of the entire United States – is not normative for the rest of the world.
I think this view needs to be qualified in two respects. First, while religious tensions and religious conflict undoubtedly exist, we hear about tension and conflict but we hear rather less about the absence of tension and conflict. I suggest that what you think is true primarily of “America and most of England” is equally true of most of Europe, most of Africa, most of Asia and probably the whole of Australia.
Secondly, a lot ot tension and conflict is characterised as religious when it is nothing of the kind. It is ethnic or national conflict, characterised as religious because the two communities concerned have different religions and identify themselves by their religion (among other characteristics). For instance, you characterised the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as “sort of both” religious and social-political-ethnic-religious. To my mind it has virtually no religious element; it is almost entirely ethnic. We have a long-standing resident population of mixed religion (Islamic and Christian) and a more recently arrived population who were resident a long time ago, which (from a religious point of view) is made up partly of practicing Jews and partly of non-observant, secular Jews (I believe, though I am open to correction, that the latter group is in the majority). The conflict is between the Arab population and the (ethnic) Jewish population. There seems to be no conflict between Muslim Arabs and Christian Arabs, or between Jews and non-Arab Christians. The antipathy which the Arabs feel for the Jews does not depend on whether they are religious Jews or secular humanists. The antipathy which Jews feel for Arabs does not seem to be affected by whether the Arabs concerned are Christians or Muslims. The conclusion is obvious. The conflict is between Arabs and ethnic Jews; religious beliefs have little or nothing to do with it.
When we go to Nigeria, we find that Christians and Muslims, who get along fine when they are both Arabs, are at one another’s throats. Why? Well, the fact that the Muslims are predominantly Berber while the Christians come from other ethnic groups, and they have quite different languages and cultures may have something to do with it.
And when we go to Rwanda, we find the most horrifying example of inter-community violence leading ultimately to genocide. The communities involved are different both ethnically and linguistically. But they are both Christian; indeed, both Roman Catholic.
The lesson seems clear. Usually (though not always) inter-community violence has more to do with ethnicity, language and general culture and identity than with religious belief as such. Religion may be relevant in that (a) it can sometimes supply a handy label for the two sides, and (b) it can be criticised for failing to prevent the conflict, or address it in ways not involving violence. There are times, I freely concede, where it exacerbates the conflict, or is even the primary factor in the conflict, but these are not typical. And it must be open to doubt (to put it no higher) if the complete elimination of all religious belief would make any material difference to the amount of inter-community conflict in the world, if the fundamental causes of a human tendency to identify with a linguistic or cultural group, and of competition between groups for land, influence or other matters, remain.