No, I said it was absurd to say religion causes things. Strictly speaking it doesn’t. Human action causes things, and religion is one of many possible motivators for human action.
It’s absurd because
Sure. There were quite a lot of heresies which, while getting smack talk from the Pope and having handfuls of leaders burnt to a crisp here and there, never received such attention. The Beguines, the Paulicians (gnostic dualists, too), the Flagellants, Patarenes, Bogomils (more gnostics), Pastoureaux, Fraticellis… none of those caught such a vast and bloody crusade up their collective bums.
But unlike the Cathars, those heresies mostly recruited among the poor and downtrodden (well, OK, not so true for the Flagellants - but those were nominally Catholics when they weren’t whipping themselves into a frenzy). Catharism was special in that fat burghers and even nobles were getting into it. They controlled major cities, they had fortresses, they owned land. They were something else, and they got something else.
If religion was not the cause of a war why was Joshua supposed to have been told by his god to kill all the people of Jericho, and then when they blew the trumpets god was supposed to have made the walls fall. If that isn’t a religious reason what is?
If religion wasn’t the cause it was sure the tool!
Would the peasants war be considered a religious war? If not what was the reason?
I didn’t know what you were talking about, but my first reaction was “Bwuh ? The answer’s in the question - they were peasants. Peasants revolt, it’s what they do”.
From Wiki :
Two out of three ain’t that bad, but one out of twelve is lousy 
Moving on :
Why so serious?
I disagree with 1 - a category is a thing, since it describes a collective of things. A ton of bricks is a thing, despite the fact it is a collective describing a specific category of things (as in, “these bricks here”).
I suppose you could make an interesting philosophical discussion on this subject, but trying to use it to obfuscate a non-philosophical discussion is a transparent dodge. To those of us using english, religion is a thing, catholocism is a thing, and even atheism is a thing, for the purposes of a discussion like this.
2 is also a transparent dodge. The fact that humans have multiple motivations for, well, everything, does not mean that nothing causes human actions. Hunger causes me to eat yogurt, and a personal preference for yogurt also causes me to eat yogurt. By your argument here neither hunger nor my preference are causes of my yogurt consumption, specifically because they both are. And I dunno about you, but that seems pretty silly to me.
My point was that at that time the concept of religion didn’t really exist. Every tribe had its particular Gods that they ascribed the actions of their tribe to. You cannot separate their religious belief from their meta-ethnic genetic kinship identity grouping.
Religion wasn’t a concept at that time. Is my point. Separating it from tribalism is impossible. The idea of religion as separate from culture is a modern conceit.
Ok fine, a category is a thing. But the problem with this viewpoint is that ‘religion’ as a whole doesn’t have much in the way of cohesion as many mutually exclusive ideas of belief fall under the rubric of ‘religion’.
I mean it doesn’t have independent existence, cannot act in and of itself, and ‘religion’ doesn’t inspire anyone to do anything. Catholicism can inspire people to do things, Islam can inspire people to do things, Judaism or Hinduism the same, but they aren’t inspired by ‘religion’, they are inspired by a particular religion. One could argue that the existence of multiple religions is really what causes the problems. If there was one unified religion that everyone agreed upon, maybe we’d be harmonious.
Nope. I am saying that religion is akin to ‘bodily functions’. Whereas ‘hunger’ is akin to Christianity, for the purpose of this analogy. One cannot extrapolate anything by saying that bodily functions caused a particular effect. One needs to know which bodily function to understand its impact. Religion is a super-category in the way ‘bodily functions’ is a super-category that includes hunger.
Many mutually-exclusive attributed fall under the label of “car” too - some are big, some are small, some are red, some definitely aren’t. But there are still enough similarities to speak of the category meaningfully.
Also worth noting, the existence of a small number of exceptions doesn’t make generalizing completely invalid. There are certainly cars that are incapable of taking people anywhere, but that doesn’t mean that it’s invalid to speak of cars (in general) as a mode of transportation.
Er, Catholocism doesn’t have independent existence of the ability to act in and of itself either, so those apparently can’t be the problem.
And you seem to be mistaken about the way categorization works. If Catholocism is a religion, and Catholoscism can cause things, then religion can cause things. Perhaps not all things that match the category “religion” can cause things - but certainly some of them can.
Now, you might be able to argue that the percentage of things called religions that can cause things is so small that it’s fallacious to extrapolate from the specific to the general. But personally I don’t think you’ll be able to argue that successfully. Most religions seem to have effects, in my experience - otherwise we wouldn’t notice they were there. Inspiring people to do things is also something that they seem to be good at, generally speaking.
Except when bodily functions have things in common, like say the tendency to define an “us” and a “them”, for example. (I know my respiration defines "us"es and "them"s all the time.)
Suffice to say, I find no reason here to claim that religion is incapable of being the direct cause of actions.
I have to disagree, at least in this context. I’d say rather that seperating can be difficult.
In a sense it becomes kind of a perspective argument - whether one takes a reductionist or holistic approach to culture. I think going towards either extreme is a mistake and I think you might be wandering just a bit too much in the holistic direction.
We can take FGM in Horn of Africa as an example. One can make the argument that is a facet of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the region. Ask Muslims, Christians and Jews in the area ( or rather the Jews that used to be in the area ) and many will say/have said that their religion mandates Pharaonic FGM. But if we look at the history of the region, we can see that said practice pre-dates all the Abrahamic religions in the area and doesn’t seem to be directly mandated by any of the holy scriptures in question. So you then end up with two interpretations:
1.) FGM is a cultural accretion, given post-hoc religious justification. It isn’t really a genuine religious practice, but rather a regional practice given a veneer of religiosity.
2.) Pre-Abrahamic and non-scripturally based or not, it is still a religious practice because the practitioners of that tradition regard it as such.
Frankly I think both answers are correct in a sense. I spend more time on the first, because when the qestion of FGM comes up it is easy to refute misconceptions ( usually related to Islam ) that it is a universal feature of the religion by pointing out just how regional, non-scriptural and pan-religious it is in practice. But the argument that local folk religion is still religion is also perfectly valid.
To go back to wars, Northern Ireland to me represents more a “tribal” than a “religious” struggle because the conflict is not fundamentally driven by piety or arguments over religious interpretation. It is driven mostly by a struggle for regional power between two groups who define their tribal affiliation by the religious faiths of, in many cases, their forefathers rather than themselves ( only 45% of NI’s population attends church even once a month ).
Now you can claim that the ostensible Catholicism of the IRA or at least its traditional identification of its supporters with Catholicism , is so inextricably intertwined with their culture that arguing whether they’re truly religious or directly inspired by their faith or not is silly. That it’s just a part of one inextricable whole. Up to a point it’s a fair argument. But ultimately from my standpoint I think focusing so much on the indivisability of culture is a bit obfuscatory, in this case unnecessarily muddying the understanding of this conflict.
Perhaps you should have avoided the word “ever” in your OP.
Isn’t the current “war” on terror a religious war? I don’t see that the extremists have gained much by the war. They are fighting for god not profit.
It depends on the context. The Jews of that time were a tribe, that had particular religious beliefs. They fought and warred with other tribes that had other beliefs. Part of what they would do when they came through was to kill the enemy Gods to show that their God was greater. This was sort of the old school version of capture the flag, it was called behead the idol. Christianity’s innovation on Judaism essentially was taking its ideas and mass-marketing them. Essentially decoupling the relationship with the God of Abraham from a particular genetic strain of humans. It was precisely this universalism that set it apart from the pack at the time. Sure, syncretism happened all the time, but Christianity, separately and distinctly believed itself to be a universal religion for all mankind.
I am unsure of what your acronym means. I’ll respond when you clarify.
Sure. That why I said it can be difficult.
FGM? Female Genital Mutilation, i.e. female circumcision. The pharaonic form practiced in the Horn of Africa is probably the most extreme version. Sorry for not being more clear - I should have wrote it out the first time.
Bullshit. You’re basically taking away everyone’s responsibility and blaming religion – an abstract concept. “I’m not REALLY a brutal sociopath – it was my religion that made me so!”
It’s not about “favoring religion.” It’s about having people stepping up and taking responsibility for one’s own actions. Sometimes people simply use their religious beliefs as an excuse to be an asshole, do they not?
And before you point out, “Well, what about people who say that ‘that religion made these people good!!!’” That’s bullshit too. It inspired them, yes. The same way it inspired people to do evil. In the end, though, is it just religion, or is humanity?
What came first – humans, or religions? Religion itself, as I see it, is an abstract, that can be an inspiration for good, or for evil. But it’s not an excuse, or a total cause.
Perhaps I have failed to recognize this argument before, but the truth of it as expressed has suddeny met with my complete concurrence.
Well done !
Well, that probably didn’t actually happen, so it’s not the best example, any more than the Iliad is an argument that beauty contests cause wars.