Where do you stand on the Bill Maher/Ben Affleck argument?

Great Debates
462

Yes, the OP indicated he was of that mind when he made the aforementioned statements. My argument was directly addressing his statements. At this point; I would let it go if I were you. He said it; I addressed it; End of story.

I’m not saying they’re equal. I’m saying their differences are negligible when one considers the facts:

-LRA existence
-ISIS existence
-Buddhist terrorists existence

-Uganda’s bill on homosexuality
-Crusades
-Inquisition
-Holy books all offering different interpretations
-The West’s current abundance of resources
-The West’s current level of education
-The West’s current state of politics
-Europe’s lack of resources during it’s dark ages
-Europe’s level of education during it’s dark ages
-The Middle-East’s current lack of resources
-The Middle-East’s current level of education
-The Middle-East’s current state of politics
-The Middle-East’s abundance of resources during it’s golden age
-The Middle-East’s level of education during it’s golden age
-The Middle-East’s state of politics during it’s golden age
The theory of geopolitics, resources, and education much better explains the disparity between the majority of violence done by religious groups, or credited to religion, over the particular religion practiced in light of the facts. If you think I’m cherry-picking facts then I encourage you to copy and past this list of facts with your own. The best theory is one that explains the most facts; Good luck.

That’s an appeal to consequences fallacy. In addition; Nothing I’ve said has minimized or excused violence. Provide one example where I’ve even implied this.

463

You can’t; I’m not implying secularism existed before it existed. I wanted to illustrate that Christianity has become less relevant, or moderated, and has not really evolved. I understood you as saying Christianity is more compatible with secularism because of it’s ability to evolve with secularism over Islam. Any religion, including Islam, can become diluted.

It wasn’t as close-minded as before the question was being proposed, and it was more close-minded than secularists today. It’s a gradient. Also, I don’t recall stating that Islamic states were stagnant after Islam’s Golden Age.

464

I’m not saying that Christianity has a greater ability to evolve with secularism than Islam does, I’m making a historical observation about secularism’s connections with Christianity as a way to partly explain why it hasn’t transferred well into Islamic contexts so far (Or to other contexts for that matter; secularism in China is kind of weird).

I can try to give an example of the kind of thing I mean: In some European countries like Germany, religious education has been handled with the state relating to registered churches who provide curricula that are official in some way for that denomination. But for Islam, the states have had a lot of trouble determining who to engage with to get a curricula. This is because the Islamic communities they have do not operate under a typical Church model. The state had an idea of what a religious community was but operating from that assumption stopped working well when they encountered a new religious community that didn’t follow those rules. They are, however, taking steps to address this, so what happened in the past will not necessarily determine the future.

I hope that explains it better. In general, and in response to your list in the previous post, I agree it is unproductive to look at instances of religious violence to try to find out which religion is inherently more violent. However, I think it is useful to look at instances of religious violence to find out how religion is playing a role for the people involved, as a way to better understand and respond to the situation. Large-scale trends flow out from that to a degree, but that’s more debatable by nature.

The remark about Islamic golden age was in response to what I thought you meant when you talked about golden ages in the West and Middle East and then how societies declined. Golden Age/Dark Age talk is kind of a pet peeve of mine, so I may have misinterpreted you in haste.

465

Do you think they don’t operate in a similar way because Muslims don’t make up as large of a population in Europe, and therefore, you won’t find as many mosques or community centers of different denominations to reference as you would churches?

It is useful to examine what role dogma played a part in contributing to violence. You can at least make useful probability statements from that data.

466

This breaks it down by country what percentile of countries is Muslim, believe in Sharia law, and honor killings of women justifiable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7TAAw3oQvg&feature=player_embeddedScary stuff.

467

Lost me at “Ben Affleck is mediocre”.

468

Really? Can you provide some real world examples for this claim?
I presume that you are separating dogma from scripture, but even so,it would be interesting to see actual examples where a study of dogma has actually predicted the level of violence followed by a religious group.

469

I’m under the impression that there are a lot of hadith about this sermon, and at least big parts of the feel-good version are supported by the hadith. Is the theory that these hadith were fabricated? Or are you just saying that the popular version contains some embellishments not found in the hadith?

In any event, it seems to me that the fact that the apocryphal version is popular should be taken as pretty good evidence of the notion that Muslims are not chained to history or dogma.

I guess that’s right, numerically, especially if you count Soviet Republics. But I still think it’s significant that the West also sabotaged secular reforms in a couple of countries. It makes it pretty ironic for westerners to complain about the lack of secularism in, say, Iran.

470

I am separating it as an adherence to an authority that you allow to override your perception and reason. I can only cite the Milgram experiment off hand. I don’t claim that it has ever predicted the level of violence by a religious group, but from a probability perspective; The chances of violence, and level of violence, should increase whenever similar elements are present. I am operating under the assumption that the authority given to religious books by it’s followers is typically not inherent in the book; It is religious leaders who give them their reverence, and interpret them for their followers. How else would a potential believer distinguish between a copy of the Quran and a copy of Lord of the Rings?

However, given the results of the experiment, if an authority figure insists on a non-violent interpretation, and that authority figure is dogmatically followed; Would chances of violence have an inverse correlation? I say Probably.

471

Well, this is a problem even in cities where Muslims make up a significant proportion of the population. The problem is that Muslims don’t have denominations as such; most European Muslims are not registered with any particular Islamic organization and there isn’t an equivalent to Catholic or Protestant clerical structures. If you want to know what to teach your Catholic students, you go to the local Catholic Bishop. If you want to know what to teach your Muslim students, well, who do you ask?

What majority-Muslim countries have typically done to address this is basically set up their own approved Islamic structures following a mix of European and pre-modern Islamic models and they let what becomes a quasi-government ministry set up a standard doctrine to teach. The problem with this is that in practice, what ends up getting taught is not a consensus, and in many countries like Syria (pre revolution) and Saudi Arabia the curricula is really, really intolerant. For example, Saudi Arabian religious education classes taught violent jihad as a great thing (I have read the textbooks myself as part of a research study) with the caveat that it shouldn’t be done against Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, because these structures are identified with the government, even if they are quite “moderate,” people who don’t trust the structure or who do not identify with the chosen doctrine look to alternate sources, too many of which preach violence. And in Europe you see similar dynamics at play.

To your second point, it’s not just about dogma. It’s about taking a holistic view of a conflict or a situation to see how it’s changing, where it’s been and where it can go. The violent movements that are affecting Islam (for example) today are not the result of an unchanging dogma, but are products of a chaotic engagement with the modern.

We certainly don’t want no mediocre.

If you go to the Wikipedia page on the sermon, you can find a few of the hadith related to it, but the best source on it is probably the quoted version from Ibn Isaq’s sira (later found in Tabari) here.

The stuff commonly quoted about equality between Arab and non-Arab, black and white, etc. (that funnily enough is also on the Wiki page) seems to be forged anachronisms, since I’ve never seen a credible primary source given for it (You’d think if that was in al-Jahiz he wouldn’t have also made some of his nasty racist statements) and the hadith support that you mention seem to often lead to hadith that are not actually related to the sermon. But I’m always happy to change my mind.

Arguably the forging of the Prophet’s words to make some kind of point in the present day goes back to almost the very beginning. It is a time-honored technique. It is good as you say because it allows for evolution, but it is unreliable in the modern day and doesn’t challenge the notion that the best in everything was reached in Muhammad’s time.

I do think you’ll find in the Cold War the US, in particular, undermining secularism in places like Pakistan (they tried to send Qur’ans into Central Asia in the 1980s too, thinking that if Muslims there could just read their Book, they would go all Mujahideen against the Soviets. That didn’t work.). But when Pakistan was founded, Jinnah’s commitment to secularism was based very much on the Western influences on him. In Iran, Khatami was looking to European models (just not the ones favored by the US and Britain) to do his thing.

I was thinking more about the ideals and the assumptions of “secularism as the civilized way” being imposed, rather than the specific structures that varied from place to place. I agree with you that an American or a Brit complaining about how Iran could have rejected secularism is pretty rich.

472

There’s a really great point here, and one where pundits like Reza Aslan mess up: people don’t come across texts and traditions outside of context, these things are always accompanied by interpretations (even if it’s as small as the unintended biases of the translator). Many people, in fact, seek out religion in order to be transformed; they are not looking for just confirmation for what they do anyway.

473

It’s interesting you bring up the example of people seeking out religion, because that’s the only potential flaw I saw with my assumption. Though a minority; These people were not instructed by an authority to believe, and have reverence for, scripture, but they want to. I’m not going to speculate as to people’s various reasons for this, but in most cases it still involves seeking an authority’s interpretation over their own, i.e: Scientology. It some cases, though, a person will have no other authority aside from the author of the text and their own interpretation; With their perception and reason unclouded by any obvious authority. In these cases; A literal and total acceptance would only be prevented by whatever their perception and reason holds to be true that contradicts scripture. These individuals are probably the least zealous of believers, but I have no evidence for this.

474

OK.

In your hypothesized scenario, we might want to distinguish among scripture, dogma, and something else, (current leadership?). Certainly, a person who strictly followed the pronouncements of Benedict XVI is liable to behave a bit differently than one who followed the pronouncement of Francis I. I get a bit more wary of the sort of discussion that occurred upstream, with what I consider the rather facile attempts to claim that one belief system or another must clearly be led toward or away from violence based on fairly shallow examinations of original beliefs or scriptures.

When examined in more depth, I think that one can draw a conclusion regarding smaller groups that have more specifically developed theologies. I would guess that there would be far less violence emanating from Sufis than from Wahabbists, just as there would be less violence emanating from Quakers than from the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster.
On the other hand, I doubt that one could legitimately extrapolate similar conclusions from much larger groups that combined membership from smaller, often competing, groups under the same “umbrella” of belief.

That is why I asked if you had examples. We can posit all sorts of outcomes in strictly hypothetical situations. It would be interesting to see actual concrete examples.

475

I liked the way I phrased it as “authority”. Authority acts on scripture which causes dogma (fundamentalist interpretation in followers). In this reasoning; They are three separate concepts which are interrelated. If this dogma consists of violence; I predict it’s followers will be more violent. Your second concern is one that I have argued against.

If two groups are small enough to be able ascertain their particular beliefs, and the strength of those beliefs, then I believe you can make useful predictions between the two. Denominations split off due to differences in type and severity of beliefs. The one’s that are notable for branching more for severity of belief are considered fundamentalist. If these small denominations are all you’re going on, then you’ll tend to find the correlations you’d expect. Other causes better explain violence among practitioners of major religious groups.

I don’t have any examples where a violent outcome was predicted beforehand.

476

Obviously a follower of Pope Benedict will pigheadedly hold onto the unscientific idea that evolution is really directed by God, while a follower of Pope Francis will come to a sophisticated and modern understanding that evolution is real and directed by God. :wink:

Even though I have to nitpick and point out that Sufis are not comparable to Wahhabis (In Christianity, it would be something like comparing Charismatics of all denominations to Quakers), I think a factor for why it can be easier to make judgments for smaller groups is that they are usually in a more united context (either a geographical or philosophical one), and so as a group they are responding to the same stimuli and have a stronger sense of unity.

Most Wahhabis in the Gulf don’t go out and kill people anymore. They don’t need to.

I had a professor once who called the illusion of objectivity “the God trick”: the idea that one could see everything from the vantage point of nowhere.

The history of the Catholic Church in Korea and the 19th century martyrdoms of Catholics there is a counterexample to your suggestion that individuals not converted by an authority are less zealous.

If you are curious about how people decide an experience they have is “religious” and how they determine that e.g. the Qur’an is different from Lord of the Rings, I’ve recommended Ann Taves’ books on this board before. There’s actually a lot of research on all of this. One of the big advancements in the field of religious studies, I would say, is the complication of our definitions of many of the terms people use as if they had an objective and defined meaning that spanned across traditions, like “authority” or “dogma” or “scripture” or “fundamentalist” or even “religion” and “secular.” This doesn’t mean that these words have no meaning, but we can’t just transplant (usually specifically modern Protestant) Christian-based ideas of these words onto Islam or Buddhism or Mayan beliefs without recognizing that they don’t really map; they are shorthand at best. There are better ways to think about these things.

477

That doesn’t shock me. I don’t know much about the history of race, but I would have thought “black” and “white” weren’t even racial categories in the seventh century.

But I don’t actually think those are the only or even most important aspects of the sermon in terms of countering the view of Muhammad as hard-hearted conqueror. Even according to the account you identify as most reliable, he’s talking about the most central and important ideas in Islam but he has nothing to say about jihad or unbelievers or really about spreading Islam at all. Instead, he’s talking about women’s rights (albeit a distinctly seventh century kind of feminism), not avenging past bloodshed, abolishing usury, etc.

478

(Too late for edit: blackness as a racial category was obviously a concept at that time. Meant to say it is unclear to me whether whiteness was.)

479

I’m speculating at this point, but it can still be useful. Without it you wouldn’t have provided your counter-example. I haven’t provided any facts since the Islam/Christianity sub-debate to be honest (unless you count the Miller experiment, which I’ll admit was a bit of a stretch for the topic, but still relevant imo).

How do you know these people weren’t converted by an authority?

I’ll look into the book.

480

It’s vaguely amusing to know that some neo-pagan groups have taken to including Elbereth in their rituals and pantheons. (Tolkien would probably not have approved…)

481

Here’s an interesting video I found of Neil deGrasse Tyson on dogma. I don’t agree with his premise about the scientific elite not believing in god; Therefore, you’re wasting time convincing anyone else about it. Science and philosophy are two different fields of study. However, he distinguishes between religious belief and dogma from authority very well.