Why does religion drive people to kill?

Great Debates
41

Take the Crusades for example. I don’t think you can understand them without religion - certainly the Saracen conquest of non-holy lands meant nothing to Europe, and certainly the Holy Lands had little that Europe wanted or needed, except for holy sites. Without religion there would be a lot fewer eager participants. And no children.

Clearly not all religion leads to violence, but some sure enable violence. Think of it as a corollary of Pascal’s wager. If the reward for believing in and following the right god is infinite, killing for that god is no big deal. Whether a person decides on his own to kill, or is willing to kill because his leaders tell him God wants it is no big deal. Especially when a lot of slaughter is justified in the Bible by God’s will.

42

But religion prolongs these divisions. How long would have the divisions in Northern Ireland have lasted if Protestant married Catholics as a rule? 40 years ago it was scandalous for my friend’s Protestant Canadian aunt to marry a French Canadian. Think how much worse the divisions in Quebec would be if that were not just scandalous but a crime worthy of ostracism?
Think about how the increasingly secular Christians of Europe are getting along better than they have for millennia? There are still plenty of cultural differences, just nothing to fight over. Do you think the situation in the Middle East would be better or worse if the parties all magically turned atheist? There will be differences across religions, but the Sunni/Shia economic and power split in Iraq was enforced by religion.
Religion is obviously not the only cause for fighting (Civil War and Revolution for two examples) but it has caused lots of wars and fighting.

43

One may argue that the greatest violence that has ever been done in Europe was done in the last 100 years, for definitely non-religious reasons of land and power (even the demonization of the Jews was not based on their religious beliefs, but by a sense that they were ethnically “other”).

44

I agree. There are gob-tons of reasons people have had wars, and religion is only one. Abstract religion isn’t even one. The Thirty Years War wasn’t over Protestantism vs. Catholicism, but over which group would have the power to govern, to rule, to build churches, to tax, to tithe, and to appoint Electors to the Holy Roman Empire.

They were fighting over land, no less than Napoleon and Wellington.

This is why I think Czarcasm was wrong in charging that this is a “deflection.” I think it is a proper framing of the dimensions of the matter.

45

friedo gave the right answer in the first reply. Religion doesn’t drive people to kill - fear or hatred drive people to kill. Religion is a convenient excuse for some. For others it’s skin color, tribalism or political system.

46

One of my professors used to talk about the “two great impulses” caused by religion - on the one hand, to label some people as worthy of damnation; on the other hand, to expand the moral imagination to conceive of some people as adversaries but not enemies.

Of course, this statement assumes some things about what “religion” is. Who actually sets out to rigorously define religion in these discussions? Taking an “I know religion when I see it” approach to the OP’s question is to employ the ‘God trick’ - seeing everything from the vantage point of nowhere.

I’ve advocated here before for a broad definition of religion as the act of meaning-making, or of assigning value. Pretty much everyone chooses to value some things over other things, for different reasons. And even though those value decisions are all ultimately arbitrary, you can use history and science to understand when and why some decisions become popular, or become enforced by societies, or get tossed aside.

So let’s look at, for example, the Crusades. If we take for the moment Christianity as an umbrella term covering several interrelated systems for assigning value to some things over other things, then there’s a huge amount to explore in terms of how Christianity influenced the Crusades. You can look at the development of “Just War” theory beginning with St. Augustine, that arose out of early Christian Pacifism. You can look at the process of how Christians moved from being more apocalyptic to getting more involved in worldly affairs. You can look at the early conceptual formation of a “secular” space in Europe as an outgrowth of Christian theology and how demarcations between political and religious leaders evolved. And that’s just the start. But the thing is that whatever judgments you get out of that effort, they’re going to have limited applicability to other systems for assigning value. Because medieval Buddhists weren’t much affected by Pope Gelasius’s “Two Swords” doctrine. They had their own stuff.

It’s frustrating to me when people who identify as religious or non-religious, while both subscribing to their own arbitrary systems for assigning value, do not even try to argue for their value decisions (like,“killing people is bad” or “being irrational is bad” or “oppressing people is bad”) before arguing for the best ways to achieve them in real-life situations. Instead they just assume that their value decisions are objective. This ignores that people can prioritize shared value decisions differently (“It’s better to kill my oppressors than be oppressed”), or disagree entirely (“Even though it’s irrational I think caring about whether my favorite sports team wins or loses is good”). It’s not like consensuses can’t be made about value decisions, they just can’t be taken for granted.

So my post-rant TLDR answer to the OP is - people sometimes turn to violence when they are conflicting over things they value. It is not surprising that the specialized systems of valuing things that people call their ‘religions’ are often involved in conflicts. Sometimes, these systems can act in such a way as to make a conflict less likely to be violent. Other times, they can act in such a way as to make a conflict more likely to be violent. Why it happens one way or the other can usually be found by investigating specific cases directly.

47

This is the statement (emphasis mine, obviously) that ISIS put out justifying the November terror attacks in Paris:

*In the Name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Beneficent,

Allah (ta’ala) said, They thought that their fortresses would protect them from Allah but Allah came upon them from where they had not expected, and He cast terror into their hearts so they destroyed their houses by their own hands and the hands of the believers. So take warning, O people of vision [Al-Hashr:2].

In a blessed battle whose causes of success were enabled by Allah, a group of believers from the soldiers of the Caliphate (may Allah strengthen and support it) set out targeting the capital of prostitution and vice, the lead carrier of the cross in Europe — Paris. This group of believers were youth **who divorced the worldly life and advanced towards their enemy hoping to be killed for Allah’s sake, DOING SO IN SUPPORT OF HIS RELIGION, His Prophet (blessing and peace be upon him), and His allies.**They did so in spite of His enemies. Thus, they were truthful with Allah — we consider them so — and Allah granted victory upon their hands and cast terror into the hearts of the crusaders in their very own homeland.

And so eight brothers equipped with explosive belts and assault rifles attacked precisely chosen targets in the center of the capital of France. These targets included the Stade de France stadium during a soccer match — between the teams of Germany and France, both of which are crusader nations — attended by the imbecile of France (Francois Hollande). The targets included the Bataclan theatre for exhibitions, where hundreds of pagans gathered for a concert of **prostitution and vice. ** There were also simultaneous attacks on other targets in the tenth, eleventh, and eighteenth districts, and elsewhere. Paris was thereby shaken beneath the crusaders’ feet, who were constricted by its streets. The result of the attacks was the deaths of no less than two hundred crusaders and the wounding of even more. All praise, grace, and favor belong to Allah.

Allah blessed our brothers and granted them what they desired. They detonated their explosive belts in the masses of the disbelievers after finishing all their ammunition. We ask Allah to accept them amongst the martyrs and to allow us to follow them.

Let France and all nations following its path know that they will continue to be at the top of the target list for the Islamic State and that the scent of death will not leave their nostrils as long as they partake in the crusader campaign, as long as they dare to curse our Prophet (blessings and peace be upon him), and as long as they boast about their war against Islam in France and their strikes against Muslims in the lands of the Caliphate with their jets, which were of no avail to them in the filthy streets and alleys of Paris. Indeed, this is just the beginning. It is also a warning for any who wish to take heed.

Allah is the greatest.

(And to Allah belongs all honor, and to His Messenger, and to the believers, but the hypocrites do not know) [Al-Munafiqun: 8].*

If you can read all that, and still believe these people weren’t motivated by religion…well, I respectfully disagree.

48

The truly horrendous massacres within Europe of the last century were not caused by “religion”, but by Nazi and Communist labeling of entire groups of humanity as the ‘other’ not worthy of existence. Both groups had nothing but scorn for religion.

It seems bizarre to claim that a decrease in religious belief correlates to Europeans getting along better with each other, when secular Europeans are, within living memory, responsible for the most notorious crimes in history - committed upon each other.

As for the ME, it is interesting to note that the main group living in the ME to embrace atheism in large numbers was - the Zionists, many of whom were expressly non-religious socialists. This did not notably lead to widespread peace. Nor did the (at least originally, wholly secular) Ba’athist movement.

49

Hitler and Stalin were hardly the kings of reason though, were they?

50

Maybe not. But then the opposite of “religion” is not “reason”; it’s irreligion.

A religious person may be rational or irrational. A non-religious person may be rational or irrational. The belief that a decline in religion is linked to a rise in rationality is, ironically, an act of faith.

51

All this tells us, Tithonus, is that these people invoked religion to justify their actions. That’s not quite the same thing as being motivated by religion.

We need to distinguish between rhetoric and reality. You have highlighted a couple of references to prostitution and vice. Yet we know that Salah Abdeslam, who has been charged as a perpetrator of the attacks, made his living as the manager of a bar in Brussels, which he co-owned with his brother. Islamic proscriptions against alcohol are well-known; you seriously think this is a man whose choices in life are motivated by his religion? And this isn’t an isolated example; the 9/11 hijackers, for instance, are known to have been regular drinkers, and to have visited strip clubs.

This illustrates a point that has been made repeatedly in this thread; one of the principal functions of religion is as a tribal identifier. Abdeslam identifies his tribe in religious terms, and this is not unusual. And there are plenty of other examples of people who are not at all religious in their beliefs or practices (and may in fact say, as individuals, that they are atheists or unbelievers) but who identify strongly we a religiously-defined tribe or community. Intercommunal conflict in Scotland and Northern Ireland is frequently cited in this connection.

The thing is, we have no reason at all to think that identification of Abdeslam and others would be any less strong, or any less murderous, if the communal identifier chosen did not happen to be religion. And this thread, remember, asks us to identify something specific to, or particular to, religion as a source of conflict. The truth is that there is nothing. Nationality, for example, works just as well as religion for these purposes. The American identity and patriotic sentiments which are so frequently invoked in the US as a response to Islamist terrorism are serving exactly the same function.

52

Yeah, and George Bush said we invaded Iraq to promote democracy.

53

What you’re leaving out is that both the idea that Hindus and Muslims could not live together, the demand for partition, and the events that precipitated the violence came from the Muslim side.

Obviously it was a lot more complex than that, and religion was not the only driver, or perhaps even the primary driver behind Pakistan’s creation. It was most likely the Muslim elite’s fear of loss of political power that drove most of those machinations. But the idea that the religion and the contents of the religion had *nothing *to do with it is absurd. Islam insists that there is no god but their god and no way to god but its way. It contains as a part of it legal and social precepts that dictate a greater part of our lives than Hinduism. All of these ideas were major influences in the birth and subsequent popularity of the idea of Pakistan.

The irony, of course, is that India is actually safer for and gives more rights to Muslims (particularly some types of Muslims, like Ahmadis) than Pakistan and Indian Muslims have grown as a percentage of the population whereas minorities in Pakistan are virtually non existent.

54

On the other hand, Islam explicitly forbids forced conversion or assimilation and, historically, has been much more successful than, say, Christianity at hosting and accommodating religious minorities, often for centuries.

In other words, there’s nothing intrinsic either in the precepts of Islam or in the practice of Islam over many centuries to require or promote violence against non-believers. So where we find Islamic communities that are engaged in violence with non-Islamic communities, we shouldn’t leap to the conclusion that they’re engaged in this violence only, or primarily, because they’re Muslims. It may (or may not) be that they’re only a distinct community because they’re Muslims, but the cause of the violence could be, and probably is, something else.

55

And I’m not saying that the only or primary cause of violence or discrimination is religion. I’m saying that a religion and its contents matter.

56

Well, in the case of Islam, you could argue that Islam requires not just individual but collective/communal life to be organised and conducted in accordance with the precepts of the faith. And therefore it’s difficult to live as a Muslim unless you’re living in a Muslim-majority society, or in a society which is dominated by a Muslim elite (like Mughal India). Never mind how true this actually is (perhaps some Muslim dopers would like to comment); lets just assume for the purposes of the discussion that this is true.

You could go on to argue from this that if Muslims foresee that they will be a minority in a state that they won’t dominate, and there are sufficiently large Muslim-majority areas, they would rather secede.

Hence, the partition of India.

But, two thoughts:

First, this isn’t a predisposition to violence as such; it’s a predisposition (in certain rather narrowly-defined circumstances) to a desire for autonomy or self-determination. Violence only results if somebody else resists that desire, and both sides are willing to use force to pursue their objectives. So even if violence does result, I don’t think you can say that Islam has been shown to be any more violent than whatever movement/identity/characteristic defines the other community involved (which could be religion, if they identify themselves as e.g. Hindus or a secular ideology if they identify themselves as e.g. Indians or Indian nationalists or British Imperialists).

Secondly, even if we take all this to be true of Islam, it just means that Islam is no different from a secular ideology like nationalism, which also give rise to demands for self-determination, separatism (or sometimes unification) and (in many cases) the willingness to use force to achieve these goals. And in fact there are many, many cases in which we see a desire by a particular community for self-determination so that they can organise and conduct themselves in accordance with their own values gives rise to violent conflict. (The American Revolutionary War would be an obvious example). It just happens that in the case of the partition of India (at least) one of the communities concerned defined itself in religious terms. But the OP is asking what is specific or particular to religion that gives rise to violence, and a desire for autonomy and self-determination is certainly not specific or particular to religion.

57

Yeah, but these ISIS guys blew themselves up.

58

So? I’m not sure what your point is.

If you blow yourself up you are more clear-sighted and articulate about your motivation than if you invade Iraq? I’m not buying it.

59

So you’re saying that if one side forcibly shuts down shops, murders and rapes people from another side that is not willing to use force to pursue their objectives, no violence would have resulted?

60

There’s a few things to unpack here. Firstly, the haram indulgences of the terrorists don’t prove what you think they do. It turns out Islamic scripture has a workaround that lets terrorists get as many drunken lap dances as they want:

*“It has been reported on the authority of 'Amr b. al-'As that the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said: All the sins of a Shahid (martyr) are forgiven except debt.”

“It has been reported on the authority of Amr b. al-'As through a different chain of transmitters that the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said: Death in the way of Allah blots out everything except debt.” Muslim :: Book 20 : Hadith 4649-50*

So, in answer to your question, “Why, if the 9/11 hijackers were so devout, did they drink and go to strip clubs?” the reason is “Because they could”. The same is true of Salah Abdeslam co-owning a bar.

Secondly, it seems to me that you’re engaging in a kind of special pleading. If I’m understanding your argument correctly, there is nothing - literally nothing - a man genuinely motivated to violence by religion can do to make his true motives known. His actions aren’t enough. His words aren’t enough. What else can he do? I ask in all sincerity, if you were a terrorist truly and sincerely spurred to violence by your understanding of your religion, how would you communicate that to someone making the argument you’re making in this thread?

Your argument seems to be unfalsifiable. If taken to its logical conclusion, it becomes impossible to truly identify anyone’s motives for doing anything. You could just as easily use it to argue that people who justify violence in nationalistic terms are really motivated by religion.

That would imply that scriptures could say anything and people’s behaviour would remain the same. The Koran could have a footnote on every page which said “Never commit violence under any circumstances” and we would still have just as many Jihadists committing violence. Apologies if I’ve misunderstood your post but with all due respect, that seems like a rather absurd argument to make.