How does joining a new tribe break down tribalism?
Note the word HIS. Christianity has been used to keep women as second class members of society for centuries.
“Quran (47:3-4) - Those who disbelieve follow falsehood, while those who believe follow the truth from their Lord… So, when you meet (in fight Jihad in Allah’s Cause), those who disbelieve smite at their necks till when you have killed and wounded many of them, then bind a bond firmly (on them, i.e. take them as captives)…”
“Luke 19:27: But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.”
There have been many follower of Christianity and Islam that have been persuaded or at least felt justified in their violent behavior based on quotes similar to what I’ve posted above.
I’m talking specifically about the actions of individuals, not actions of states in war time.
In a word… bull.
Women had no rights in pre-Christian societies that were taken away by Christianity. Despite what feminist professors may tell you, women were NOT valued or esteemed highly in pagan cultures.
A tribe that ANYBODY can join is very different from one that draws barriers and declares those outside it permanent enemies.
No-you’ve just substituted new barriers for old.
My understanding is the Cossack’s devoutness had a lot to do with it. Attacks on Jews in the middle ages and after to take their money likely used religion as an excuse with relieving the royal debt as a bigger factor. But the pogroms were directed at those without a lot to lose.
As another example, consider attacks on Catholics in Elizabethan England. Religion was involved on both sides, and I hardly think you could claim ethnic differences accounted for this. Henry VIII might have attacked Catholics to take land, but that was a done deal by Elizabethan times.
Religious-driven violence is more often than not deeply steeped in morality, though. This is where comparisons to other forms of tribalism break down. What religious people believe matters when trying to understand what drives them to violence.
If I blow up an abortion clinic because hating fornication and anyone who aids and abet the products of fornication is a core part of my religious beliefs,why assume it’s tribalism that is driving me to do this bombing? Why wouldn’t it be me trying to prove my faithfulness, my desire to feel righteous and brave, and me finding meaning in my life by carrying out what I believe is God’s will?
And yet has also been used to liberate women. We know that in the early period women embraced Christianity at a signficantly higher rate than men, and this seems to be because of the relatively high status that women were afforded in Christianity.
Sure. But this goes back to the point I made earlier. In both religions, these quotes are selected from a vast range of scriptures, and they are selected because they can be used to justify violence. But we have no reason to think that the people who selected them to justify their own violence did so because they were Christians or Muslims. They could have been just as Christian, or just as Muslim, and selected quotes to justify benevolence, charity, tolerance or many other virtues. Conversely, they could have been not religious at all, and gone looking in non-religious philosophies and ideologies for rationalisations and justifications for their impulses to violence.
So I’m still not seeing anything to suggest that people who are religious are more likely to be violent than people who aren’t.
You mentioned tribes and tribalism. That’s pretty much the opposite of the actions of individuals.
Yes, but not different in a way that necessarily helps your argument, I think. If your tribe is one that anyone can join, doesn’t that can make it easier for you to blame the outsider, and judge them to be responsible for the deficiency of being an outsider, and therefore justify punishing them for it?
Mmm, yes and no. The objection to Catholics in Elizabethan England was not that anyone who, e.g., prayed for the dead or sought the intercession of the saints was evil and had to die. It was a political objection; Catholics were suspected of disloyalty, of subordinating their allegiance to the (English) crown to a a higher allegiance to a (foreign) papacy. Thus, they were seen as a threat to the tribe, and in particular to the political establishment of the tribe. But it was the political dimension of their Catholicism that cause the problem, and the fear which gave rise to the oppression of Catholics was the fear of the political establishment that they would be overthrown and displaced.
I’ll grant you that abortion clinic bombing is not a good example of tribally-driven violence. But, then, I have never said that all violence was tribally-driven; just that tribally-driven violence is not more likely to be associated with religiously-identified tribes than with non-religiously-identified tribes.
So, what are we to make of abortion clinic bombing? I’ll agree that bombers always or nearly always cite religious beliefs as a factor in their decision to bomb. It’s not normally, though, a hatred of fornication that they cite (surely you’d bomb brothels, nightclubs and a certain class of hotels if that was your issue?) but rather a conviction about the innate human dignity of foetal life. They see themselves as defending the unborn.
That conviction alone, though, wouldn’t drive you to bomb abortion clinics. I think you have to combine it with an Enlightenment commitment to human rights, and a moral conviction that everyone must do everything he can to prevent attacks on human rights. I think you need those three elements to account for the actions of the abortion clinic bomber.
And two of the three elements, we note, are not especially religious. Can we imagine that if somebody identified a human right which they didn’t ground on religious convictions, and also felt an commitment to the transcendent significance of the rights of individuals and a moral obligation to defend and vindicate them, they would do something analogous to bombing and abortion clinic? Well, we don’t have to imagine it; we can just point to Timothy McVeigh, who in one act in the defence of (his conception of) individual liberty killed more people (by an order of magnitude) than have died in thirty years of abortion clinic bombings. And that’s before we look at people killed by racially-motivated attacks on, e.g, black churches, or civil rights organisation. Or the Unabomber. Or the Red Brigades. Or the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Or the Bologna massacre.
So, if we move away from tribally-motivated violence and look and individual violence driven by personal conviction (and possibly a degree of personality disorder), I’m again not seeing much case for saying that religious convictions are more effective drivers of such violence than non-religious convictions.
That was a pretty low bar in the first century though. Low enough that second class citizen was a step up for women.
Of course. But the point is there’s nothing intrinsic to Christianity (or to religion) which denigrates or disempowers women. Whether we judge a religion to be oppressive to women is context-dependent; what are we comparing it with?
Really stupid ones, maybe. Not to get all hermeneutical on you, and I know very little about the Koran, but that Bible quote is so out of context it’s nonsensical. The line is spoken by a character in one of Jesus’ parables, not as a command to Jesus’ followers. [Also, using the King James translation is almost always a dead giveaway of cherry-picked verses.]
Am I saying that no Christian ever has used a cherry-picked verse from the bible to condone violence? Of course not. But it is an example of using the Bible to justify your own violence, not because the Bible itself encourages believers to be violent - in fact exactly the opposite; the teachings of Jesus have been cited by non-violent resistance leaders for thousands of years.
Just curious.
Who are these non-violent resistance leaders?
The way the same religion treats MEN; i.e. Catholics, Mormons, Islam. Unless they have females leading the church, they are guilty of sexism
With the standards of our current culture, of course. If a religion is telling adherents that woman shouldn’t speak in church, are not fit to lead, and must submit to their husbands, its certainly fair to say this religion disempowers women relative to modern-day attitudes about gender equality and sexism. And Christian scriptures promote these ideas. Although one may choose to reject these ideas and still call themselves a Christian, to say that these views aren’t promoted in many Christian churches would be false. My mother and MIL are both ordained ministers, and sadly, both have come against sexism in their ministries because of scriptural interpretations about their proper place int the church.
I think the problem with this discussion is that we’re working off of different concepts of “religion”. You seem to be saying that just because religion comes in so many different forms and flavors, we can’t attribute anything specific to it; it’s all over the place and so it’s not fair to make generalizations about it. What I and others are arguing is that we can say some things about religion, because it’s a component of human culture that has certain properties that can be appreciated and discussed. In other words, it isn’t so nebulous of a concept that we can’t speak about common attributes.
For instance, most of the major world’s religions have traditions going back hundreds of years, set in times when women were very much disempowered and very much lacking voices. The most religious people tend to take the most traditional interpretations of their faith and reject anything that contradicts, citing written scriptures as a defense. So while it’s may not be technically incorrect to say “there’s nothing intrinsic to religion which denigrates or disempowers women”, this is a disingenuous statement because it ignores that many if not most of the world’s religious traditions reflect sexist attitudes that were prevailing at the time of their founding. These attitudes still flavor the beliefs of many adherents today, and it shouldn’t be a controversial statement to point this out.
Gandhi, Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther King Jr. are the ones that jump immediately to mind; but we can also find examples in the anti-slavery movement. That’s only going back 150 years or so.