We may be talking about two different things. Being a member of a religion doesn’t predisposition the average person to violence. However, subsets of a religion can and do attract and motivate people to commit violent acts. Those subsets could be considered tribes and they have their religion in common.
Tribes motivate the individual.
And that is basically my point. Not that every religious person becomes violent, but that religion can be used influence people to be violent, by taking the responsibility of their actions out of their own hands and putting it in the perceived will of God.
Possibly they are guilty of sexism. On the other hand, possibly by focussing simply on the question of the gender of the leaders, you are using a very narrow measure of sexism (and, ironically, buying into a patriarchal evaluation of the importance of status and command).
We observe that churches typically have male leaders, but predominantly female practitioners and adherents. One conclusion that we can draw from this is that women generally are more drawn to involvement in religion than men are, which is hard to square with the assumption that religion is anti-woman. And a possible account of this apparent inconsistency may be that the gender of the leaders is not as important to women in general as you think it is, or as you think it should be.
We also note that if we compare what churches actually do - where they put their resources, what programmes they run, etc - this generally aligns much better with the priorities that women tend to favour than with the priorities that men tend to favour. Which might suggest that even though they are barred from leadership positions, women generally are not without influence in churches, setting priorities and choosing directions. Which might in turn be related to the fact that, at every level below the formal leadership level, women predominate.
So, yeah, the exclusion of women from leadership positions in churches may be sexist. But it may not be all that effective a form of sexism, or all that offputting to a lot of women, who find ways to make their influence felt, and have their priorities accepted.
Compare the effect of female suffrage in civil life. When women got the right to vote, and the right to be elected, in western countries this was not followed by equalisation of the numbers of men and women in elected positions. But it was followed over a number of decades by significant policy shifts, with states becoming much more involved in, and/or devoting much more resources, to medical care, education, social welfare. It may well be that when women have power, they are not concerned to use it to secure high-status positions for themselves, but rather to use it to secure policy that accords with their priorities and values. Women, in other words, may appreciate the distinction between power and status better than men do. And if that’s correct, it would explain why the exclusion of women from leadership positions in churches, as sexist as it may be, is neither a deterrrent to women participating in religion nor an obstacle to women influencing the course and direction of churches.
Yes, yes. With you so far.
Well, here I start to pick nits. Yes, most of the worlds major religious traditions do go back hundreds of years, but the characteristics that result from this are not characteristics of religion specifically; we expect them also to be characteristic of non-religious traditions that go back hundreds of years. (And we can point to plenty of sexism embedded in our culture to exemplify this.) And - while we have strayed a bit from the OP - this thread is looking for characteristics that are specific to religion, that arise out of it fundamental nature rather than out of the accidental fact that, at this moment in history, most of the dominant religous traditions are quite old. They weren’t always old, and the dominant traditions of the future won’t always be old either.
Secondly, the claim that “most religious people tend to take the most traditional interpretations of their faith” is contentious. It’s frequently the case that people are identified as “most religious”, precisely because they take traditional positions. What is at work here is the assumption of the commentator that the traditional position is the authentic or normative one. The religious person who takes a less traditional position would obviously dispute that. And we know that the majority of religions believers in our society don’t believe that women shouldn’t speak in church, should be subject to their husbands, etc. I don’t accept that those believers are “less religious” than the traditionalists.
If that’s the case, you also have to acknowledge the other subset - the members of the religion who aren’t motivated to commit violent acts. They too must be a tribe (and a much, much larger one). And I don’t think you can say that the existence of the violent tribe characterises religion in a way that the existence of the not-violent tribe does not.
And if you do say that, then you have to be willing to apply the same analysis to other cultural identifiers like nationality, language, etc. If the existence of a subset-tribe motivated to violence by religion shows that religion motivates to violence, then the existence of a subset-tribe motivated to violence by nationality shows that nationality motivates to violence. (And, if we’re honest, rather more strongly than religion does.) And, again, the OP is looking for things specific to religion.
But in fact I think you’re making a fundamental mistake here. The tribe for which an Islamist terrorist kills is not the set of Islamist terrorists; it’s Islam. He claims to act on behalf of all Muslims. Likewise, the tribe on whose behalf a soldier kills is not the army, or those of his citizens who approve of killing; it’s the nation as a whole.
Yes, I know.
Which raises an interesting point. If somebody goes postal and shoots sixteen people at his workplace/university/local shopping mall, we don’t automatically attribute that to religion. Even if he happens to belong to a minority religion we don’t (unless we are bigots) attribute his actions to religion. We would only consider doing so where he claims to act in the name of, or on behalf of, his religion, or offers a justification for his actions which appeals to his religion.
But, if that’s enough for us to say that religion drives people to kill, then we have much, much more evidence for saying that nationality drives people to kill. Not only do we have a far greater number of individuals killing in the name of nations, and a far greater number of people killed in the name of nations, but with nations we find explicit mandates to kill, detailed long-term preparations for killing, organisations established by the nation devoted entirely to this function, etc, etc. These features are found only exceptionally among religions, but they are pretty standard for nations.
In both cases, the actual killing is done by individuals manipulating weapons. But when you say that “tribes motivate the individual”, the motivation by the nation is much clearer, much more explicit, much more consistent, etc, than the motivation by the religion.
So, again, I’m not seeing anything particular to religion to suggest that a religion-tribe is more likely to motivate violence than a non-religion tribe.
Well, I’m glad that you recognize this as a nit, because it most certainly is one IMO.
Non-religions traditions are less sticky than religious traditions. Why do I say that? Because an important property of most religions is that core tenets are forever binding and not subject to change. Changing tenets threaten religion because if we can accept a God who changes his mind, then why in hell should we assume the Bible, the Koran, the Tora, or any other religious doctrines/scriptures have relevance today? As an example, consider the controversy caused when priests stopped condemning meat on Fridays. You’da thought somebody had died.
In contrast, other traditions are much more subject to evolution in keeping with the changing values and needs of society, because morality isn’t so at stake. For example, we see fewer women in the western world taking their husband’s last names as a matter of habit. Who knows? In 20-50 years, this might be a completely obsolete practice as more people recognize the sky isn’t falling. The traditional 40 hr work week is also become less ubiquitous as businesses take advantage of different arrangments, including telecommuting. Mainstreaming special needs children rather than excluding them is another shift from tradition.
Clinging to old ways and old values is a fundamental property of religion, for the reasons I pointed out about. It’s not a coincidence that the most prevalent religions are the ones with the oldest histories; this history adds to their legitimacy and cultural influence.
People who are the most religious have lives that revolve around their faith more tightly than people who are less religious. Do you disagree with this? They are the ones who go to church or temple or whatever multiple times a week, pray at regular intervals throughout the day, speak of God and prophets as if they are actual people, and abstain from mainstream activities out of respect for religious rules (eating pork and non-kosher foods, wearing certain clothes, drinking coffee, using profanity, accepting blood transfusions, watchin R rated movies). These people also tend to take traditional views of their religion, meaning they put stock doing the way things always have been done. Meatless Friday’s, women must keep their hair covered, only men can be priests and pastors, gays are an abomination, etc. While it’s possible to find a traditionalist who doesn’t mold their life around religion, these qualities tend to go hand in hand with one another.
Again, I don’t understand how any of this can be argued with a straight face. But perhaps we should agree to disagree.
Oh, nonsense. Of course religions change. If they didn’t, we’d never have Christianity as a development of Judaims, or Islam as a development of Christianity and Judaism. And religions change internally. The early Christians were pacifists. Jews used to practice polygamy, but no longer do. Rabbinic Judaism as we know it was unknown at the time of Christ. Christians didn’t used to ordain women, but increasingly they do. There was no monastic tradition in Christianity before the fourth century. There were no mendicant friars before the twelfth century. The history of religion is every bit as diverse and varied as the history of any other human activity.
Religions may towards the conservative end of social institutions, but they are social institutions and, like all social institutions, the change, evolve, grow, shrink, die, spawn successors, etc.
And you can hardly point to controversy over religious change as evidence that religions don’t change, can you?
Religions are durable, but that’s not the same thing as unchanging. Indeed, some might suggest that their durability is more likely to suggest flexibility and adaptability than it is to suggest rigidity and an inability to change.
Your arguments here are not really evidence-based (which is ironic, for one who regards science as the exemplar of rigorous and valuable study). You’re taking tired old pejorative preconceptions about religion and elevating them to absolute principles which are stated without demonstration, and which you haven’t tested against the available evidence.
I accept that people who abstain from common activities out of respect for religious principles are religious poeple. but it doesn’t follow that people who don’t abstain from those activities are not religious; they may simply be following different principles, but just as seriously. You’re still hung up on the notion that if somebody’s religions principles don’t impel them into rigid counter-cultural conservatism, they’re not real, authentic religious principles. That’s just nonsense, I’m afraid.
Straw man. I said they are more resistant to change than other parts of culture.
You are arguing against things that aren’t even controversial at this point and wasting words in the process.