On War & Religion

Whyte Horse wrote: Got it too . But there is a much more sinister motivation behind religious extremism. The people who control the religious extremists don't care about religion at all. They aren't even religious.

This basically sums up my feelings on the matter too. The world is full of people who interpret and twist religion and other ideals for their own gender.

Actually, here's another point:

Let's say I choose my schedules to keep one day of the week off, because my book tells me so, and let's say I don't eat pork, because my book tells me so. If you don't want the reference to sound as if it was a particular religion, let's mix it up a little and say I am not allowed to eat ham instead. Let's say I never enter a temple without a head dress, because my book tells me so, I'm circumcised because my book told my parents so, I observe a weekly ceremony because my book tells me so and I profess the holy Truth of my book to my peers because the book tells me so.

Now, if that's what I said, nobody would question my motives. Nobody would say that it is a matter of local climate or recent geopolitical history. But if I say that my book also tells me that I must not leave those wretched witches in peace, or that I must not ever befriend a non-believer, and that I am obliged to wage a holy war on them (specifically them and not just their non-belief) even in times when I or my peers doubt that I should, and I do, all of a sudden my faith has nothing to do with it and I completely misunderstand the text and I'm not true to my deity and the motivations for my action are completely absolved from the religion that motivates every other ritualistic nonsense I make myself follow every day.
Why is that?

Worth watching...

Gisteron wrote: But if I say that my book also tells me that I must not leave those wretched witches in peace, or that I must not ever befriend a non-believer, and that I am obliged to wage a holy war on them (specifically them and not just their non-belief) even in times when I or my peers doubt that I should, and I do, all of a sudden my faith has nothing to do with it and I completely misunderstand the text and I'm not true to my deity and the motivations for my action are completely absolved from the religion that motivates every other ritualistic nonsense I make myself follow every day.
Why is that?

If you're losing while you claim your deity's name, you don't have the favor of your deity. Perhaps it simply means you are an unbeliever at the core of your heart, and therefore your deity refuses to work with you even though you are doing as his/her book tells you.

Much like this (since I know this is specifically Abrahamic you're referencing, I'll go with Abrahamic tradition)

Abel and Cain each give their offerings to God. Both have done so, but Cain's offering is not received well. Both believed in God, both followed pretty much what He told them, but one did not have the sincerity of the other.

Seeing how Abrahamic deities in particular also can't handle iron chariots, success is not necessarily an indicator of faithfulness, nor does this have anything to do with the question I posed. I am pointing out the double standard in seeing everything largely harmless to humankind at large or personal as indubitably religious when claimed to be, but anything just as much claimed to be part of the same religion that we happen personally to find disagreeable as necessarily a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the same religion.
So if your text tells you to give thanks for the harvest, and you do just that, that is accurately following it, but if it tells you to rob the neighbor infidel village for their harvest this year, and you do just that, suddenly that is a complete misunderstanding?
Oh, and what, by the way, if you succeeded, rather than lost? Are you saying that God was on the colonists' side when they successfully slaughtered the natives of America or Australia? Certainly, by your standard, since the latter lost, God must not have been in support of their cause... Maybe God was first on Napoleon's side, when he conquered Germany and Italy, but after he had beseiged Moscow God changed his mind and supported the victorious Alexander instead? I take it the citizenry of Hiroshima or Nagasaki didn't have a God-approved cause either, did they?
Make no mistake, a majority of people throughout recorded history, warriors and leaders, civilians and slaves, were genuine believers in one form of religious nonsense or another. That may not have been their motivation all of the time or even most of the time, but if you are saying that defeat is a sign of a lack of divine support, you must make some ugly admissions about the unfortunate...

Gisteron wrote: Seeing how Abrahamic deities in particular also can't handle iron chariots, success is not necessarily an indicator of faithfulness, nor does this have anything to do with the question I posed. I am pointing out the double standard in seeing everything largely harmless to humankind at large or personal as indubitably religious when claimed to be, but anything just as much claimed to be part of the same religion that we happen personally to find disagreeable as necessarily a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the same religion.
So if your text tells you to give thanks for the harvest, and you do just that, that is accurately following it, but if it tells you to rob the neighbor infidel village for their harvest this year, and you do just that, suddenly that is a complete misunderstanding?
Oh, and what, by the way, if you succeeded, rather than lost? Are you saying that God was on the colonists' side when they successfully slaughtered the natives of America or Australia? Certainly, by your standard, since the latter lost, God must not have been in support of their cause... Maybe God was first on Napoleon's side, when he conquered Germany and Italy, but after he had beseiged Moscow God changed his mind and supported the victorious Alexander instead? I take it the citizenry of Hiroshima or Nagasaki didn't have a God-approved cause either, did they?
Make no mistake, a majority of people throughout recorded history, warriors and leaders, civilians and slaves, were genuine believers in one form of religious nonsense or another. That may not have been their motivation all of the time or even most of the time, but if you are saying that defeat is a sign of a lack of divine support, you must make some ugly admissions about the unfortunate...

But it has everything to do with what you're asking- because of the thought process religious people have.

Now that said, although I am Christian, I do believe that God does not get involved in all of the affairs of people. Those that are unfortunate are not unfortunate due to God bringing it upon them. God does not always meddle in the affairs of others. But if you are doing something on behalf of a God(dess), because He/She has told you to do so- then it will be sanctioned by them.

I don't believe the story of Job either. He had a lot of bad luck, whoever tells the story is trying to make it look like God sanctioned the bad luck. If Job is a real person in history, I don't believe that God had anything to do with his string of bad luck. If it is a myth told by a storyteller to try and make people feel better about what happens to them- it's clever. But still just a myth about how your faith can keep you alive in God's eyes.

So what do I think of those that got a bad card in life? I think that God has nothing to do with their situation. God didn't put them there, cause and effect of choices (not necessarily the individual on the street's choice, but the choices of everyone around them is to be included in understanding their situations). We are given free will, if you think that God has something to do with everything, you eliminate free will.

The key here isn't JUST success. The point is where is God in it? Either He is in it, or he's not. If you are doing things in His name, and you're not winning- then He doesn't have your back. If you are winning, he MIGHT have your back, or you might just be that good.

It also does not mean that God has anything to do with the people that are overpowering you. He has simply decided to leave it to our own devices, and whoever is the victor is the victor. So you see, I don't believe that America has God's backing either in this. I think He left it to the superior force to win out (survival of the fittest).

its impossible to measure all of the kindness and the support and the care that religious people have shown to the world as a result of their religious beliefs - nurses and teachers and coaches and medical organizations and homeless shelters and missionary work and every day people who give a little or give a lot and have been doing so for centuries because their religion or church or temple taughtthem that it was the lords will or the path to enlightenment or just the right way to live

yes it is easy to point to the harm and the violence - its much harder to quantify the goodness

balance

it was religion and religious thought which first asserted that life has any sort of inherent value at all

yes, a lot of evil has been done in the name of religion, and without condoning that i still say that the fact that we regard it as evil at all is because religious reverence informed us that we are capable of and should strive for better

OB1Shinobi wrote: it was religion and religious thought which first asserted that life has any sort of inherent value at all

This is false. It's actually false on multiple levels, too. First, the genes that do more to preserve their survival survive at a higher rate. That animals evolved to preserve themselves and their kin is a direct result of that and it happened long before the first religion. Also, the assertion that any life has inherent value is false by necessity, since "inherent value" is already something internally inconsistent. Value is an outcome of putting value upon things. It cannot be inherent by definition. Nor does a majority of largely popular religions in our day, and by that I mean religions with any global influence of note, teach that life has inherent value. The value of life they teach is often only as far reaching as the religion's tribe and doesn't extend even as far as to all mankind, and it is also, in most cases, contingent upon either ourselves, a cosmic impersonal justice and morality system, or a countable set of deities. Value and inherency are two incompatible things.

... the fact that we regard [said things] as evil at all is because religious reverence informed us that we are capable of and should strive for better

Religion is not only not the only source of morality, but it is of them all one of the poorest ones at that. It does not take religion to recognize something wrong about burning occupied villages by the dozens, but it does very much take religion to think there is something doomingly horrific about that delicious looking piece of penis skin. And how insulting this is to mankind, while we're at it, how insulting is that to the moral thinkers throughout the ages indeed! Dare ye not speak for the rest of us when you say you wouldn't know any better without religion. We would.

genetics does not in any way provide one with a sense that their life or any life has value beyond the immediately obvious, the immediate impulse - as a purely genetic being i may value my own life in the sense that i dont want to feel pain, and i dont want to die, and i may value a mate because i like sex - and i may value association with others because we get more wooly mammoth by working together, and because Urggh tells really funny dirty cave woman jokes and that entertains me, but once we begin to associate a deeper significance to ourselves than pain and sex and food and general entertainment we are entering into the realm of the religious - by definition - and this is where morality becomes JUSTIFIED

religion is the exploration of the ULTIMATE - ultimate reality, ultimate truth, ones ultimate journey as a soul or spiritual being

when we say "my life is valuable because i am intrinsically valuable" we have to justify this - and religion is the original source of this justification

you say that we dont need religion to tell us that its wrong to burn down a dozen villages - but i say that this is exactly what we need - or what we needED, and that until religion came along and told us that it was wrong, it wasnt wrong!

now that religion has informed us that there is a better way, we have the luxury of saying religion is pointless

but it was religious thought that developed human kinds first sense of morality, becauase it was religious thought which first asserted that human life has value beyond the immediate sense of pain and pleasure and delay of death

and ultimately it is religious thought which justifies any morality, because once you assert that there is value in life, beyond what we (or the subjective I) PREFER in the moment, you enter, by definition, the realm of the religious

if you dont agree then please, lets establish exactly WHY it is wrong to burn down a dozen villages

If it benefits me, if it simply entertains me, and i can get away with it, and my life is just as good after burning these village as it was before, maybe even better because the villages smelled bad and they played their music too loud, why shouldnt i do it?

what is WRONG about it?

Again, intrinsically valuable is already a nonsense term, because value is by definition contingent upon a subject and not a property of the object.
No, religion does nothing to justify morality, it merely asserts it. Just because a religion tells you to behave a certain way doesn't make that way right or any other way wrong, even if their claims about the will of the universe or any gods were true, because even with that will and even with a severely problematic coersive system of explaining why we better give a damn (or else), why anything is the right or good thing as opposed to any other remains unknown. Because God says so is not an explanation. It's a lazy way out of having to explain anything.
And no, both people and other animals have had compassion long before anything like religion existed. It went even so far that leaders would lose the support of their flock in raiding a neighbor. It is not until after religion came along that people began being perfectly fine with some of the most inhumane ideas their sick fringes came up with. It did not become any more wrong with religion telling us so than it was with my mommy telling me so, and our instincts as social animals were what both motivated us to not do horrid things to each other, what motivated our mommies to teach us not to do said horrid things, what made a prohibition of said horrid things part of some religions and what made other religions necessary to do said horrid things anyway.
And also no, you do not need to enter "the realm of the religious" to discuss motivations beyond the immediate and current.

As for your challenge, I could name a number of reasons why it is against my interests to burn down neighbor or even faraway villages. I could also try and argue from emotion, saying that my instincts as an empathic social animal deter me from doing such things, but I feel like behavioural studies of people and animals and moral philosophy has done more to this regard than I could ever do justice, so instead, since it was originally your assertion that we do need religion for questions of this kind and their justification, I shall point the challenge back to you:
Let's say I am a sociopath and a psychopath - a proper savage for all intends and purposes. I was born with no regard for the feeling or well-being of others. Let's say I have no foresight either and so cannot picture the consequences of my actions as they return back to me. Let's say I live at a time before religions were far spread and you are a traveller who was enlightened by a religion in a land beyond the mountains and so you come to my village on a mission to inform me and my tribe of how to live a better life. I am completely gullible on matters of fact and will accept any and all supernatural claims you make at face value, including the existence of deities, their will and your knowledge of their will, the existence of parallel worlds or reincarnations including punishments and rewards for a good lived life irrespective of the criteria.
So in other words, you can use any and all religious doctrines at their full capacity, but you cannot appeal to my compassion or consequences or honour.
Under these conditions, i.e. using religion alone, explain to me why I must not burn a neighbor village for their plentiful harvest or indeed why I must not burn you as an intruder into mine.