I’m pretty liberal but this annoyed me for some reason. Firstly, why is #notinmyname apologetic and pandering to the Western media? Surely Muslims would be quite happy to dissociate themselves from atrocities being committed in the name of their faith. You could argue that it’s wrong to link the 2 but it’s not the media that are making that connection.
Secondly, Islam didn’t invent the list of great things, people did. At a push a country could claim credit but attributing it to a faith?
Muslims invented hospitals, really? There were hospitals 1,000 years before Muhammad was even born. Also, physicians at the first Muslim hospitals were Christians.
Can’t all religions just apologize for 3000 years of unnecessary brutality, war and suffering, vow to never do it again and we’ll start fresh in the morning?
Very little historical brutality was caused by “religion”. Competition for scarce resources is by far the greatest impetus for conflict. Perhaps all scarce resources should apologize.
Right. Like access and dominion over Jerusalem is pretty much the scarcest resource of all.
You can always make a case for conflict being about competition for scarce resources, because - pretty much independently of how violent conflict starts - the winners end up taking scarce resources. Then you go back and say “see, you thought it was about [insert reason people said they were killing each other in horrific ways], but it’s really about competition over scarce resources.”
Lots of conficts are about scarce resources, but just because resources play into it doesn’t mean religion is a big shaper. Look at the Children’s Crusade. They sent children to attack Turks, on the theory that children were more innocent than adults, thus God would have them win. If religion were just a cover story for controlling scarce resources, there’s no way people would have tried that.
I wasn’t aware until my main man Neil DeGrasse Tyson pointed it out; while the rest of the civilized world was stuck in the dark ages, Muslims were advancing science at an amazing rate. They would invite academics from all over the world to discuss everything from physics to philosophy.
I’m not sure what happened, but man…they really did a 180 over the last 400 years. What a bummer.
I didn’t say “no brutality”. I said “very little”. There are some very notable examples. The Crusades, for example, was clearly over religion (though in that case Islamic Nations invaded North and Europe pushed them back). The Protestant Reformation led to the pretty brutal 30 Years War. But typically conflict wasn’t caused by religion, but often used by leaders to motivate troops after conflict had already initiated.
In some cases religion is also inappropriately attirbuted as the underlying cause of violence. For example, King Ferdinand II initiated the Spanish Inquisition in order to maintain control over dissenters that he saw as politically threatening. The Pope objected and tried to stop him. But Ferdinand was also the only thing standing between Rome and Islamic Moors to the South, and the Pope eventually caved, lest he lose the seat of the Catholic Church.
In either case, atheistic causes (e.g. Communism) more than made up for 2000 years of any religion-inspired violence. And besides that, “religion” is an entirely inappropriate category given the very different underlying theologies of different religions.
I’m an atheist without a cause. I want people to stop killing/oppressing people in the name of any and all real/imagined beings, be they kings and queens, phrophets, sons of god, etc.
I agree that there is plenty of aggression that is caused by grabbing for scarce resources, and that it may well be more than that caused by religion (and almost certainly more, if you are including the East - China, India, Japan - and long arcs of history).
But there’s plenty of religious stuff in there, particularly before the Enlightenment. During the Black Death, there were plenty of massacres of Jews, based on the idea that the Black Death was punishment for tolerating so-called Christ-killers. Rulers - as you note - used religion to motivate people, but that religious motivation often created killing that was extra brutal (not unlike ISIS) and goes way beyond what is necessary simply to control resources.
In the West and Middle East, there are particular problems with the Abrahamic traditions. I trace it to monotheism, which cannot abide other religions. It’s easy to forget that the Islamic expansion of the 600s and 700s basically wiped out anyone who wasn’t Christian or Jewish, unless they converted to Islam.
I’m not sure what mileage one gets out of saying religious conflicts aren’t really all that serious, or not that important to history. Or maybe you’re trying to say something else. At the very least, religion is frequently gasoline for the fire, and often it is the spark for it as well.
Few of the largest wars and killings were due to religion as we usually think of it. That makes sense because most religions hold peace as a good thing, although there are obvious exceptions. Of older conflicts, the Mongols killed the most. It really just comes down to thirst for power and control, scarce resources don’t appear to play a role in most of these.
Are religion and human behavior distinct and independent? No, I don’t think so. Religion is an ideology that persists over time, across generations, because it is institutionalized. Some religions say you must have mass prayers every week. Some religions teach you not to eat cows. Some religions tell you your life purpose is to build a religious state, that women are a class beneath men, and that Jews and atheists can be killed as you please. This is written in a sacred book that some people take literally. If not for this institutionalization of beliefs, fundamentalists would have no reason to adhere to backwards practices from 1500 years ago.
Many religious people are smart enough to realize that fundamentalism is a bad idea. These intelligent and moral people defy the literal teachings of their faith and would never marginalize the rights of women or instigate violence against people of other religions. However, other religious people are weak and ideologized; they continue degenerate practices that have no place in modern society, and this behavior is strengthened by written religious belief. People would still kill each other without religion, but some religious teachings make people kill more people.
People will always find reasons to oppress, i just find religious oppression to be especially disgusting. Someone else mentioned scarce resources. I at least understand that. I’m not supporting it, but I can wrap my head around killing for land, water, food, etc. I can’t wrap my head around hating someone because they believe their moral authority derives from a different descendant of Abraham.
Part of the issue with this way of seeing history is the fact that there were really no irreligious societies in that era. So *all* historical brutality is seen through a lens that “religion” is somehow the culprit. The reality is that, with some notable exceptions like the Crusades, European Christian leaders typically intervened to stop or minimize violence. “Religious” violence most often manifested from cultural clashes. Like when the Moors invaded Europe, for example. This was less a function of religion than it was an attempt to expand their society (one component of which was religion).
We saw several attempts throughout the past century to replace religion and there wasn’t much success in taming society in those cases at all.
USSR was not an “atheistic state”, while their government was officially atheist, the core ethnic group in charge of the USSR was ethnic Russians who are inseparable from Russian Orthodoxy.
Furthermore, communism in large part has quasi religious aspects, and anyways is a modern invention and small fry in the longer view of history.