Of course it's ridiculous. I thought straw men were meant to be ridiculous.

And Hussein was a mass murderer, tyrant, and warmonger who was a very devout Muslim. We can do this all day. That, old man, is fallacy. Hussein was a nutjob. The Columbine shooters were a bit off-kilter too. There is nothing intrinsic about atheism that says killing your peers is a good thing.

It even extends to societal effects. Female genital mutilation is practiced almost exclusively in Muslim Africa, but it's not a Muslim practice so much as a tribal practice that Muslims thought was a good idea. Now, while you can wholeheartedly blame them for encouraging it for religious reasons, it's safe to assume that Mohammed's followers wouldn't have invented it themselves.

So where do you draw the line? Basically, you go for that which is 1) explicit within the religious tradition or texts, and 2) practiced by the orthodoxy (acknowledging that this means you need to look at several groups separately sometimes.) Clause one, which we'll call novelty, exempts them from responsibility for sewing women shut, at least as a religion. The culture is still responsible and should get shunned all the same. Clause two, orthodoxy, exempts them from responsibility for things like forced military service for all capable men until they go on a campaign that involves fighting along their borders or into infidel territory. It's dictated by the Koran, but it's not actually preached by the clerics, so the Arab nation here and there that quotes the Koran as justification is basically using it as an excuse.



I was half-tempted not to respond to this one, since I don't think you actually believe this yourself, but the first and last lines are worth addressing. First, yes, you can argue anything you want. Daganev spends time on the forums. Believe me, we know. That's why, here on the forums, we get to debate in more than 10 seconds soundbites. You get to back up your arguments or watch them fall apart. It's lovely, don't you agree?

Anyways, you're right in saying that unstable people are responsible for things all by themselves. I don't refute that, and I don't think you get to call Christianity a source of gang violence just because most non-Caucasian gang members happen to be Christian. Both the novelty and orthodoxy clauses kick in. This is why it's helpful to say explicitly what we're looking for when we're looking for the causes of social phenomena. And you're right, saying that a devout Christian is more likely to support rape is ridiculous. (Yes, yes, that was probably a typo, but I'm going to run with it.) The differences between the religions aren't trivial. If the major world religions were Jainism and a Venus-dominated Roman polytheism, I doubt we'd be having this discussion. The mere fact that the religions makes a difference, though, points to religion as a cause of certain social ills (and certain social benefits that have no secular replacement, as conceded above).

A major defining factor of Western society is the belief that religion is a private affair, which brings us to...



...this! You have to remember, most of the world isn't Western. Oriental society also suppresses public display of religion, so when you combine the two, you get close to half of the world's people, but not half of the world's religious adherents. Here in the Western world, we pick and choose what we want from our religions. (As an interesting aside, "heretic" derives from a Greek word meaning "to pick and choose.") This is very much not the norm worldwide, and as such, our native views on religion distort our ability to clearly see and understand not only religion in general, but religious people throughout the world. How do you, as a Western person, find common ground with someone who believes his religion is completely non-negotiable? Someone who, from birth, has been taught that the punishment for converting from Islam is death, that women are quite literally their fathers' or husbands' property, that free speech is an immoral excess, that sexual education will tear apart society, that having non-Muslim friends is only acceptable if you're trying to convert them or by yourself time to launch a military campaign, that the whole world needs to submit to Muslim rulers or be exectuted and your purpose on Earth is to make it happen, and that all of this is morally proper and indisputable. That's huge. And that's real. That's mainstream, orthodox Islam. That's not mainstream, orthodox Christianity, even as practiced in Africa or the Kurds, both of which have similar societal influences. You can't call it just culture; that doesn't correlate with reality. (Again, not to let Christianity off the hook. They just have a completely different set of issues.)

With multiculturalism such a big trend in the West, it's also something you need to come to grips with, and fast. You have communities even in the West who believe those things and who don't feel the same pressure to assimilate that they did before WWII. It'd be irresponsible not to be aware and figure out how to meaningfully communicate and provide the sort of subtle pressure to acculturate that we need.

Religion is a tool not a cause. Replace religion with ideology or methodology and you can derive the same conclusion. National Socialism, Communism, Manifest Destiny, Colonialism, Imperialism, and so on and so forth. This sort of argument will ultimately always simplify to the same basic question. Is human nature good or evil, savage or noble?

These are all fine points against your basic argument. Thank you.

Exactly. I could have sworn, however, that you were arguing that a -religion- was responsible for the behavior of rapists and their protection, and we're getting to a point where people can no longer plausibly deny that organized religion isn't evil. By saying that the Koran doesn't teach rape and the orthodox (with the oddballs noted, as you did) don't practice it, haven't you just unwound the very basis of you bringing this issue up in the first place?

What's funny to me is that I was about to make the exact same point. The way you get at a religion's role in behavior is to look for the teachings that encourage that behavior as well as the behavior of people who actually believe the religion (you had earlier made the point that people who are nominal members of a religion aren't problematic). So, in order for your contention to be correct that organized religion is evil, and using rape as an example, you'll need to show that the Koran advocates rape and this is the majority teaching and practice among the orthodox. If this is NOT the case, then your point falls.

Now, I have some issues with some orthodox teachings of the Koran, especially pertaining to how the Muslim world is to interact with the non-Muslim world, but that's a different issue, and you and I would probably find a great deal of agreement. How evil that makes Islam, I'm not sure. Once again, I'm inclined to point to the oddball's application of it.



Leaving aside whether or not a forum for a fantasy mud is the best place to get authoritative information and discourse on the world's problems, yes, I agree. But my point wasn't that we can assert whatever we like. My point is, when you look at someone's behavior and begin to travel down a chain of causation, it isn't hard to arrive at virtually any cause you like. Most rapists drink Pepsi. Most rapists are democrats. Etc. Etc. You are familiar with the phrase post hoc, ergo propter hoc?



Except that doesn't follow at all, which is precisely my point. It's hard to find someone who hasn't done something atrocious in the name of X, whether X is Mohammed or video games or the Beatles. Whether that makes X a cause of social ills, however, is a completely different story.

In order to prove that religion is a cause of murder, you need more than what you've got so far. I'd be willing to say that there's no correlation between how ostensibly religious a society is and how many social ills they experience, but to say a religious society CAUSES those social ills... you have not convinced me.

Again you attack a straw man.

Xavius isn't pointing to religion as a cause of murder, but rather a cause of "certain social ills."

Certainly a belief system that preaches there is no such a thing as rape is a bad thing, and deserves to be criticised; an institution devoted to propagating such a belief is doing negative social engineering which could easily be seen as leading to higher incidence of rape, because the notion is inherently evil, regardless of outcome.

Which we all know by now is code for "Religion is bad! Evil! Blah blah! I'll single handedly demolish it all, especially the Catholics!".

What, couldn't get into the kinky nun games in Seminary, Xavius?

Religion isn't evil. It provides hope for billions. We're supposed to be hardwired to accept the inevitable, but a lot of people need it anyway. Opiate of the masses indeed. It's not evil. It's what people do while using it as an excuse, violating the spirit while using the letter, that is evil. Christ. Who knows, it might even turn out to be true. If it's not, I don't think anyone will really care right at the end.

Yes, I know that using the word christ like that is a bit of an irony, but chances are it'll always be one of my primary fear/anger/shock words.

Bull. If I can go through life without beliving in fairies, spirits, ghosts or deities, anyone can.

It's not quite that simple - I think most people have their own kinds of mental "crutches" that let them live life happier. The difference is yours aren't as obvious because they don't directly contradict reality when it comes to matters like history and science. In a sense, religion is quite helpful - and it's not like the fact that hope for an afterlife is false matters, since they'll be too dead to care when it turns out there isn't one.

But if they could, I bet they'd be pretty bummed out about spending all that time in church when they could've been with their families and friends, or reading, or doing something productive, or something that makes them happy.

I understand a lot of people enjoy going to church. But a lot of people, also, live in fear and go to church every week because, in the world view that was handed out to them, they'll be in pain and suffering if they don't.

A line like that is as bad as any religion that says "I can go through life beliving in this, anyone can." You are trying to put your idea's on people. That's similar to saying that everyone should feel rape is a woman's fault because you and your religion say it is her fault.

Not all of them even do that, methinks. Father Bob (Speaking in Tongues is most amusing, I'm sure even Verithrax would get a kick out of John Saffran and Father Bob. Especially Father Bob.) mentioned that one of the viewpoints he'd consider possible, and, infact, many other priests he'd discussed it with, is that God did create the universe - billions of years ago. In the bible, it was compressed to make it easier for humanity to understand to 6000 years - after all, it was written though the imperfect instrument of humanity. All sorts of ways that it could correllate with science. Assuming you weren't a hardliner, anyway.

I love that word. And now I'm going to do nothing but read this thread, because it seems to be populated by people who believe it's a bygone conclusion that there IS NO GOD AND ONCE WE DIE WE JUST CEASE LIKE GOING TO SLEEP NEVER TO AWAKEN. And that makes me snarky, which'll lead to deliberate trolling. Well, moreso than usual.

..yeah.

I'm not going to try and enter this debate, but I -would- like to point out that it seems to me that people are attacking the argument "Religion causes rape and murder", whereas people are defending the argument "Religion, on the whole, tends to be a bad thing in society."

I have decided that these debates are purely based on ignorance.

I have done so because of the comments that Sam Harris makes in this debate here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5og-hyD3A7A

Reza Aslan seems to have the right of it. I say this of course, because it is what I have been arguing with people for the past 10 years.

The basic argument is this. People who do things, do so for various political, economic and social reasons. They will also often try to use a larger ideology to support this practice, to have other people agree with them. (insert more statements here) Therefore, it is not the ideology which causes people to act certain ways, rather the ideology is only the language that the people know, to express what they are doing and why. The more widespread and accepted the ideology, the more that ideology will be used as an excuse to do things.


edit: The youtube debate is 5 clips long.

That would be because the "defenders" switched the argument half way through the debate.

No comment.

If that's all you're ever going to contribute to any thread on the subject, why don't you just stop posting in them?

Because that isn't all I contributed, you linkaphobe.

And I do suggest anyone who cares about the thread's topic give up 50 minutes of bashing Astral to watch those clips. I don't at all agree with Dag's conclusion from watching the debates (except regarding the wars--the Muslim Brotherhood isn't a terrorist organization, and I'm not sure where Sam Harris got that idea), but regardless, it's bound to be the most civil discussion on the topic you're ever going to hear.

I won't be back for commentary for a few hours, but rest assured, it's coming.

Right. Like when I said:



You even quoted that part, yourself. How am I attacking a straw man when I delineated precisely what you claim is Xavius' argument?



Ok, but Xavius himself attributed this kind of thing to oddballs rather than orthodoxy. Once again, show me that the preponderance of orthodox Muslims believe that the Koran teaches that there is no such thing as rape, and I'll go, "Well, you may have something there."

But going to an Internet post about rape and pointing to the fact that some miscreants made comments to the fact of, "She had it coming." neither proves that Islam is evil, nor the much broader condemnation that organized religion is evil. It might prove the Internet has jerks on it, but I'm not sure we need a thread to discuss the validity of that thesis.

This argument, to me, seems based a lot more on emotion than rationality, unless you are prepared to argue that, if person X commits crime Y and attributes it to cause Z, that establishes cause Z as evil. If you're willing to commit to that, I'd at least respect the consistency of your view.

There, i translated it.

Remember folks, Verithrax is the only person with a right to have his opinion heard.