Religion, war and violence

[Oneironaut]

Religious people like to claim that their religion is the one that is going to bring peace to the world, or that their religion in one of many peace-bringing religions out there. They say that followers of their religion, believers in their god(s), donators to their church will be infused with a sense of peace and tranquility and will not want to do harm unto men. Yet in the real world, the history of religious dogma has been the story of constant warfare and strife. Even now we see horrible monstrocities committed in the name of religion all over the globe. What gives?

Consider the case of the Māori people and the Moriori people of New Zealand. The Māoris lived on mainland New Zealand, and the Moriori a few hundred miles to the east on the Chatham Islands. The Māori had been a warlike people, while the Moriori had a tradition of resolving their conflicts with peace and consensus building. When the Māoris heard about the islands the Moriori were living on, they sent a few hundred soldiers over to invade. The Moriori tried to issue a peace offering, but before they could their villages were being burned, their citizenry raped and slaughtered. The Māori people survive today. The Moriori do not.

The same kind of clash has undoubtedly occurred in the past between people of warlike religions and people of peacelike religions. The outcomes of those conflicts are going to be heavily in the favor of the warlike groups, so we should expect to see warlike religions surviving today. No surprise, then, that's exactly what we see. It's a kind of Darwinian natural selection. So that's one reason we see people fighting for religion: if peaceful religions had superior survival rates, warlike religions would have died out long ago. Granted, there are some seemingly peaceful religions whose members do not spread their beliefs by violence, the main ones being Buddhism and Taoism. (Incidentally these two religions also do not posit the existence of deities. Hmm...) So the process of natural selection didn't completely kill off all peaceful religions, but remember that there are far more Christians and Muslims than Buddhists or Taoists. In any case, the comments here do not apply to Buddhism and Taoism. I am dealing only with those religions whose members are willing to kill for their beliefs.

Besides teaching militancy in general, there is another feature of the warlike religions that might make warriors of the religion better fighters: belief in the afterlife. When you believe that there is an afterlife in which you will be eternally rewarded, you are much braver on the battlefield than the atheist who is shaking in his boots about the prospect that his consciousness may end forever. With no belief in an afterlife, 9/11 would never have happened. There would be no suicide bombers anywhere. Who knows how many massacres might have been avoided if there was no such thing as the maxim "Kill them all and let God sort them out"? Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins theorizes that that is the reason why almost all cultures have some sort of belief in the afterlife: all of our ancestors who didn't were beaten on the battlefield.

As for why religions quarrel with each other, it isn't hard to see why. Religious people have some very deep-rooted beliefs about how the universe operates. These beliefs influence the life of the believer every day, and like anybody they are reluctant to just give up on something they have invested so much time and effort in. It's a big disappointment to realize that you've been working your whole life to get on the good side of a deity that doesn't exist. So they hold onto their beliefs with steadfast faith, complete unquestioning dogma in the ideas which their culture has taught them. And, incidentally, they don't have any real proof that their religion's tenets are any truer than those of any other religion. But this does not sway the believer, who must under all circumstances not change his mind about anything — there are severe psychological and social implications in changing your mind about such fundamental issues as religion. The human brain being what it is, people are very reluctant to do so, even when it means believing in things for which there is no evidence or even things which run counter to the evidence.

So what do two people of differing religions do when they meet each other? Say, for example, a Christian happens upon a Muslim. They discuss their differing belief systems, and realize they have quite a dilemma on their hands: they both have gods who claim that disbelievers in the One True Religion will be severely punished in the afterlife. And yet these are two very different gods with different rules about human affairs, different stories about how the universe works, different demands for its believers. So they can't both be right. They might try to argue the points for a while, with such arguments as "Allah makes me feel tingly when I pray" and "my cousin Joe swears he saw an image of the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwhich", but soon they will realize that they're in an even bigger dilemma than they started out in — it looks like neither of them is right, or at least that neither God is willing to come out and offer proof of his existence. They just can't seem to dig up any arguments that will make everybody believe in whichever God they grew up believing in.

So they result to the only thing which can possibly resolve such a dispute: violence. From the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition down to Palestinian suicide bombers and the Kashmir conflict, religious conflict all boils down to that simple inability for any religion to show that it is the right one. When scientists have competing theories, they don't kill each other to show the righteousness of their One True Theory. Why do that when you could just argue the evidence and show your opponent that your point of view is undoubtedly the right one? Any good scientist realizes that if he can't do that, if he can't show how his theory best fits the evidence, he has no right claiming the theory to be true in the first place and ends up revising his position. This never happens in religion though, because religions believe themselves to be immune to logic, objectivity and experimentation. There's no evidence, you just have to believe it. Or else. When was the last time you heard a church say something like "Our previous statement x was controversial, and after considering all the arguments of our opponents, and scrutinizing the available evidence, it seems that Islam was right all along about this." Scientists make such concessions all the time. But religions cannot, for the simple reason that they don't have any evidence to scrutinize. When they do look at the evidence all they see is a conspicuous absence of anything suggesting the supernatural even exists, much less that it works according to the model proposed by their particular faith. In those rare cases where a religion does make a concession like that, it takes a really long time. For instance, it took the Roman Catholic Church 359 years to concede in 1992 that Galileo was right after all about the Earth not being at the center of the universe.

On the surface it seems like peacelovers have a simple task ahead of them: teach people to use critical thinking, to base their beliefs upon evidence and to not blindly accept things which don't have any observable evidence going for them. But everybody knows it isn't really that simple. In some countries you can still be killed for saying something like that. And there are lots of people who claim they really do have proof — Creationists and the like. It's really faulty "proof", but they're not scientifically literate enough to realize their errors and ultimately it's clear that their "science" is really based on faith. They will not make any falsifiable scientific theories because their "scientific" theories are so entwined with their religious worldview that they would see falsification of the "science" as falsification of the religion, which as I've explained is something that is simply inconceivable for most religious people. Even those who don't claim to have proof seem almost impenetrable by logic: they think that it's okay to have "faith" in an idea if it's comforting enough, even if there isn't anything to show that it's true.

Religious faith is extremely durable. There is no doubt that the vast majority of people alive who are religious will die that way. If we are going to get anywhere in promoting critical thinking, we need to start with the children. Let's teach critical thinking to our children while they are still young and religious indoctrination has not yet rendered the child's worldview immune to logic. Let's stop teaching them to just memorize facts and start teaching them how to do good science, how to rigorously test all new ideas, how to judge whether a theory is in accord with the available evidence, and what to do about theories which are not. Maybe the generation that grows up with that kind of education will be the generation to turn this world into a beautiful, peaceful, religion-free place, and they can spare the world the horrors of religious conflict.

Oneironaut Reviewed by Oneironaut on 12-09-2005. Religion, war and violence Religious people like to claim that their religion is the one that is going to bring peace to the world, or that their religion in one of many peace-bringing religions out there. They say that followers of their religion, believers in their god(s), donators to their church will be infused with a sense of peace and tranquility and will not want to do harm unto men. Yet in the real world, the history of religious dogma has been the story of constant warfare and strife. Even now we see horrible Rating: 5

[Oneironaut]

So they result to the only thing...

Of course, that should read "resort", not "result".

[Euphoric]

interesting concept! survival of the fittest, eh? :thumbsup:

what about buddism though? it seems peaceful enough yet it survives. tis a paradox. i suppose theres an exception to any rule.

with these kind of statistics we could assume that any alien race we encounter in the future would be very well armed. combine that with any religons tendancy to see other points of view as inferior

perhaps though, once a group is able to defend itself well enough by going through this warlike stage it only then has the option to revert back to a peaceful nature. hopefully

[Oneironaut]

I think any extraterrestrials we meet will have gotten well past this stage. Species that hold on to warlike religions, I suspect, end up eventually wiping themselves out.

[F L E S H]

Excellent essay. There's absolutely nothing with which to disagree.

All this seems so bleak to me, because it is only intensifyling. On the short- and medium-terms, I am very pessimistic, I think the fundamentalists on all sides will get stronger until some sort of world-wide cataclysmic conflict ensues. I really don't see anything happening that could prevent this...

However, on the long term, I am optimistic. I believe that it will take that cataclysmic conflict to wake people up. Hopefully our descendants will take advantage of this.

[Stoner Shadow Wolf]

dont worry, it wont be any later than 2060 or so, most of us wil llikely be alive when the worst comes, let's all have a party for those of us who live to see the worst pass

[MudFu]

As long as their are different religions then there will always be conflict. You can not convert everyone to one religion because not everyone agrees about the same things. Hell, I have a hard enough time finding anyone who thinks remotly close to me when it comes to God and whatever. And as for faith, you do not have logic to have faith...or else it isn't faith. To have faith is to believe in and trust the unknown. Faith is your logic when you can't prove something. As far as buddists and that religion goes...well even that has its limits. I once agreed with the ideas and the teaching when I was younger...but then I grew up and asked questions like; why do they sell you books on meditation when they do not believe in material wealth? Why must you have a buddha statue? Well soon I saw that it was like most other religions, corrupt. That is why I don't like to say I am a certian religion. I have faith in God, not complete faith but I'm only young and still questioning things. Who knows I might change everything and decide that God is a hoaxs. I already think the Bible is a novel. The best seller of its time and the New Testamint is part two of the book series. I choose to not trust the Bible because it was made from lies. For now I have faith in God alone.

[Stoner Shadow Wolf]

fine, mud, join my religion:

we worship existance, no two gods are alike, and we dont care!



plus we dont have a name for the "religion" so we can just be spiritual, and unlabeled.

[weirdo79]

I see Buddhism as more a of a philosphy (and so apparently did the "buddha") thats probably why it didnt go the same road as others (that were religions).

Great post One ,

[Oneironaut]

And as for faith, you do not have logic to have faith...or else it isn't faith.

Exactly. Logic is a way of reliably obtaining information about the universe. Faith is pretending to have knowledge that you could not possibly know from evidence, which is illogical.

To have faith is to believe in and trust the unknown.

No, faith is pretending to have knowledge of the unknowable. Not being based on evidence and logic, it is not a reliable way of obtaining knowledge about the universe. It is nothing but guesses believed in absolutely.

Faith is your logic when you can't prove something.

On the contrary, there is no kind of logic that can be applied when you can't prove something one way or the other. When scientists don't know something about their field of study, they boldly state "I don't know". When people of faith find something about the universe they can't prove one way or the other, they say with certainty "It surely must be this way and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar". And, predictably, another person of faith will state that he is a liar for believing what he believes. When you do not have evidence for something, you have to be able to say "I don't know". Just because there are mysteries about the universe doesn't mean you need to make up explanations for them and then pretend your guesses are facts.

My point is that we need to abandon this idea of "faith" in things for which there is not sufficient evidence. That is the core of critical thinking, of science itself, that wonderful mode of thinking that routinely provides the world with incredible new discoveries beyond the wildest imaginations of the previous generation. And what wonderful progresses has faith made for humanity? Nothing but oppression, war, censorship, intolerance and superstition. Science often has to clean up the mess that faith has left for it. Science had to climb enormous hurdles to get the germ theory of disease accepted over the demon theory and to get the heliocentric universe accepted over the biblical geocentric universe. Now in this country we are in a struggle to get the theory of evolution accepted over the theory that the Earth was created all at once sometime in the late Stone Age.

Let's abandon all this faith stuff and base our beliefs on evidence, shall we? All these faith-based theories made before we had all the evidence have historically been incredibly unreliable in reflecting the truth.