newtype_alpha

And I'll say it again: God does not always give that courage, nor is he neccesary for that courage. This may or may not have something to do with the fact that God cannot do what human beings are incappable of doing themselves. This means he cannot make a person brave if that person is a coward by nature.

And I just said, the statistics are NOT in your favor. They are vague enough to be in just about anyone's favor, which neither proves nor disproves anything.

Correction: we have consistently given you reasons and you have consistently ignored them. Among the three reasons suggested:
1) The overwhelming majority of convicted fellons are black and hispanic. The overwhelming majority of blacks and hispanics are protestant Christians and Catholics
2) Stronger religious belief has a higher correlation with both poverty and poor education; incidentally, so does crime.
3) Prison conversions.

I see that one went right over your head. Let me simplify it for you:

First: You made shit up with your imagination
Second: Found a statistic that says the majority of criminals are believers
Third: You decide this statistic supports the shit you made up, and then you make up more shit based on the statistic.

I'm not disputing the statistic. I'm disputing the shit you made up.

Yes, an INFERENCE, and a real stretch at that. You need to support this inference with facts before you bother using it in a hypothesis. So far, all you have is a guess.

I repeat: firstly, I don't have to prove a negative. You made the assertion, the burden of proof is on you. Secondly, I'm not even suggesting they don't pray. I'm suggesting they DON'T PRAY FOR HELP IN COMITTING CRIMES.

Had you made the assertion that all Christian women pray for God to make their tits bigger, I would dispute this claim too and suggest just as strongly that you back it up with some kind of direct evidence.

It doesn't matter what they consider, the fact is what they are doing is a crime.

Your premise basically boils down to "theism = courage." This does not appear any more logically defensible than "theism = morality," and even less so since your premise would also imply "atheism = cowardice." None of these appear to be the case and are unsubstantiated. You can either support your assertion, or you can't.

Technically, the premise "theism = courage" could easily be supported by citing the numbers of believers in the armed forces to see if they are overrepresented there, or believers in the police and fire departments, or believers participating in extreme sports; furthermore, you'd have to distinguish from prison populations how many of them are in there on drug charges or theft and evaluate the number of believers in for violent (high risk) crimes. If you note simiar correlation between the numbers of believers here, then you may have the beginnings of a valid hypothesis.

Because a simple criminal or a fraudster is motivated by greed. The exact religious convictions of a fraudster are difficult to determine, because by the nature of his crime he is untrustworthy. Criminals are much easier: ask them WHY they comitted their crimes, and if they give you any answer other than "Because it was God's will" then your hypothesis has been disproven.

THE TEST SUBJECTS didn't know that. As far as many of them knew, the learner in the experiment had actually died from the electric shocks well into the experiment. If there is no risk involved in killing someone else, why would you bother to maintain that God gives people the courage neccesary to "risk" comitting murder?

Hurting people IS a crime, isn't it?

If people can create ad hoc rationalizations for crimes, what does this say about your hypothesis?

Pause and think about it for a moment.

Test subject in the Milgram experiment no longer hears the learner screaming out every time he shocks him with the higher and higher voltage. The leaner has repeatedly said he has a heart condition. For all this test subject knows, the learner has died of a heart attack. YET, the test subject does not pray to God for courage, nor does he pray for a way out of this situation, nor does he pray for God to end this experiment before it goes too far.

What do we learn from this? Belief in God != courage. Belief in God, at best, can be used as a device to prevent people from thinking about their problems. There is nothing inherent to God that makes this possible, so the fact is, strong belief in just about ANYTHING can distract a person from his problems.

newtype_alpha

And it was NOT a reaction to Muslim agression. It was, as you have stated, a war to capture the holy land from the Seuljuk turks (not the Ottomans). The Crusaders not only captured the land, they massacred its inhabitants.

Then why are YOU still alive?

ligesh

Instead of all these vague, ad-hoc explanations, I am giving you a very SIMPLE, empirically verifiable explanation for why Believers are less moral than atheists. See? It also manages to explain the fundamental trait found in all religions


---------------------- Amazon.com review of Religion Explained, by Pascal Boyer.
Boyer says every religion has these common features:

1) A supernatural agent who takes a specific ontological form (animal, tree, human, etc.)
2) There is something memorably different about this agent (the animal talks, the tree records human conversations, the human is born of a virgin, etc.), which is an ontological violation.
3) This agent knows strategic information and can use that information for or against you.
----------------------

You are just ad-hocing around, and coming up with silly explanation for every different theistic action. I am giving you a simple, consistent, and empirically verifiable theory to explain the same. But I guess, you prefer the incomprehensible ad-hoc and differing explanation for theistic behavior to a consistent, and verifiable theory.

--
:: Ligesh :: http://ligesh.com

ligesh

I gave you the dictionary.com definition. It was meant to recover the holy land. It was not CONCEIVED as an unbridled and perpetual warfare on the infidels. That's the only thing I said. It started AFTER the Muslims first captured Jerusalem in 1076.


Do you mean that Allah will strike me down? I have not published anything criticizing islam. I just got into some arguments in the net. Sometimes arguing with you, I get a feeling I am arguing with some peculiar kind of mind. I have not made any other criticisms other than the one I got in the net. If I make a real public statement in mainstream media, then I am sure I will get a fatwa. I mean, isn't that what Rushdi did. Arent' there fatwas on so many Muslims themselves who dared to criticize Islam.

In fact, Anwar Shaikh has a fatwa. I mean, isn't that kind of norm in Islam.

--
:: Ligesh :: http://ligesh.com

ligesh

First: The concept of Crime and Religion both as a resulting from poverty was first proposed by ME. You have an annoying habit of taking credit for something which I had proposed some 50 posts back.

Second: The conclusion that blacks and hispanics are more likely to be both criminals and believers, even if it is true, is totally unrelated to our context. (On the other hand the statement that poverty as being responsible for both crime and belief is a valid one).

By just trying to explain the correlation using an artificially created class like 'black or hispanic', which has no relevance on the statistics, you are just showing how much of bigot you are.

--
:: Ligesh :: http://ligesh.com

newtype_alpha

Just because something is simple doesn't mean it is true. The simplest explanation for most things in this world is "Goddidit." It's simple because there's no evidence for it, and is vacuous enough not to need any.

Your hypothesis has a similar level of simplicity. It can fit the facts, just not the evidence.

That's because the actions you keep describing are not "theistic actions." If they were, it would be true that no atheist has ever joined the army, fought in a major war, comitted a major crime, or perpetrated an act of terrorism. This is simply not the case, so the actions you describe in this hypothesis are not unique to theism. And SINCE they are not unique to theism, we can justly eliminate theism as a direct causal factor; logically, we can say that theism is not a neccesary condition for risky behavior (since not all criminals are theists) and is also not a sufficient condition for risky behavior (since not all theists engage in risky behavior). Whether or not something RELATED to theism is a factor still remains to be explored. So far, however, your simple explanation "theism = courage = criminal behavior" is, indeed, just as simple and as true as "theism = fear of punishment = moral behavior."

Until you have actually gotten off your ass and interviewed any number of criminals on whether or not their religious convictions affected their criminal behavior, you have just as much evidence for your theory as a theist has for the "theism = morality" theory: absolutely nothing.

newtype_alpha

Of course it did. That still doesn't change the fact that it wasn't a REACTION to it (considering, for example, that the Seljuks captured in Jerusalem from OTHER MUSLIMS).

No. You asserted that someone cannot criticize Islam without being threatened with death, while one can criticize Christianity all they like. So far, you have spent alot of time and energy criticizing Islam, and from what I can tell you have no recieved a death threat from the Muslims on this board, nor have you been killed by one of them. Why is that?

newtype_alpha

Actually, I believe it was first proposed by TomboyMom (on this board, anyway). And the question was about reasons for them, not who gave them, so it doesn't matter either way.

How so? Around 62% of prison inmates right now are black; by national average, it's estimated that around 84% of blacks are protestant Christians. If prison populations are weighted according to the specific densities of theists in each ethnic group, you come out with a figure of about 90%. This comes pretty close to explaining your single statistic...

Except, now that I check around, it appears based on the numbers at Adherents.com that only about one half a percent of Americans actually are atheists.

Plus, there's another weird curiosity: in the stats you appear to be citing, first of all, Protestant Christians are severely underrepresented (35%, compared to 52% of the population) and Catholics are severely overrepresented (39%, compared to 24% of the population). 18,381 inmates listed "no answer/non-religious." That's around 24 percent, and would--incidentally--include an unknown number of agnostics and deists. Now... Adherents.com places the number of "non-religious" at about 7.5% of the American population. So protestants are underrepresented, Catholics and "non-religious" overrepresented. What interpretation do you draw from this?

I don't get that... do black people not really exist?

ligesh

------------------------- This was the first post that talked about poverty and crime, and I said it.
The statistics indicate that Gods encourage crime. Or at least there is a strong correlation between belief and crime, which could be caused by a third factor, that is both responsible for belief AND criminal behavior. We can maybe consider that both belief in God, AND crime are caused by poverty, but I think even that isn't sufficient to explain this.
-------------------------

Tomoboymom went into a detailed exposition on this theme, and hers was much better than my mere statement. But I had stated it before that. You seem to simply lack basic capability to retain what you read. You should remember the context of the thread, at least before you make grandiose statements.

Actually this has happened in the 'nudity' thread too. You go the full round around the world, and in the end just repeat what I said in the beginning, and you state it as if it was a revelation. I mean, so frustrating when what you have been trying hammer from the beginning, is stated back to you if a great new finding.





Do you mean that blacks have a gene that makes them criminal, and also another gene that makes them believe in God. The only way an artificial category like blacks can account for this correlation is if they have separate genes for both criminality and belief. Else, I can say that blacks are criminal BECAUSE they believe in God.

So you have to first prove that Blacks have INNATE tendency to be criminal, and an INNATE tendency to belief. That's why I said, bringing in artificial categories simply cannot EXPLAIN the correlation. If you say poverty, it does make sense. Poverty can cause criminality AND belief independently, but even that doesn't mean that there isn't a causation element. For that you have to find the statistics among the poor Atheists, and see whether they commit crime.

You can't simply explain away facts with a wave of a hand, and taking credit for something *I* proposed at the very fucking beginning.

--
:: Ligesh :: http://ligesh.com

ligesh

Good. They claim Seljuks were harrassing the pilgrims who went to Jerusalem, and that's what caused the pope to call for a coalition to drive them out. But again it was a specific incident dealing with specific land. Not a general call to arms demanding Muslims kill infidels wherever they find them.


I have no clue how to respond these nonsense statements. How can anyone in this board kill me. River did make a statement that can be construed as a threat, and I did question him, but he denied, but still I consider it as a veiled threat.

But funnily, why haven't YOU been killed? For all I can see, with your half-assed attempts at defending Koran, you actually butchered it far more than I did with my rhetoric. Ha. If you go on 'defending' Islam the idiotic way you did in that thread, you are going to get a fatwa much before me. Ha.