ligesh

Because Christianity doesn't advocate suicide attacks. Christianity is about Christ, and the fundamental principle, at least on the outside, is supposed to be the Golden Rule. So no Pastor can really convince his congregation to kill others for the sake of furthering the cause of the God. The problem with Koran is that it lacks that one statement, and in its place you have 400 passages saying 'doom' awaits the unbelievers and direct passages asking the believer to kill and die for the cause of the Islam.

But my hypothesis is not about Islam or Christianity, but about the general human tendency to believe in the supernatural. I just used Islam, Christianity as examples. My real theory is actually about the origins of ALL religions, and the primary focus is the explain the origins and nature of tribal religions.

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

ligesh

The actual nature of the religion will wary according the people who first constructed it, their social conditions, and the enviroment etc. Thus OT which was forged in the deserts of middle east by a wandering tribe desperately trying to settle down, and is really barbaric.

While NT, which originates under the aegis of a more civilized climate of Roman Empire, thus reflects the culture in which it was formed.

Islam just reflects the mindset of Nabi and his group of vulgar men who just toppled Arab civilization of their time, and brought in a set of laws to promote their own selfish needs.

So these religions are all different in their actual laws because they all originated in very different circumstances.

What all of them have in Common is a personal, unjust God, who actually acts arbitrarily based on his whims. And this jealous, petty God is same across ALL cultures. It is an empirical finding that EVERY culture that has been discovered believed in some kind of God or God like entities that have the knowledge and power to influence his wellbeing.


------------------------ Amazon.com review of "Religion Explained".
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.
------------------------

This is the fundamental basis for every religion. Christianity, Islam etc are varied manifestations of this same fundamental rule, and the basic religious behavior is an evolved human trait rather than a meme or something.

premjan

I think the distinction between tribal religions and "perennial philosophies" is that the tribal religions act to reinforce tribal identity. When two of these tribal identities meet they will then clash (this happens even without any mention of God of course, as in Hutu-Tutsi or Serb-Croat-Bosnian). The perennial philosophies are knowledge or realization-centric. The tribal ones are survival-centric. One reinforces identity the other diffuses identity.

ligesh

Yes, but all religions start as tribal religions, and it is only later that they achieve the 'perennial philosophies', and even then they never really lose their tribal heritage. The old gods are still retain the relics from their tribal and brutal past. For instance, Hinduism, while it accrued a whole spiritual dimension, the main stories of the old gods' exploits still did not change.

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

newtype_alpha

Neither of which is evidence for your hypothesis. You have evidence for the observed phenomenon, sure; that's not much better than the evidence for Intelligent Design. Citing a fictional character as an example of your hypothesis just indicates your hypothesis is equally fictional.

That's exactly my point. Circuimstantial evidence is inherently inconclusive. You can draw almost any conclusion from it and all of those conclusions would be equally fitting to that same evidence. You need something that positively confirms your hypothesis if it is to have any meaning at all.

Theoretically, it COULD be extrapolated to the criminals. What you lack is even a shred of direct evidence that this is the case.

You keep saying this, but until you actually bother to collect direct evidence, you have no support. If and when you do collect this evidence, you will find this assumption is incorrect.

TomboyMom

Sorry, got to dispute this. Pastors have really convinced their congregations to kill millions of others for the sake of furthering the cause of God. Most of European history from around 900 A.D. to 1500 A.D. consisted of people doing just that.

newtype_alpha

Ligesh, among other things, Milgram's experiment demonstrated that how "logical" a person happens to be in a comfortable setting has little if any effect on their actual behavior. All that is required for immoral or risky behavior is the proper motivation, and God is not neccesary to provide this motivation.

Show us the numbers on how many criminals actually pray to God asking for help before a crime, or thank him afterwards when it was succesful.
Oh wait... you can't do that, because you haven't bothered to collect any real data.

And I expect you have no intention of backing this one up with actual data...

newtype_alpha

We did. Two pages ago. It's remarkably easy to refute because tere is no evidence for it and plenty of evidence against it. Other posters have refuted it backwards and forwards before I ever came to this message board.

Simple: most people, given a choice, would be perfectly willing to accept the APPEARANCE of moral uprightness rather than aspire to the actual condition. This fact has been observed in an experimental setting; one Stanford study effectively demonstrated that around forty percent of interviewed males would be willing to perform a sexual assault IF it was gauranteed that they would not get caught.

It is a well-known, often repeated myth in religious circles that religious people are more moral than non-religious people. Therefore, people of dubious moral character find in religion a very simple way to take on the APPEARANCE of moral uprightness without having to live the part.

In other words, a religious person can, if he wants, use the myth of theistic morality as evidence for his own moral character, even he is no more or less moral than the atheist next door.

Various reasons, the main one being that human beings cannot be moral without the threat of punishment for wrongdoings (although evangelicals will use the fluffy "only the holy spirit can make a person moral" excuse). Statistics asside, this reasoning is flawed because it assumes something about human nature that has no evidence to support it, and some evidence against it. Basically, it's flawed for the same reason your hypothesis is flawed: its very premise conflicts with reality.

Another bump on the irony meter.

ligesh

If you are talking about Crusades, it was a actually a 'REACTION' against muslim aggression. Mostly Christianity spread by conversions, or in the very least, by managing to convert an emperor, who then made Christianity the state religion.

Anti-semitism has been a fundamental part of Christianity though. But that seems to be a special case. As such I found Christianity rather harmless, especially if you compare to Islam. I mean, you can insult Christianity without fear incurring direct threats on your life. I understand that in US the Church is behaving in aggressive ways, but to me all that appears quite innocous when compared with the unmitigated hatred as preached by Koran. I was just making comparisons.

Anyway, in a debate, a moderate Pastor CAN win, as opposed to a Moderate Imam. A Christian can always point to the message of Christ, who at least, ostensibly, lived a life of a mendicant, and preached 'loving your enemies'.

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

ligesh

Good lord pal!!! Are you comparing hurting others with putting oneself into risk? Do you have any idea about natural selection. I guess you don't. Only someone staggerringly oblivious of the basic rules of evolution would make such patently absurd statment.

Criminals identify themselves as being religious. And that would mean that they would engage in praying. Of course, we need proper studies to show what exactly was their state when they commited their crimes, but I don't think anyone ever harbors a notion that THEY are actually committing a crime. Again we lack statistics, and I have already agreed to this.

The current statistics that we have, however, seems to be pretty much in my favor, and you still haven't managed to explain that.


You have a statistics that you simply don't understand, which you have tried in very absurd ways to refute, and now you are asking me for more? Currenlty we have criminals who self-identify as believers. Which would seem to indicate that they do engage in praying. And so I am just extrapolating this to mean that they do engage in praying before they start on their crimes.

If you think otherwise, YOU have to give me the statistics. I mean, you are actually engaged in the INITIAL no-true-scotsman that people who have identified themselves as believers in prison, do not actually pray. I fail to understand this at all.

So we have:

99.8% of the criminals are believers.

I expect these people to pray to god for material welfare, just like everyone else. And the material welfare in this particular case is a life of succesful crime. See, you are the one who is arguing against statistics. So if you want to make a case, show me that people who are believers, do not pray.

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