[extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again (resend 2)

Lee Corbin lcorbin at rawbw.com
Sun Oct 1 16:29:26 UTC 2006


John Clark writes

> I would never be so foolish as to say religion is the cause of all human
> misery, but I would say that with the exception of death itself religion has
> caused more misery than any other single thing.

But how do you know?  How do you know what history would have
been like in the absense of religion?

So far as *I* know, we don't have a lot of data. The 20th century did
seem to indicate that the fervently anti-religious socialist regimes of the
Soviet Union and Red Chinese killed people at at least the same rate
if not much greater.

My own suspicion is that tribal conflict (which evolves to wars when
the tribes are big enough) is an ESS under primitive enough conditions,
i.e. pre 19th century technology and pre 19th century democracy.
Take for example the countless combative American Indian tribes
whose wars were woven into their cultures, religion or no.

And that there are plenty of other interesting mechanisms, as Joe and
Mao discovered, for keeping people in line in modern big-government
states that have nothing to do with religion, but which are very 
expensive in terms of human misery.

Lee




More information about the extropy-chat mailing list