[ExI] Damage Due to Religion (was Fwd: New Article)

[Lee Corbin]

Keith writes

> At 01:56 AM 10/4/2007, BillK wrote:
> 
>> [Sam Harris] is making the case that all religions
>> are not equal and the Muslim religion is much
>> more likely to produce jihadist murderers than other
>> religions.
>> So there is also a specific Muslim problem to deal with.
> 
> I would disagree with him there.  *All* religions can inspire 
> warriors to jump up and down and yell "kill, kill."  That's the 
> evolved *function* of religions and if one has drifted away from its 
> function, it can jolly well swim back as needed.  Remember the crusades!

One of the crucial and important questions that has been 
at the forefront of discussions about religion is the actual
amount of harm that can be laid at the feet of religion, or
very specifically in other words:

Just how much of the same harm would have occurred anyway?

The data is rather scant, unfortunately.  We do have samples
of cultures where the religion though present did not have the
usual trappings we are familiar with.  One example is the Mongol
nation during the first part of the second millenium, i.e. 1100 - 1500 AD.
Some of their massacres were indeed justified in the name of their
religion, which amounted to a worship of Tangri, The Deep Blue Sky.

But it seems quite clear, at least to me, that deeper evolutionary forces
were actually at work, and the so-called religious sentiments merely
a post-hoc rationalization.

Sooner or later in the steppes of eastern Asia---as actually happened
many times---one tribe will gain dominance over a few nearby tribes.
The martial skill and practice thus obtained made further conquests
relatively easy. So every so often, as especially indicated in the most
famous case (Genghis Khan), an empire is formed.  And when
it works, *anything* can be evolutionarily favored. The tremendous
carnage of the Mongol Empire it seems to me, would have occurred
religion or no. So religion in some of these cases clearly had nothing
to do with conduct by our standards today utterly cruel and destructive.

Yet we have other unmistakeable examples of the very workings
of abstract theology serving to accentuate all the worst that societies
are otherwise capable of, much in the way  that technology *enabled*
some modern nations to achieve greater harm than they would have
otherwise.  But we can see that technology *per se* is not the
actual causative agent.  Yet this isn't enough to let religion off
the hook.  I think that we just don't know the relative merits
of religion in the world pre-1800.  The Aztecs and Maya, for example,
justified their ritual torture and human sacrifice by appeal to religion.
But are we sure these activities would not have ensued anyway.

In reading Will Durant (for example, the earliest pages of "The
Reformation") a great deal can be said in favor of the effects of
religion in the pre-1800 era. Yet who can say whether the same
effects would not have arisen in the absence of religion?

I think we have to keep open minds and continue in our reading
to rack up the plusses and minuses, insofar as we can guess that
certain effects stem from religion alone.

Lee