[ExI] Religions and violence

Keith Henson hkeithhenson at gmail.com
Sun Jul 25 15:39:52 UTC 2010


On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 5:00 AM,  John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net> wrote:

> On Jul 23, 2010, at 5:54 PM, Will Steinberg wrote:

snip

>> there are reprehensible passages in every bible.
>
> True, but most christians and jews have the good sense to ignore the more repulsively ugly parts of their holy book.

The EP models states that under population stress the respective memes
would mutate back to the ugly parts being important.  The formation of
the state of Israel demonstrated that.  As for Christians . . .

"The Cathars spent much of 1209 fending off the crusaders. The leader
of the crusaders, Simon de Montfort, resorted to primitive
psychological warfare. He ordered his troops to gouge out the eyes of
100 prisoners, cut off their noses and lips, then send them back to
the towers led by a prisoner with one remaining eye."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism#Massacre

The problem of war, terrorism and related social unrest is not one
particular religion, the problem isn't religion at all.  The problem
is evolved human psychological mechanisms that are activated by
population stress.  The stress is almost always relieved by a
substantial fraction of the population(s) in contact dying.

If you wanted to see Islam become a peaceful religion, figure out how
to raise the average income per capita over a long term for those
peoples.

Keith



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