Religion IV: Deus vult!

[Ramsay Gimp]

The last blasphemy trial in the UK was in 1979. It was only abolished at Common Law in 2008.

New Zealand still has blasphemy laws on the books, though our only trial (in February 1922) resulted in acquittal.

So what are you arguing here? That religious intolerance is essentially a wash between Christian countries and Muslim ones? No one (least of all Gears) is claiming that Christianity is all sunshine and rainbows, or totally above oppression. But compare the state of blasphemy laws in the UK/New Zealand with any number of Muslim countries and you will see our point.

Ah yes, very good, being bigoted against Muslims is no different from being bigoted against Nazis. I guess I can't argue against condemnation of the one without arguing against condemnation of the other, forcing me to choose to defend Nazis. What am I then, a Nazi-lover? Pierced by these fierce pincers, surely I must admit defeat... or nah.

That last question there, very nice - what reason have I to doubt the wisdom and honesty of brutal murderers? A group, after all, renowned worldwide for their brilliant ability to assess themselves philosophically, psychologically, and spiritually and then faithfully report back their findings.

Whenever people start talking about how they're motivated by something like faith, freedom, community, nation, honor, love, reason, it's usually just bullshit to make themselves seem like better people. Everyone can reach into their ass and find some platitudes we're supposed to pretend are the driving angels of their behavior. That way, you can't hate the playa, you can only hate the game. It's not ME to blame for my disgusting homophobia, it's my religion. A wizard did it!

Beliefs are often not merely separate from, but totally contradictory to, actions. That's not some weird left-liberal fact there, just a fact.

Y'know, Godwin's Law does not mean that any mention of National Socialism in an online argument is fallacious. It certainly wasn't intended to be a carte blanche excuse to avoid responding to someone's actual point, which is what you are doing here with the "Nazi-lover" line. is I'll assume you aren't actually so dumb as to think I was claiming anyone who defends Islam is a "Nazi-lover." More likely, you were just being disingenuous because you have no response to the idea that religions are ideas, and attacking ideas is not "bigotry."

Your claim that a person's beliefs have no relation to their actions is also too ridiculous to even bother with. Did you really think that through?

[Serious Callers Only]

Keep up the fight GotB, no tolerance for intolerance.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

SCO,

Is anyone arguing "tolerance for intolerance"? All I'm saying is that blanket condemnation of "Islam" based upon the beliefs and doctrines of extremists among that faith is wrong. I'm not saying we should tolerate intolerance. I'm saying claiming that all of Islam is intolerant is a form of intolerance because it is painting all of Islam with the beliefs of its most extreme believers.

[Serious Callers Only]

And gears of the beast is saying - correctly - that the beliefs and doctrines of extremists - such as sharia - are not unusual, and are in fact, the majority wish in certain countries - probably because of a chauvinistic self indoctrination, they took our jobs etc. Do persians - the cultural identity for such that consider themselves to be so - pine for the code of hammurabi.

The middle east seems to have the unfortunate fate of having a vibrant religious culture still thriving. 'Attack' the religion - turkey for instance - and you get pushback down the line and the hicks are totally fine with it, bring on the stonings. At least Christianity is a martyr religion and they don't have public executions prescribed in major works of the founding members.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

SCO,

But to imply they are held by a majority of all Muslims based upon the actions of a portion of 6% of Muslims is absurd.

[Gears of the Beast]

But to imply they are held by a majority of all Muslims based upon the actions of a portion of 6% of Muslims is absurd.

I didn't imply that at all in fact explicitly stated why I brought it up (among the positions that actually are held by the majority of Muslims in these countries).

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

GotB,

This is what you said:

Khomeini was essentially the spiritual leader of Shi'a Islam. He was the supreme leader of Iran. To act like he's some random extremist is absurd. You people keep acting like I'm using small extreme groups to categorise Islam. This isn't true. The vast majority of Muslims believe apostasy should be punished by death, the majority of Muslims in most Islamic countries believe female adulterers and homosexuals should be killed. Yusuf al-Qaradawi is an Islamic theologian and chairman of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, he has a TV audience of 60,000,000 and he supports suicide bombing attacks on Israeli civilians including women and children. I'm saying Islam has a serious problem with violence and the oppression of women and homosexuals etc. To say otherwise is dishonest. To say that 'not everyone supports this view of Islam' is not to say that this problem doesn't exist. Go read about what Islamic leaders of countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran think about homosexuality and do to homosexuals, it is repugnant and people like that cannot co-exist with civilisation. I'm not and never have been talking about a couple of extremist sects.[emphasis added]

60,000,000 (assuming every one of Yusef al-Qaradawi's viewers agree with him) is 6% of the billion followers of Islam. That is hardly a "vast-majority". Upon what are you basing your claim that the "vast majority" of Muslims support executing apostates, adulterers, and homosexuals?

[Gears of the Beast]

GotB,

This is what you said:

60,000,000 (assuming every one of Yusef al-Qaradawi's viewers agree with him) is 6% of the billion followers of Islam. That is hardly a "vast-majority". Upon what are you basing your claim that the "vast majority" of Muslims support executing apostates, adulterers, and homosexuals?

There seem to be some severe comprehension difficulties here. The phrase 'vast majority' was only applied to one of those positions, I suggesting reading over the text you helpfully bolded again. You'll find most of the relevant statistics here.

[OnionAhaiReborn]

I'm very late into this discussion, but: I seriously doubt that any of the ideological particulars of Islam are the driving force here. This kind of extreme social conservatism is a global-historical issue, and I think the fact that the Islamic world today has major (perhaps comparatively worse than almost anywhere else) issues with religious violence and oppression is more the result of other factors than the religious ideology that happens to predominate in these regions. Essentially, if by historical accident Christianity happened to be the predominant religion in what is today the Islamic world, I think we'd see very similar problems. That said, I'm sympathetic to Maher's and Harris' complaint that there is more defensiveness among liberals for any criticism of Islam while they're quite happy for Christianity to be criticized without accusing those making anti-Christian arguments of racism. I'm not familiar with Harris beyond name recognition, so I don't know if he's said more inflammatory things in the past, but Affleck's response to him on Maher was a wild overreaction, a perfect example of the defensiveness they were talking about.

[Gears of the Beast]

The wide variety of factors that have lead this current state are certainly worth discussing and a valid conversation to have. You need only look to countries like Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina to see that Islam isn't the only factor that leads to a society as compromised as Saudi Arabia.

[TerraPrime]

And gears of the beast is saying - correctly - that the beliefs and doctrines of extremists - such as sharia - are not unusual, and are in fact, the majority wish in certain countries - probably because of a chauvinistic self indoctrination, they took our jobs etc. Do persians - the cultural identity for such that consider themselves to be so - pine for the code of hammurabi.

Is it still "extremist" if it's the position of the majority of Muslims?

Also, sharia is not a single entity. Sharia just means applying the Qu'ran and the Prophet's teaching to draft laws that govern our daily lives. There are many versions of sharia due to the interpretation issue. Some forms of sharia have very violent responses, and others do not.

Sharia is actually no different than the genesis of some of the laws we have in the U.S., such as blue laws banning alcohol consumption on Sundays in some cities, i.e. laws that are based on religious convictions and then imposed on everyone. To point to the support of sharia amongst Muslims as a sign of their "extremist" world view seems overly sensational and jingoistic.

[Sci-2]

The west is still "fucking" (most of) the rest with "free" trade "agreements" in our favor, exporting subsidized agrarian produce to ruin local small farmers, selling our arms to everybody with some claim to be "our bastard" etc. So we have no reasons for putting ourselves on the moral high ground. And we do not really care about the treatment of women, children etc. in islamic countries. Otherwise Saudi Arabia (clearly worse than Iran and the hotbed and funding source of islamic terrorism) would not be our "friend", but occupied and forced to democratize.

But anyway: How many people should we bomb to liberate women and gays in the muslim world? How many collateral dead children? Even if such ideas were the reasons for our wars in the middle east (which they obviously are not), would those really be good reasons to wage a war and kill thousands to "liberate" groups that are suppressed (according to our Western standards)? I do not think so.

Apart from the moral questions, I am not aware of historical precedents when "liberations" like this actually worked, often the opposite was the result. Enlightenment and social progress do not work like that.

I don't know if it's fair to say "we" don't care about treatment of women, gays, & children in Saudi Arabia, though I'd agree we could do more and there is a tendency to implicate the other in order to ride a cultural high horse.

We don't necessarily need to bomb anyone to ask the extent to which a set of ideas and beliefs is harmful. We might look at religions as we would video games, and ask what our reaction would be if scripture was game plots and similar percentages of players had the kind of beliefs Gears has described.

And it's not just Islam - whenever a non-Christian religion comes up you have a subset of liberals trying to rationalize. I was recently talking to a non-Indian who's into yoga, who for some random reason [we were discussing happiness in America vs India] starts defensively telling me that maybe the caste system had some logic to it and he didn't want to condemn another culture. Lol wut? The caste system is/was horrible.

[Serious Callers Only]

Sharia is actually no different than the genesis of some of the laws we have in the U.S., such as blue laws banning alcohol consumption on Sundays in some cities, i.e. laws that are based on religious convictions and then imposed on everyone. To point to the support of sharia amongst Muslims as a sign of their "extremist" world view seems overly sensational and jingoistic.

If you don't care about sharia how about sex slavery, good enough to rile you up? Not general of course, but good enough to be published on ISIL own newsmag, not bad. Undoubtedly 'imposed on everyone' but i wonder if a catholic publication, say from the vatican would do the same on the 30 years war (just a example). 'Kill all protestants, you get to rape and sell them too'.

Comparing the CC to ISIL is a fallacy, but its so tempting temporal and religious power in one invites it. I wonder if the most effective way to tame a major religion is to centralize it and then shame it so it self-polices, the catholic sex abuse scandals don't seem to indicate it. Probably separation / rivalry (in early stage) of church and state is more important.

[Gears of the Beast]

Is it still "extremist" if it's the position of the majority of Muslims?

Which is a point raised by a video I linked earlier. If you read the description of the video they think it points to the fact 'western media' is just Islamophobic and racist because it sees such positions as radical, I'm not sure I draw the same conclusions as them...

Your definition of Sharia is pretty correct. However, considering what the Qur'an, Sunnah and Hadith say about certain things it becomes quite obvious that Sharia is a terrible idea and indeed when you look at the countries that fully employ Sharia it becomes very problematic indeed. Individual support for Sharia does not necessarily reflect support for some of the common practices under Sharia. For example in Malaysia 86% support Sharia while 60% support stoning as a punishment for adultery. Now 60% is still insanely high and these are not mirrored everywhere, in fact in Egypt there is 74% support for Sharia while 81% support stoning as a punishment for adultery.

[Sci-2]

FINDING MY RELIGION / Author Jeffrey J. Kripal talks about "Esalen, America and the Religion of No Religion"

Why did you decide to write a book about Esalen?

I think Esalen provides a good counterculture argument to the rise of fundamentalism in this country and elsewhere. But my interest in Esalen goes back further. My early training and work was in Asian religions, particularly Hinduism. I was interested in how religions meet, how they influence one another and how that can be a positive as well as a negative thing.

When I began looking at the American scene, it seemed to me that Esalen was a fascinating case study in how Asian religions were translated into American culture -- what worked and what didn't. That was my initial question, and it quickly kind of ballooned and a lot of other questions entered in. I found the history far more intellectually stimulating and profound than most stereotypes of Esalen would suggest.

What kinds of stereotypes?

The idea that Esalen is identical to the counterculture of the 1960s, and that's all there is to it. In fact, Esalen was inspired well before there was a counterculture, and it's survived well after the counterculture.

I've also always been interested in the body and its relationship to spiritual experience. And so Esalen was a perfect prism through which to look at those things, too. One of Esalen's real geniuses is that it insists on a kind of embodied spirituality, that the spiritual life is most deeply lived in a body and in a body that's gendered and sexual at the same time.

Can you give an example?

I think a lot of people in the '50s and '60s, when they looked at Western religion, they saw it as anti-body. And they saw that to get to God you had to leave the world in some sense. And what happens in the '50s and '60s [at Esalen and elsewhere] is a gradual turn back towards the body and the world. And seeing God not as outside the universe but in the universe.

Did you grow up with a particular religion?

I was raised as a Roman Catholic, and I spent four years of college in a monastic seminary. However, as a young man I had become deeply anorexic, and it was very much tied up with my religious beliefs about the body and sexuality, and it just about killed me.

Luckily, the monks at the seminary were very wise, and they put me into psychoanalysis and cured me of this anorexia. But part of that cure involved abandoning these models of God that are anti-body and anti-sex. And so, when I left the seminary, I was still very much committed to a spiritual life, but it was a spiritual life that was not anti-body.

[Sci-2]

The Religion of Progress

Just as devout Christians are taught to see themselves as members of the mystical Body of Christ and participants in their faith’s core narrative of fall and redemption, the civil religion of Americanism teaches its faithful believers to see their citizenship as a quasi-mystical participation in a richly mythologized national history that portrays America as the incarnation of liberty in a benighted world. It’s of a piece with the religious nature of Americanism that liberty here doesn’t refer in practice to any particular constellation of human rights; instead, it’s a cluster of vague but luminous images that, to the believer, are charged with immense emotional power. When people say they believe in America, they don’t usually mean they’ve intellectually accepted a set of propositions about the United States; they mean that they have embraced the sacred symbols and narratives of the national faith.

The case of Communism is at least as susceptible to such an analysis, and in some ways even more revealing. Most of the ideas that became central to the civil religion of Communism were the work of Friedrich Engels, Marx’s friend and patron, who took over the task of completing the second and third volumes of Das Kapital on Marx’s death. It’s from Engels that we get the grand historical myth of the Communist movement, and it’s been pointed out many times already that every part of that myth has a precise equivalent in the Lutheran faith in which Engels was raised. Primitive communism is Eden; the invention of private property is the Fall; the stages of society thereafter are the different dispensations of sacred history; Marx is Jesus, the First International his apostles and disciples, the international Communist movement the Church, proletarian revolution the Second Coming, socialism the Millennium, and communism the New Jerusalem which descends from heaven in the last two chapters of the Book of Revelations.

[Seli]

This seems to be of general interest to these threads, someone apparently wrote an article arguing that religious belief and factual belief are inherently different things. I've only seen the argument summarized in this NPR piece http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/10/20/357519777/are-factual-and-religious-belief-the-same .

Consider the following two statements of "belief":

Devon believes that humans evolved from earlier primates over 100,000 years ago.

Devon believes that humans were created less than 10,000 years ago.

These claims are clearly at odds. Since they can't both be true, Devon holds contradictory beliefs. Right?

Maybe not.

A new paper by philosopher Neil Van Leeuwen offers a third possibility: That factual belief isn't the same as religious belief. Even though we use the same word, our attitudes toward the respective propositions — that humans evolved thousands and thousands of years ago, that humans were created quite recently — could differ considerably.

<snip>

eta: and the summary of the (of course paywalled) article:

I argue that psychology and epistemology should posit distinct cognitive attitudes of religious credence and factual belief, which have different etiologies and different cognitive and behavioral effects. I support this claim by presenting a range of empirical evidence that religious cognitive attitudes tend to lack properties characteristic of factual belief, just as attitudes like hypothesis, fictional imagining, and assumption for the sake of argument generally lack such properties. Furthermore, religious credences have distinctive properties of their own. To summarize: factual beliefs (i) are practical setting independent, (ii) cognitively govern other attitudes, and (iii) are evidentially vulnerable. By way of contrast, religious credences (a) have perceived normative orientation, (b') are susceptible to free elaboration, and (c') are vulnerable to special authority. This theory provides a framework for future research in the epistemology and psychology of religious credence.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027714001723

[Sci-2]

Thanks for that Seli.

Sadly I'm not sure what distinction he's hoping to make here. Aren't credences - as defined in the paper - largely incorrect facts?

[Jo498]

A similar distinction is rather clear in the new testament and has probably been familiar to theologicians and historians of religion for ages. In philosophical discussions in classical antiquity "belief" in the sense of an opinion that can be true or false is called "doxa". The task set in several famous dialogues by Plato is the distinction between "mere doxa" and "truthful systematic knowledge" = episteme.

Whereas St Paul uses "pistis" for religious belief. This should probably better be rendered as "faith" or "trust". belief/opinio/doxa is about factual statements being probably true or false. Faith/fides/pistis is more like trusting in a person, relying that someone will not be late to an appointment, does really love me etc. If someone would scientifically evaluate whether his partner/spouse loves him/her and whether one could trust them this would seem rather strange to us and we would probably suspect that he had already lost his faith in this person. But it would be appropriate for a belief about bacteria or electrons to be evaluated scientifically.

Of course there are connections. If I rely on a medical drug (or on a climbing rope) I am both concerned about true beliefs and a pragmatic trust in this thing. I cannot have faith in my brother if I am not sure whether he exists...

[Born Yesterday]

A similar distinction is rather clear in the new testament and has probably been familiar to theologicians and historians of religion for ages. In philosophical discussions in classical antiquity "belief" in the sense of an opinion that can be true or false is called "doxa". The task set in several famous dialogues by Plato is the distinction between "mere doxa" and "truthful systematic knowledge" = episteme.

Whereas St Paul uses "pistis" for religious belief. This should probably better be rendered as "faith" or "trust". belief/opinio/doxa is about factual statements being probably true or false. Faith/fides/pistis is more like trusting in a person, relying that someone will not be late to an appointment, does really love me etc.

Good points all around. I agree that the distinction exists, and is useful to keep in mind. But I don't believe it applies everywhere. No matter how we define "belief", Devon believes EITHER that humans evolved more than 100,000 years ago, OR that they were created less than 10,000 years ago. He can't believe both at the same time, because they are blatantly contradictory.

However, it's entirely possible for Devon to be confident that evolution is correct ("doxa", as you say: he's read all about it and he's pretty convinced by the logic of it - though he's not a biologist himself), AND that god created humans ("pistis", as you say: this belief happens to be his faith). Millions of people think like this particular Devon, because there's no immediate contradiction here. They simply conclude that god used evolution to create humans, and call it a day.