What if religious violence is just a syndrome of a missing systemic trait?

[DetlefK]

Consider two religious people. They disagree over a religious point.
What could they do to end the argument?
They could cease it or they could find out which one is right.

Consider two scientists. They disagree over a scientific point.
What could they do to end the argument?
They could cease it or they could find out which one is right.




How do the scientists settle their dispute? They make predictions and then look what really happened. The loser joins the victor and they move on.

How do religious people settle their dispute?
By insisting even stronger that they are right and the other side is wrong.
By presenting evidence that the other side preemptively regards as invalid.



There were dozens of scientific disciplines and over time they all have fused into one giant network of tools and theories, from predicting the movement of the stars to fighting fever.

There were hundreds of religions, but why have none of them fused into more comprehensive explanations?
(AFAIK, that only happened in ancient times, when every country and city had its own religion and religious tolerance was a diplomatic tool during peaceful times. And back then it was custom for the defeated to adopt the religion of the victors, the Jews being the notable exception.)

Why aren't the wrong religions discarded over time, simply by contemplation, argument or discussion? Imagine huge religious conferences, with priests and preachers fighting long-winded philosophical battles to find out once and for all which religion is right and which religion is wrong.
Ridiculous, isn't it?

Because there is no way to compare religions through passive observation. This leaves conflict, violence, among the proponents as the only tool to compare the validity of religious ideas, by interpreting a mundane war as a symbol of a divine war.



Religion is not evil per se, religious people are not evil per se.
The elementary weakness is just that religious systems only have two choices to interact: Ignore each other or fight to the death.
Scientific systems have a third choice: symbiosis.

[Exultant Democracy]

1. While I think you are mostly correct, especially about fundies, I think you took a step too far.

The Religions that you are familiar with have grown and thrived in large part because of their symbiosis with other systems.

The process you ascribe to ancient times is the same thing the Spanish, British and the rest of the Europeans used while they were conquering the world and you can see the effects even today. If you ever spend much time in South or Central America it will become apparent quite rapidly that while they are almost all "Catholic" that their Catholicisms is like nothing you would find in the US because culturally these people never abandoned their pagan roots. They use the synchronicity they found between the two systems, catholic and pagan, and devised an alloy of both that would allow natives to place the new religion within the context of their original belief system.

On a side note, not that it matters to your argument, but sometimes the conquerors would give up their religion in favor of their new subject. Alexander the great pissed of his supporters when he decided he would rather be a Persian god king then follow his fathers religion. The Romans basically decided to become Greek, not just in religion but in every way they could. Egypt was conquered repeatedly by barbarian tribes that immediately converted to the Egyptian religion when they took over.

[DetlefK]

2. Good points.

For example: The Christmas-tree is rooted in the ancient german and norse religion where trees were a religious symbol.

While it is true that religions mutate and exchange traits (e.g. there are 3 types of Voodoo: caribbean/american Voodoo with catholic influence, traditional african Voodoo, and african Voodoo with islamic influence), that communication is limited to peripheral traits. One religion does not regard another religion as valid and their co-existence is a mutual non-aggression-pact on behalf of their believers, not on behalf of the religions themselves.

In contrast to religious systems, scientific systems have staked out parts of reality as their "claims" and regard each other's claims as valid. This is possible because they regard their kind as fallible and therefore incapable of describing all of reality at once. Religious systems do try to describe all of reality at once, which leads to conflict because those descriptions vary among their kind.

[onager]

4. Egypt has a stunning example of religious blending

The Kom el-Shoqafa catacombs in Alexandria. As ranted before, I went thru that place many times when I lived in Alexandria, and always saw something new.

It's a 3-story underground Roman tomb built around 200 CE. But its religious symbology mixes ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman styles.

Often in bizarre ways. One doorway is flanked by statues of the Egyptian gods Osiris and Sobek The Crocodile God. But they are dressed in the uniforms of Roman soldiers. Seeing a crocodile squeezed into Roman armor is just really weird.

In another place, two paintings are placed one above the other: Anubis preparing a dead person for entry into the Afterlife (pure Egyptian), and Persephone in Hades (pure Greek).

My favorite spot was a big vessel of mixed bones - human and horse. It was a shrine to Nemesis. Who, among her other multi-tasking chores, was the patron goddess of jockeys and horse racing.

According to legend, the shrine was built by a famous jockey in Alexandria who was thrown from his horse, crippled, and told he would never walk again. He fully recovered and went back to racing. And used his winnings to build the shrine to Nemesis.

Gee, that sort of thing sounds vaguely familiar...

And for "double bet on the Afterlife," it was hard to beat one exhibit in Alexandria's Graeco-Roman Museum. It was the corpse of a person who had been carefully prepared for an ancient Egyptian burial, with elaborate wrappings etc. But the wrappings were decorated with Xian crosses all over.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacombs_of_Kom_el_Shoqafa

[nil desperandum]

3. Violence

On a personal scale there might be some merit to your observations, for larger regional conflicts I suspect there is often more than ideology at play in spite of the propaganda perpetrated by either side.

Religion is only a catalyst that fuels mans natural propensity for problem resolution through violence. Furthermore, I would suggest that violence is how humanity, like all other earthly animal species, resolves most disputes whether based on religion or science or simple resource acquisition.

Religion can be used to provide motivation for conflict, and can be used to solidify opinion behind conflict but science has often aided that violence by contributing more effective means to kill other humans. While science and the disputes between scientists are not the root cause of this violence it does not lessen the contribution made by science. Even religious violence on a grand scale can be attributed to forces other than ideology, a desire to obliterate the heathens in the next nation is often times the mask for the desired acquisition of more arable land or natural resources held by those heathen.

We are by nature a murderous, violent species just like every other species spawned on this earth. We need very little reason to exercise our propensity for violence. Religion, politics, science, or the simple joy of slaughtering our perceived enemies are typically a means to justify what has been engineered into our DNA through evolutionary processes designed to weed out the weaker gene pools through whatever methodology suits the times.

The real question is why have we not recognized through science what we are? We are the current apex predator of this planet, responsible for the slaughter of countless lesser evolutionary species and millions of our own species. We are fooling ourselves when we imagine we are somehow a moral, caring species as there is absolutely zero evidence of that when we are viewed as a whole across the world. We routinely enslave those we can, we routinely prey upon those we can, and we routinely exhibit the same behavior as any other apex predator by killing anything we consider a threat. Mankind is nothing but another plague on a planet infested with all manner of murderous creatures.

Religion, science, politics, national pride it matters little to the dead how they came to be dead those words only matter to the living so they can continue to pretend they are not really what they are.