I realize that this entire mental exercise, including its characterization of religion, is somewhat tongue in cheek. But it's important to note that the fear of punishment doled out by an omniscient God only goes so far in preempting sin, and people are very adept at convincing themselves that they are doing God's will, whatever they're contemplating. The real value of religion or a guiding philosophy (e.g., Christianity, Stoicism, Buddhism) is how it foments inner restraint and even molds a person's desires. At best, it can even instill within a person the courage to stand against evil. The despot imagines that he has all authority, because he has all the weapons and security forces. The believer sees a higher authority. If you're watching Shogun on Hulu, take note of how Mariko is guided by her deeply held beliefs, and how she summons the courage to defy Ishido in the end. There's far more to the history of human beliefs than can be captured by a cartoonish materialistic conception.
I was raised a Quaker, with zero fear of punishment from god at all. I was taught, as a Quaker, that hell may or may not exist but Jesus died for my sins whether I wanted him to or not, so there would never be any punishment, and I should seek to do good because it's the right thing to do.
That's why, when I post the 3d graph, I say "1" on the Z axis is "all potential criminals are committing crime," not every *person* is committing crime. Potential criminals are deterred by punishment mechanics. Non-criminals don't need to be deterred.
But criminality is somehow a process of character formation over time, and it's that process that ultimately matters. Everyone is potentially a criminal, because selfish desires are part of the human psyche. Evolution has something to do with that, right?
Your parents sound like great people. Beliefs are interesting. There's what people are taught to believe, what we say we believe, and what we actually believe, as revealed by our actions. Some of that good socialization clearly took hold in you.
Your "only goes so far" also applies to Rationality, Science, etc. Faith is fundamental to all humans and their organizations, you can see it if you carefully watch how they talk.
Maybe tangentially, maybe not, but the imaginary chainsaw faced robot dogs reminded me of the ‘fake bomb detector’ scandal of the Iraq war.
Checkpoints were issued with ‘bomb detectors’ which were nothing more than toys. Someone paid a lot of money for them. Someone made a lot of money from them. Obviously they didn’t work.
But did they? It seemed to me that if everyone manning the roadblocks, the army, and everyone travelling through the roadblocks, the insurgents believed they worked, then they worked.
The army would use them to ‘scan’ vehicles. The insurgents would avoid carrying bombs in cars for fear of being ‘scanned’. It was a system based on belief. And it worked.
Until it didn’t. And loads of people got killed by a bomb. And some guy went to prison. But for a while there…..
Reminiscent of polygraph tests. Polygraph tests aren't "lie detectors" (they just measure proxies for nervousness, and people can be nervous for all sorts of reasons unrelated to dishonesty). But the misconception that polygraphs ARE lie detectors is so common that hooking someone up to one can induce them to be truthful even if they were planning on fibbing.
Yes. Exactly. It doesn’t even have to be ‘real’. David Simon The Wire creator talks about this in his book Homocide. To the extent that the detectives would make the suspects put their hand on the office photocopier which was preloaded with papers saying ‘truth’ ‘truth’ and ‘ lie’.
Then they would ‘calibrate’ the ‘lie detector’ and ask the suspect to state their name. The suspect would oblige. Press the button. ‘Truth’. And what is your address? The suspect answers. Press the button. ‘Truth’. Did you kill Jimmy J? ‘No!!! ‘ press the button. ‘Lie’. Sorry but the lie detector says that’s a lie. So you better start talking. Crestfallen the suspect would accept the result and confess.
I think the slow update time is a feature, not a bug. We can come up with a lot of ideas not entirely thought through or not taking particular circumstances into account.
But truth doesn’t pull down the fence; ignorance does. The fence builder’s purpose, planning and execution are objectively true. Truth built the fence, and as long as the condition which gives it purpose pertains, truth will argue for its retention.
God isn't real is truth - therefore religion should die? But the 'truth' seems to be that religion fills something within a human psyche, the worst cultures to live in seem to be explicitly atheist ones. Its generally better to be a kaffir in Saudi Arabia than . . . well, *most anyone* in the Soviet Union or during Mao's China, or North Korea, or . . .
We rarely see far enough to know when the 'truth' is complete.
The problem with relying solely on rational thought is that it is limited by the boundaries of human logic. I am a member of the Church of a Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. My post here is not an official statement of the church, but I am comfortable with my interpretations. If any other member of the Church disagrees with me, I am always willing to learn from competent sources.
We know that God loves all of His children and seeks to gather them back to Him. But everyone has absolute freedom of choice, so that goal is frustrated by any number of us making poor decisions. Those poor decisions lead to their own punishment in life, and restrictions on a person’s eternal growth. Does the Bible describe individuals and groups suffering horrible fates? Yup. But I would ask anyone using those instances to declare that Yahweh is vengeful to look at the run-up to those events. Mercy cannot trump justice.
Atheist-ish observation on the term "sin": it definitely appears to correlate strongly with "behaviors that feel good/tempting in the moment, but will cause/risk harm in the long run, either to the sinner or to the society they live in". This was not obviously the intended meaning to me growing up: it came across as "thing we adults incorrectly think is bad", probably as a result of which media I was exposed to, plus nobody actually explaining the term.
I mean, there's tons of examples of God being vengeful on people who disobeyed his rules - based on God's assumption that God has the moral authority to make and enforce God's rules.
But can you say, really, that god's vengeance on people who were, like, really into butt-stuff *was justified*? Not if you think people own themselves, are autonomous, and can decide their own purpose. That's something you do for property that is misbehaving.
When people get so into butt-stuff that roving groups of them insist on doing it to any unsuspecting male who passes through their town, I do think some divine vengeance is warranted.
Got here from the school shooting solutions piece, but this is better.
I think your assumption that "criminals come from a static pool of potential criminals, and it's this group that we as a society need to deter, because others are behaving well for positive reasons" is overtly simplistic. While undoubtedly some proportion of people will behave in morally desirable and legally permissible ways at all times and some will have a tendency or desire to misbehave at all times, for the majority incentives/costs calculus will occur.
We'll likely all make fraudulent statements to a government agency or shoplift from a supermarket to save a life of someone we know; some of us will do the same to be able to buy a case of booze or a pair of shoes. Routine petty crime, "underclass" crime, "underworld and gangland" crime all seem to operate in a different way than singular acts of "out of character" crime such as murdering a cheating spouse or spree shootings. People engaged in the former are a modern type of outlaw, or perhaps semi outlaw, and treat the potential penalties as costs of living and working in a particular way.
You can see a different version of this by looking at more restrictive rules and especially societies where "crime" in the sense of engaging in illegal activities is unbiquitous and not limited to criminals: you might be committing a crime by having homosexual or unmarried sex, listening to a foreign radio station, reading or just owning certain books, wearing or not wearing certain clothing, exchanging sexual acts for money, ingesting certain substances or traversing a road on foot outside a marked pedestrian crossing.
This is also the Toothfairyville system fails: is that it seems to assume a perfect overlap between the illegal (criminal) and immoral and we surely don't want this.
So, concluding this: I'm not so sure which place I'd prefer to live in (yes I know it sounds insane but wait). Living in an ABSOLUTE FEAR of hell, a fear that's a lie, seems an ultimately worse state of being than living in a realistic, practical fear of functioning robo dogs.
On what metric can you say that life in New Robotnik or Toothfairyville is better? In all three cases, nobody ever actually gets punished by the system, so there is zero harm from that. In all three, people live in constant fear of the system punishing them, and the harm from living a life of fear is exactly the same.
You've actually proven that religion is just as bad as a totalitarian police state, if the rules it enforces are the same. It is not better in any sense. And if the rules it enforces are less aligned to human flourishing, it will be worse. Atheists propose replacing the fear of one totalitarian punishment regime with the fear of a different totalitarian punishment regime. But if the atheist regime enforces fewer commandments, it will be better. And building a competent police state is plausibly cheaper than building a brainwashing engine that requires everyone to burn several hours a week going to an indoctrination camp.
Plus, it actually works, so when people test the system, they don't get away with crimes.
It is true that the $150 billion buys many valuable social services in addition to the indoctrination, but this does not count the time cost. Valuing leisure time is a tricky and unresolved issue (see my discussion at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DoED83teKobgyZMji/valuing-leisure-time ), but requiring everyone in a society to spend 2+ hours per week (when counting the commute) on forced indoctrination sessions will cost the equivalent of at least 2% of GDP.
So the police state clearly wins the cost-benefit analysis. It is cheaper and more effective. I am also fairly confident that people feel more free in modern Singapore than in 1950s America, because there is more de facto freedom of speech and thought.
>requiring everyone in a society to spend 2+ hours per week (when counting the commute) on forced indoctrination sessions will cost the equivalent of at least 2% of GDP
That seems like a pretty weak objection. Most people don't work on Sundays anyway.
Going to church was traditionally an excellent networking opportunity, both in a professional and personal/romantic sense. It's hard to imagine that the costs associated with mandatory churchgoing (the hit to GDP you describe) could be greater than the benefits provided in fertility and increased economic productivity.
AI and religion are the same to me. The priests who interpret and enforce religion are fallible and prone to corruption. AI programmers and owners of big tec companies are the priests of the chainsaw faced robot dogs. Thru corrupt shady programming they like the priests of religion will end up doing all kinds of nasty shit just like the Catholics have done throughout history. In the end is seems to me that all that both systems are flawed because the human factor always is involved in making the rules. I would choose to live off by myself and not in any of these towns.
You don't need new commandments, you just need to have a spiritual authority above the state that can influence the state. It's how what the perennialists call a traditional civilization is run, and you can read about it in Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power.
As to a new religion, I think it's going to have to be something pretty decentralized, since a big chunk of the culture has a lot of resistance to someone playing the guru/messiah (and the chunk that doesn't likely would declare the new religion Satanic). But that can totally work, quite a lot of traditions out there are pretty decentralized.
I have some ideas about this, and am working on a project to produce decentralized scripture (though that's not how it will be promoted).
I get what you're saying, but didn't we have this debate about whether or not religiosity causes people to be law-abiding like fifteen years ago, during the "New Atheism" era? Wasn't it conclusively shown time and time again that secular states enjoy a lower level of crime than states with an enforced state religion?
The Armenian genocide took place inside the Ottoman empire, an Islamic empire.
Most Rwandans are Christian. "Longman argues that both Catholic and Protestant churches helped to make the genocide possible by giving moral sanction to the killing... Some church leaders actively participated in the genocide. For example, Athanase Seromba, a Catholic priest responsible at the time of the genocide for the Nyange parish, was ultimately (after appeal) convicted in 2008 by the Appeals Chamber for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda of committing genocide and crimes against humanity. Specifically, it was shown that Seromba abused his high degree of trust in the community as a Catholic priest, when, instead of protecting the 1500-2000 Tutsi refugees sheltering in his church, he provided key and necessary approval for the church to be bulldozed to the ground with the intent to kill the refugees inside... On November 20, 2016, the Catholic Church in Rwanda released a statement signed by nine bishops apologizing for the role of its members in the genocide of 1994." (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Rwanda)
The partition of India resulted in mass killings of Hindus by Muslims and vice versa.
Sure, but Pol Pot killed twice as many people in the name of Communism. In fact, he managed to kill 25% of the entire population of his country.
And he was small time compared to the larger countries where communism has taken root.
> "Are you arguing that genocides don't happen in highly religious countries?"
I'm not him, but I'm sure he's not. The argument isn't that genocide doesn't happen in religious countries, but rather that the secular ones do manage their own body counts. Often quite high ones.
I'm not disputing that: of course secular countries have seen some of the most bloody and horrific genocides in history. But it sounded like Beej is arguing that religiosity prevents crime and/or genocide altogether, and I don't think that's remotely true.
In addition to the “make self-immolation great again” hat you’ll have to add “make robot chainsaw dogs great again.”
in all seriousness though, nice article. I recall a conversation between Dawkins, Harris, Dennet, and Hitchens 10+ years ago. At one point the group posed the question, “if you could eliminate religion from history, would you?” Not surprising Hawkins was an immediate, “yes” followed by a bunch of mockery. More surprising, Hitchens was an immediate “no” which he followed up with an acknowledgement of religions positive contributions to society.
You haven't shared your sources, but if this is typical of atheist argumentation, then Rule #1 is going to be to lump Christianity together with third-world paganism in order to water down the dataset, and Rule #2 is going to be to credit atheism with the achievements of societies that built their prosperity on a Judeo-Christian foundation and then recently pivoted towards atheism.
Besides, aren't all you guys "cultural Christians" this week?
The keyword there is "enforced," because the enforcement implies that the religion is still using the chainsaw-faced robot dogs, so to speak. As with "real socialism" what the article's talking about ain't been tried.
The legal system of Saudi Arabia is based on sharia, and one can be executed for apostasy. Despite (?) this, it has a higher intentional homicide rate than numerous secular countries like Spain, Norway, Iceland, South Korea, Switzerland and Japan. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate)
I think you'll agree that direct comparison to other cultures is not useful, and at a minimum you'd have to compare to similar cultures such as Somalia, Yemen, and Iraq.
I realize that this entire mental exercise, including its characterization of religion, is somewhat tongue in cheek. But it's important to note that the fear of punishment doled out by an omniscient God only goes so far in preempting sin, and people are very adept at convincing themselves that they are doing God's will, whatever they're contemplating. The real value of religion or a guiding philosophy (e.g., Christianity, Stoicism, Buddhism) is how it foments inner restraint and even molds a person's desires. At best, it can even instill within a person the courage to stand against evil. The despot imagines that he has all authority, because he has all the weapons and security forces. The believer sees a higher authority. If you're watching Shogun on Hulu, take note of how Mariko is guided by her deeply held beliefs, and how she summons the courage to defy Ishido in the end. There's far more to the history of human beliefs than can be captured by a cartoonish materialistic conception.
I was raised a Quaker, with zero fear of punishment from god at all. I was taught, as a Quaker, that hell may or may not exist but Jesus died for my sins whether I wanted him to or not, so there would never be any punishment, and I should seek to do good because it's the right thing to do.
That's why, when I post the 3d graph, I say "1" on the Z axis is "all potential criminals are committing crime," not every *person* is committing crime. Potential criminals are deterred by punishment mechanics. Non-criminals don't need to be deterred.
But criminality is somehow a process of character formation over time, and it's that process that ultimately matters. Everyone is potentially a criminal, because selfish desires are part of the human psyche. Evolution has something to do with that, right?
Your parents sound like great people. Beliefs are interesting. There's what people are taught to believe, what we say we believe, and what we actually believe, as revealed by our actions. Some of that good socialization clearly took hold in you.
This assumes that culturally normative behavior isn't criminal in fact though!
Your "only goes so far" also applies to Rationality, Science, etc. Faith is fundamental to all humans and their organizations, you can see it if you carefully watch how they talk.
Maybe tangentially, maybe not, but the imaginary chainsaw faced robot dogs reminded me of the ‘fake bomb detector’ scandal of the Iraq war.
Checkpoints were issued with ‘bomb detectors’ which were nothing more than toys. Someone paid a lot of money for them. Someone made a lot of money from them. Obviously they didn’t work.
But did they? It seemed to me that if everyone manning the roadblocks, the army, and everyone travelling through the roadblocks, the insurgents believed they worked, then they worked.
The army would use them to ‘scan’ vehicles. The insurgents would avoid carrying bombs in cars for fear of being ‘scanned’. It was a system based on belief. And it worked.
Until it didn’t. And loads of people got killed by a bomb. And some guy went to prison. But for a while there…..
here’s a link to an unpaywalled version of the story. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/may/02/fake-bomb-detector-conman-jailed
Reminiscent of polygraph tests. Polygraph tests aren't "lie detectors" (they just measure proxies for nervousness, and people can be nervous for all sorts of reasons unrelated to dishonesty). But the misconception that polygraphs ARE lie detectors is so common that hooking someone up to one can induce them to be truthful even if they were planning on fibbing.
Yes. Exactly. It doesn’t even have to be ‘real’. David Simon The Wire creator talks about this in his book Homocide. To the extent that the detectives would make the suspects put their hand on the office photocopier which was preloaded with papers saying ‘truth’ ‘truth’ and ‘ lie’.
Then they would ‘calibrate’ the ‘lie detector’ and ask the suspect to state their name. The suspect would oblige. Press the button. ‘Truth’. And what is your address? The suspect answers. Press the button. ‘Truth’. Did you kill Jimmy J? ‘No!!! ‘ press the button. ‘Lie’. Sorry but the lie detector says that’s a lie. So you better start talking. Crestfallen the suspect would accept the result and confess.
A great book.
I think the slow update time is a feature, not a bug. We can come up with a lot of ideas not entirely thought through or not taking particular circumstances into account.
Patch only after code review.
But truth doesn’t pull down the fence; ignorance does. The fence builder’s purpose, planning and execution are objectively true. Truth built the fence, and as long as the condition which gives it purpose pertains, truth will argue for its retention.
Not all fences.
Your objection is with the op, not me.
"Truth built the fence".
>" Should it?"
Yes.
But there are *levels* of truth, aren't there?
God isn't real is truth - therefore religion should die? But the 'truth' seems to be that religion fills something within a human psyche, the worst cultures to live in seem to be explicitly atheist ones. Its generally better to be a kaffir in Saudi Arabia than . . . well, *most anyone* in the Soviet Union or during Mao's China, or North Korea, or . . .
We rarely see far enough to know when the 'truth' is complete.
But its interesting to see people like Y starting to understand this.
Surely Yudkowsky has been an AI alarmist for decades?
I know he was very, very pro-Singularity at one point.
Yudkowsky has been concerned about unfriendly AI since at least 2008: https://intelligence.org/files/AIPosNegFactor.pdf
Sure. I meant like, 1994-ish?
The problem with relying solely on rational thought is that it is limited by the boundaries of human logic. I am a member of the Church of a Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. My post here is not an official statement of the church, but I am comfortable with my interpretations. If any other member of the Church disagrees with me, I am always willing to learn from competent sources.
We know that God loves all of His children and seeks to gather them back to Him. But everyone has absolute freedom of choice, so that goal is frustrated by any number of us making poor decisions. Those poor decisions lead to their own punishment in life, and restrictions on a person’s eternal growth. Does the Bible describe individuals and groups suffering horrible fates? Yup. But I would ask anyone using those instances to declare that Yahweh is vengeful to look at the run-up to those events. Mercy cannot trump justice.
Atheist-ish observation on the term "sin": it definitely appears to correlate strongly with "behaviors that feel good/tempting in the moment, but will cause/risk harm in the long run, either to the sinner or to the society they live in". This was not obviously the intended meaning to me growing up: it came across as "thing we adults incorrectly think is bad", probably as a result of which media I was exposed to, plus nobody actually explaining the term.
Soddom and Gommoragh.
The Flood
I mean, there's tons of examples of God being vengeful on people who disobeyed his rules - based on God's assumption that God has the moral authority to make and enforce God's rules.
But can you say, really, that god's vengeance on people who were, like, really into butt-stuff *was justified*? Not if you think people own themselves, are autonomous, and can decide their own purpose. That's something you do for property that is misbehaving.
When people get so into butt-stuff that roving groups of them insist on doing it to any unsuspecting male who passes through their town, I do think some divine vengeance is warranted.
Don't get me wrong here - I'd still prefer to live in a Mormon theocracy than in any of the atheist states that have existed.
Got here from the school shooting solutions piece, but this is better.
I think your assumption that "criminals come from a static pool of potential criminals, and it's this group that we as a society need to deter, because others are behaving well for positive reasons" is overtly simplistic. While undoubtedly some proportion of people will behave in morally desirable and legally permissible ways at all times and some will have a tendency or desire to misbehave at all times, for the majority incentives/costs calculus will occur.
We'll likely all make fraudulent statements to a government agency or shoplift from a supermarket to save a life of someone we know; some of us will do the same to be able to buy a case of booze or a pair of shoes. Routine petty crime, "underclass" crime, "underworld and gangland" crime all seem to operate in a different way than singular acts of "out of character" crime such as murdering a cheating spouse or spree shootings. People engaged in the former are a modern type of outlaw, or perhaps semi outlaw, and treat the potential penalties as costs of living and working in a particular way.
You can see a different version of this by looking at more restrictive rules and especially societies where "crime" in the sense of engaging in illegal activities is unbiquitous and not limited to criminals: you might be committing a crime by having homosexual or unmarried sex, listening to a foreign radio station, reading or just owning certain books, wearing or not wearing certain clothing, exchanging sexual acts for money, ingesting certain substances or traversing a road on foot outside a marked pedestrian crossing.
This is also the Toothfairyville system fails: is that it seems to assume a perfect overlap between the illegal (criminal) and immoral and we surely don't want this.
So, concluding this: I'm not so sure which place I'd prefer to live in (yes I know it sounds insane but wait). Living in an ABSOLUTE FEAR of hell, a fear that's a lie, seems an ultimately worse state of being than living in a realistic, practical fear of functioning robo dogs.
"But who do we trust to do that? "
Me, duh.
I promise to only abuse my power in entertaining ways.
I want a chainsaw faced robot dog... I'd name him Buzzy.
"Here Buzzy! C'mon Buzzy! Who's a good boy? You're a good boy! No licking, no licking!"
On what metric can you say that life in New Robotnik or Toothfairyville is better? In all three cases, nobody ever actually gets punished by the system, so there is zero harm from that. In all three, people live in constant fear of the system punishing them, and the harm from living a life of fear is exactly the same.
You've actually proven that religion is just as bad as a totalitarian police state, if the rules it enforces are the same. It is not better in any sense. And if the rules it enforces are less aligned to human flourishing, it will be worse. Atheists propose replacing the fear of one totalitarian punishment regime with the fear of a different totalitarian punishment regime. But if the atheist regime enforces fewer commandments, it will be better. And building a competent police state is plausibly cheaper than building a brainwashing engine that requires everyone to burn several hours a week going to an indoctrination camp.
Plus, it actually works, so when people test the system, they don't get away with crimes.
Demonstrating that faith comes in many forms.
The Singapore Police Force cost roughly SGD 2 billion per year in 2013 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore_Police_Force), which was USD 1.6 billion, or about 0.5% of Singapore's GDP that year.
Traditionally, religion is expected to consume 10% of GDP. Currently in the US, religious organizations have a total revenue of about $150 billion (https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/market-research-reports/religious-organizations-industry/), which is 0.6% of our GDP, for a small fraction of the indoctrination that happened in the past and would be required in the future.
It is true that the $150 billion buys many valuable social services in addition to the indoctrination, but this does not count the time cost. Valuing leisure time is a tricky and unresolved issue (see my discussion at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DoED83teKobgyZMji/valuing-leisure-time ), but requiring everyone in a society to spend 2+ hours per week (when counting the commute) on forced indoctrination sessions will cost the equivalent of at least 2% of GDP.
So the police state clearly wins the cost-benefit analysis. It is cheaper and more effective. I am also fairly confident that people feel more free in modern Singapore than in 1950s America, because there is more de facto freedom of speech and thought.
>requiring everyone in a society to spend 2+ hours per week (when counting the commute) on forced indoctrination sessions will cost the equivalent of at least 2% of GDP
That seems like a pretty weak objection. Most people don't work on Sundays anyway.
Going to church was traditionally an excellent networking opportunity, both in a professional and personal/romantic sense. It's hard to imagine that the costs associated with mandatory churchgoing (the hit to GDP you describe) could be greater than the benefits provided in fertility and increased economic productivity.
AI and religion are the same to me. The priests who interpret and enforce religion are fallible and prone to corruption. AI programmers and owners of big tec companies are the priests of the chainsaw faced robot dogs. Thru corrupt shady programming they like the priests of religion will end up doing all kinds of nasty shit just like the Catholics have done throughout history. In the end is seems to me that all that both systems are flawed because the human factor always is involved in making the rules. I would choose to live off by myself and not in any of these towns.
You don't need new commandments, you just need to have a spiritual authority above the state that can influence the state. It's how what the perennialists call a traditional civilization is run, and you can read about it in Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power.
As to a new religion, I think it's going to have to be something pretty decentralized, since a big chunk of the culture has a lot of resistance to someone playing the guru/messiah (and the chunk that doesn't likely would declare the new religion Satanic). But that can totally work, quite a lot of traditions out there are pretty decentralized.
I have some ideas about this, and am working on a project to produce decentralized scripture (though that's not how it will be promoted).
Very well stated and argued.
I get what you're saying, but didn't we have this debate about whether or not religiosity causes people to be law-abiding like fifteen years ago, during the "New Atheism" era? Wasn't it conclusively shown time and time again that secular states enjoy a lower level of crime than states with an enforced state religion?
I'm going to guess the New Atheists forgot to include genocide deaths in their crime count.
Are you arguing that genocides don't happen in highly religious countries?
They tend to happen in the countries *of the neighbors* of highly religious countries.
They tend to happen *inside* highly secular countries.
Like it or not, there's a distinction between 'democide' (the killing of your own people) and genocide.
The Armenian genocide took place inside the Ottoman empire, an Islamic empire.
Most Rwandans are Christian. "Longman argues that both Catholic and Protestant churches helped to make the genocide possible by giving moral sanction to the killing... Some church leaders actively participated in the genocide. For example, Athanase Seromba, a Catholic priest responsible at the time of the genocide for the Nyange parish, was ultimately (after appeal) convicted in 2008 by the Appeals Chamber for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda of committing genocide and crimes against humanity. Specifically, it was shown that Seromba abused his high degree of trust in the community as a Catholic priest, when, instead of protecting the 1500-2000 Tutsi refugees sheltering in his church, he provided key and necessary approval for the church to be bulldozed to the ground with the intent to kill the refugees inside... On November 20, 2016, the Catholic Church in Rwanda released a statement signed by nine bishops apologizing for the role of its members in the genocide of 1994." (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Rwanda)
The partition of India resulted in mass killings of Hindus by Muslims and vice versa.
Sure, but Pol Pot killed twice as many people in the name of Communism. In fact, he managed to kill 25% of the entire population of his country.
And he was small time compared to the larger countries where communism has taken root.
> "Are you arguing that genocides don't happen in highly religious countries?"
I'm not him, but I'm sure he's not. The argument isn't that genocide doesn't happen in religious countries, but rather that the secular ones do manage their own body counts. Often quite high ones.
I'm not disputing that: of course secular countries have seen some of the most bloody and horrific genocides in history. But it sounded like Beej is arguing that religiosity prevents crime and/or genocide altogether, and I don't think that's remotely true.
In addition to the “make self-immolation great again” hat you’ll have to add “make robot chainsaw dogs great again.”
in all seriousness though, nice article. I recall a conversation between Dawkins, Harris, Dennet, and Hitchens 10+ years ago. At one point the group posed the question, “if you could eliminate religion from history, would you?” Not surprising Hawkins was an immediate, “yes” followed by a bunch of mockery. More surprising, Hitchens was an immediate “no” which he followed up with an acknowledgement of religions positive contributions to society.
Cheers
You haven't shared your sources, but if this is typical of atheist argumentation, then Rule #1 is going to be to lump Christianity together with third-world paganism in order to water down the dataset, and Rule #2 is going to be to credit atheism with the achievements of societies that built their prosperity on a Judeo-Christian foundation and then recently pivoted towards atheism.
Besides, aren't all you guys "cultural Christians" this week?
I don't know who "you guys" are. I'm an atheist and have been for decades.
I think he means Richard Dawkins and friends.
The keyword there is "enforced," because the enforcement implies that the religion is still using the chainsaw-faced robot dogs, so to speak. As with "real socialism" what the article's talking about ain't been tried.
The legal system of Saudi Arabia is based on sharia, and one can be executed for apostasy. Despite (?) this, it has a higher intentional homicide rate than numerous secular countries like Spain, Norway, Iceland, South Korea, Switzerland and Japan. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate)
I think you'll agree that direct comparison to other cultures is not useful, and at a minimum you'd have to compare to similar cultures such as Somalia, Yemen, and Iraq.
Sure. But you're still not addressing the assertion: on the graph, Sharia law is *not represented*.
Which graph are you referring to?
The 3D graph of belief and police and crime.
Some would argue that Sharia is the perfect intersection of belief, police, and crime. Interesting graph.