Not that there’s anything good about this, but hearing that both Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins “resigned” from whatever honorary positions they had with the FFRF rather made my heart sink.
I was a linguistics student for a time, and Pinker’s books always had a sociolinguistic aspect to them, but I never saw transphobia. It was admittedly a while back, so it really wasn’t yet settling into the national consciousness.
I also admired Dawkins’ writing style; again, I saw nothing transphobic.
So for both of these guys to be like “nope, you should have totally kept a piece up that says transwomen should have fewer rights and options” is, maybe, the final insult of 2024.
Before I get to your counter-arguments, I must comment on your general stance since it strikes me as a bit contradicting, let’s start from where we don’t agree and then go to where we might agree,(although it should be the opposite but ok) let’s see:
Where we don’t agree:
this actually doesn’t make any sense from a common sense perspective basically, people are not just sitting around and deciding on their own to commit crimes and justify it with their religious scriptures later, even just saying that makes you want to take a look at those scriptures, doesn’t this alone makes you at least suspect that the scripture has to do something with their actions, I mean you just said this
That’s the contradiction, as a detective/doctor who wants to cure Humanity from evil you have to suspect every element of the equation, not dismiss it… Especially if that element is the core component of the equation, I’ll explain why below
Where we agree on
Not just in the modern era, across history and it goes back all the way to the founding figures of these religions, why do you think that in this modern day and age, religious people dress the way they dress, slay a sheep or goat every year, pray a number of times at specific times each day… and all these kinds of rituals… God isn’t talking to them now, he isn’t sending more prophets… So how do they know what to do? Priests/Imams tell them what to do… Yes… But how do they know… they’re getting it from somewhere, right? An original scripture (Quran/Bible/Torah…etc.)… which bring us to your first argument.
The issue is not of who’s making the twisting, the issue is that the text as peaceful as it might be, IS STILL Twist-ABLE, which doesn’t indicate that a Divine authority with infinite wisdom wrote it in the first place, does it? God doesn’t make mistakes, right? How could he fuc* it up so bad… Like you could avoid controversial lines, bruh… annnnd avoid genocides that took place over centuries, avoid entire civilizations, minorities, cultures, tribes being wiped out off the face of the earth because they don’t share the same beliefs
I’m not denying that people do twist the scripture and use it to manipulate people, “scholars” in Saudi Arabia for example keep making forbidden things allowed when it comes to their king… But there’s more into it than just powerful people and rich sheikhs and priests
I used to look at my old religion as the absolute truth, I read its scriptures and thought it was flawless, and only a Deity could have written it, despite also reading the clear, straightforward, blunt, grossly honest, explicit commands and orders to kill Jews, or to beat up women, harm gay people…just a few examples
Here’s the thing, in any religious society there are Categories of people, from the least conservative (progressives) to the most conservatives to the extreme fundamentalists, the great misconception people have about religion, is that people misinterpret the scripture and then become extremists, nope… like I said I used to read (explicit not vague) extreme passages that incite violence and still thought there’s nothing wrong with the text, there’s no hate speech, and that my religion was perfect… so what’s happening here?
The answer is people don’t actually follow the teachings of their religion to the letter, they’re just happy being conservatives, it already gives them all they need, a sense of unity, protection and that they’re part of something bigger… and then there is the serious minorities (AKA the fundamentalists) who take their stuff Seriously, and they’ll follow every single order with “blind faith” (being sarcastic)
a religion can have all the ethics in the world written on its pages, but the mere fact that it has passages that incite violence (even if it was just a single page) shows it’s not worthy of following, because it was enough to make a group of people carry firearms and go on a killing spree, or drive a car through the crowds or bomb themselves, and at many points in history, it moved armies to kill other armies and erase civilizations
if you were planning to convert to <insert religion name here> the approach of looking of what people say and do is a very flawed approach (I just explained why, it’s the Categories of religious people, fundamentalists, conservatives, progressives… Etc) and you’re setting yourself up for great disappointment, and you’ll feel tricked when you find out the truth.
So the best approach, since it’s the most logical one, is to go to the official sources to read what it says and what’s it all about, and you’ll be surprised to know that some religions (e.g. Islam) require you to read the Quran otherwise you won’t know how to pray, and therefore you won’t go to heaven, you see the importance of scripture, without it, you’re already disqualified. So how could you say? :
And guess what ?
It’s just so happens that ALL terrorist groups that I’m aware of, they do things by the book, the way they kill, the way they execute, they way they talk, the way they look, they didn’t invent a thing, it’s all already written in a book, and they’re just following holy orders that will get them into heaven
And when you open that book, you’ll see that They’re copying the founder(s)'s of that religion own doings (crimes)…
You say that you wish they took their beliefs Seriously, I take it you mean the good parts, in that, I’m with you… I wish that too… Personally, I want them to wake up to religion flaws because I hate seeing people being manipulated and exploited due to their ignorance… It’s actually very harmful, not to just them, but all of us.
Your first counter-argument had some weight to it (despite the little contradiction in your statements), this one feels pretty rushed out and doesn’t hold any weight… I’ll explain
I see you picked USA and Indonesia, and you compared the number of terrorist attacks in each, and your conclusion was that there’s more in the USA than in Indonesia (which seems right)
here where it falls apart: a quick search shows that the US is bigger and more populated
This already makes the comparison unfair… But issue #02 why Indonesia? Like, why that country? Is it because I talked about Islam and Indonesia is a Muslim country so it qualifies for the comparison somehow… like if that’s the criteria I would say that Saudi Arabia is more worthy to choose for that comparison, especially since Saudis are fluent in Arabic, while Indonesians have their own language…
#03 issue; the US is a Christian majority country, and if your intention was to prove that Islam doesn’t have that much influence over these attacks by picking an arbitrary Muslim country, which makes the number arbitrary… well if we’re comparing religion VS religion and not a Country VS Country, you should compare every Christian country to every Muslim country ( combined ) and even then the results wouldn’t mean anything… Christian fundamentalists commit more crimes than Muslim fundamentalists, how would that help solve religious extremism again?
Stats you’re asking for wouldn’t address the problems (wars, violence, hate speech… etc.) that are associated with religion… Because you’re looking in the wrong place, you want to understand a religion, look no further than it’s official books, look into the history of its founders, you’ll find your answers and more.
sorry for the wall of text… Happy new year
The region of the world does not change the text of the religion, which in turn should mean that the type of terrorist attacks committed by specific religions should be similar. This is the case when we look at the links between Indonesian Islamic terror orgs and other Islamic terror orgs. The reason I chose Indonesia was a population based comparison to show off an outlier in the United states. The united states despite being significantly less religious than Indonesia, a nation of comparable population has a comparable amount of terrorist attacks. In addition, why does the language of a religious text matter in the modern era? The Bible wasn’t written in English, but it certainly manages to be a part of lives of English speaking peoples.
The claim to compare terrorist acts by religion does make sense, so I looked up some data - https://www.visionofhumanity.org/maps/global-terrorism-index/ which does seem to indicate the majority of violence in terms of number of people harmed does seem to stem from Islamist terror organizations. However, these actions seem to be heavily concentrated in specific regions with specific terror groups. For instance, half of all terrorist deaths happened in one region of sub Saharan Africa - Sahel. Additionally, in the West, politically motivated attacks overtook religious attacks, which declined by 82%. There were five times more political attacks than religious attacks. This is my point fundamentally - We cannot draw a direct line between terrorist attacks and religious people, leave alone between terrorist attacks and the text of specific religions.
However, as I mentioned earlier, I will contend that groupthink caused the lack of a functional truth seeking algorithm, and the lack of a robust meta-ethical foundation does play an important factor in religious terrorism specifically. Religion by definition has a requirement of trusting claims without evidence, and is therefore strongly associated with groupthink, which also requires blind trust.
Beehaw is a leftist space, and leftists are known for their essays lol, as I have just demonstrated myself. Additionally, I think I’ve spoken my piece here, so I probably will not reply further, as it does take significant time to read and respond with evidence, to claims made without evidence.