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#201 | |
Rock n' Roll Doggie
Band-aid Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: The Most Important State in the Union
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#202 |
ONE
love, blood, life Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: New York / Dallas / Austin
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Religion is such an incredibly malleable thing. The Bible and the Quran are both violent in some passages, peaceful in others... it is easy to create an interpretation saying just about anything, to the point where it's hard to say that either book defines a religion. Rather, the religion that people follow is defined by their interpretation of the Books, to the point where I'd say that al Qaeda probably has more in common with, say, the great people of Westboro Baptist Church than most Muslims.
__________________Peace, to me, is about peaceful integration. It is about expanding communities beyond the immediate. Really, human history has slowly progressed more towards global integration, towards commonality (I highly recommend reading the book Nonzero by Robert Wright for more. It and Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond are my favorite nonfiction books.). Integration is largely a function of economic dependence. Why are China and the United States at absolutely zero risk of warfare, despite competing ideologies and major potential for geopolitical conflict? Why, since 1945, is warfare dying down in Europe for the first time since the fall of the Western Roman Empire? In both cases, it's because of incredibly deep economic integration between people, which in the case of Europe is even leading to the blurring of lines between nation-states (the merits of that are another argument). In Europe's case, these new connections between peoples are cutting through centuries of nationalistic distaste for other Europeans. Can anyone imagine any combination of France, Germany, and United Kingdom at war anymore? It's unthinkable, and a century ago, it was constant. Economic integration creates two things issues that bring people together. First, it helps to prevent wars, as countries realize that it would be economically suicidal to wage war on those on which they depend. Second, it helps to bring people together, as they have to mingle to facilitate their trade; it exposes the humanity of different races to each other, to put it crudely. Since the mid-1800s or so, however, the Middle East has largely been the object of Western intervention and tampering without economic benefit. When the Ottoman Empire began to decline, Britain, France, and Russia all swept in, and the region that was the economic center of the world while Europe languished in the Dark Ages began to fail. It only got worse after First World War, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed completely and the European victors (against the advice of a very wise president, Woodrow Wilson) got to cut out zones of imperial influence in the Middle East. Western colonialism and neo-colonialism (for which neo-conservativism is basically an aphorism) did nothing to develop the area, and it's no wonder to me that there is so much anti-Western sentiment there. By poverty, especially in the poorest of the poor areas like Somalia and Afghanistan, is borne the sort of extremism and hatred towards "the man" on which terrorism survives. And in this case, "the man" is the West, as typified most strongly by the United States. Of course Islam develops around this. While the vast majority of Muslims are just like the vast majority of Christians, it's no surprise at all to me that a strong and attention-hungry sect of Islam developed that despises the West. The Quran can be used to support it, but is that really what matters? Of course not. The Bible could too if the people of the area happened to largely be Christians! Any ideology can be used in that manner, though religion is easy. But wars get waged all the time on the backs of other sorts of ideologies used in a mythological form. Nationalism is extremely common, of course. For neo-conservatives, Democracy gets used, although it is heavily intertwined with Nationalism. The ideology is not what matters. The religion is not the source of evil here. Nix Islam, and people would be rioting over attacks on the sovereignty and the culture of the Arab people. The problem lies with resentment bred by decades of economic non-integration. And by integration, I don't mean Washington Consensus colonial raiding-of-resources nonsense. I mean trade of equals - the sort of trade which Japan and China were able to develop by themselves with comparatively little Western colonial influence. So yes, in a nutshell, religion isn't the real issue here. It gets used to justify conflict, but that conflict tends to be bred by economics, and other ideologies can fill the same roll. |
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#203 |
ONE
love, blood, life Join Date: Mar 2005
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You make some good points, digitize and I'm sure all that factors in. It's really late here (beddy byes), so don't take my short post as dismissive, but aggression between Christianity and Islam go back much further than the 1800s. The crusades being an obvious example.
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#204 | |
ONE
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It's not surprising that the countries in which the influence of religion is dwindling show less potential for being at war with one another. |
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#205 | |
ONE
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#206 |
ONE
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right, but economics wasn't a driving force so much as religion was. It seems to me to be a more distilled example of the similar situations today
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#207 | |
ONE
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#208 |
ONE
love, blood, life Join Date: May 2009
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I'd have to challenge this, I'm afraid. I would say that the early Crusades were an example of kings and the pope - political figures, essentially - taking advantage of religious individuals for the sake of their own economic gain. Kings got rid of the nobles who were destroying royal lands with their constant feuding, and the pope tightened his stranglehold on European politics. The lucrative trade routes in the Near East were also an object of desire. All this is to say that those who instigated the Crusades were not motivated by a hatred of Islam so much as by a desire to further their own political and economic interests. They simply took advantage of religious people in order to further their own ends, much as someone like Bin Laden did. There is a lot of interesting scholarship on the issue of piety in the motivations of ordinary crusaders, by the way.
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#209 |
ONE
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But that is pretty much organized religion in a nut shell. Kings, Popes, the church in general manipulating and controlling the population for personal gain; that's one of my primary reasons for being so anti-religious. I would never argue against the fact that there were probably nefarious motivations for the crusades; I'd be shocked to hear of any virtuous motivations. But take away the religious aspects and they wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Regardless of who's pulling the strings at the top, it's the infection of religion throughout the general populace that allows these things to happen.
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#210 | |
ONE
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#211 |
Rock n' Roll Doggie
VIP PASS Join Date: Dec 2003
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I'd say pride in religion, country or anything else would make people act irrationally when provoked. It's the "this is who I am and how dare anyone insult me" type of thinking. It is also mass egotism.
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#212 |
Blue Crack Addict
Join Date: Jan 2010
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Religion is a symptom of poverty, or more accurately, a symptom of economic inequality.
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#213 | |
ONE
love, blood, life Join Date: May 2009
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For a long time the consensus about the spread of Christianity and Islam was that the celebration of the poor and marginalized attracted those demographics, i.e. early Christianity and Islam was populated by the lower rungs of society. Recent evidence is challenging that vantage point rather convincingly, though. |
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#214 |
Blue Crack Addict
Join Date: Apr 2002
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#215 | |
ONE
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#216 | |
Blue Crack Supplier
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: in the sound dancing - w Bono & Edge :D
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And i didn't expect him to leap out of his seat and do something right at that second..... i'm sorry he still looked like a deer in the headlights.... what he could have done was excuse himself after half min, min saying children/students sometimes when something very important a President has to leave where he is and go talk with his advisors... etc nice and calm... |
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#217 |
Rock n' Roll Doggie
Join Date: Mar 2005
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Mitt would never apologize to the protesters! Romney 2012!
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#218 | |
Blue Crack Supplier
Join Date: Dec 2003
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Really most Muslims won't be reacting , yeah i do believe other social-economics factors enter in. there's a ?billion or so believers in Islam so... these are smallish groups in relative terms. Also that's why you'll see a lot of geometrics, plants animals in there art and mosques, not depictions of Mohammed and his ? relatives or supporters. I can also tell you living in a part of Brooklyn near to where a lot of Musloms live/worship the day after (or 2nd day) 9-11 there was an interfaith march including Muslims to commemorate the death & suffering. I didn't know that area well so i was going down this street and that never found them to join in. finally there were thousands maybe even more of Muslins in Terhan, Iran that night (still our day/early eve) with candles in the big square memorializing the atrocity. |
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#219 | |
Rock n' Roll Doggie
Band-aid Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: The American Resistance
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Which countries protected private property rights and economic freedom and which ones viewed the state's role as insuring "economic equality"? |
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#220 |
ONE
love, blood, life Join Date: Mar 2005
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Religion is a symptom of being afraid to die.
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