Here's why the "all religious fundementalism throughout history is the same" argument scares me...

[MadDAsHell]

Last edited Tue Feb 10, 2015, 07:03 PM - Edit history (1)

If you believe all religious fundamentalism (and its associated violent destruction) throughout history is the same, then it seems to me you have to believe at least one of the following as well:

1) the world has made absolutely no progress over time in terms of human rights, and thus it's perfectly reasonable to assume people will burn other people alive today, because people were burning people alive a few hundred years ago too. Nevermind the fact that many of the world's worst maladies are at just a fraction of where they were in the past (slavery, torture and cruel & unusual executions, etc.).

The world is no more enlightened today than it was 1,000 years ago, and NOONE can/should be expected to act more civilly than people were acting 1,000 years ago.

OR

2) The world has indeed become more enlightened, but ISIS and the more hardcore elements of Islamic extremism are somehow intellectually inferior to you and thus exempt from the expectation to act like rational humans in the 21st century.

If there are millions or billions of people around the world believing either one of these 2 things, I weep for our future.

[ck4829]

1. There are parallels that need to be identified and resisted

Black and white thinking, where someone is all-good, all-right OR all-evil and all-wrong
This thinking carries with it, a sense of self-righteousness where the person has it is not capable of being wrong in their opinion
Just those two things have led to violent destruction.

What about the extreme paranoia directed at the other or the outsider?

Also the idea that God appointed someone to be the personal dispenser of justice

These are just some of the parallels, you change the name and these religion or even something where religion isn't necessarily the focus (fascism comes to mind), and you will find these no matter what you are looking at.

[el_bryanto]

9. These are some very good points

Well worth considering.

Bryant

[on point]

2. or 3, their religious myth is 700 yrs behind Christian life cycle because their religion is 700 yrs

younger.

That is, religious myth go through typical life cycles, and Islam is just following typical life cycle. They are where Christianity was 1200 years after founding, in the middle of the re-commit to fundamentalism called the crusades and inquisition (Obama was right). Of course this led to reformation and eventually enlightenment, and now finally to secular ditching of superstition. Now think where Islam is 1200 years after founding.

One would have hoped Islam could have jumped ahead to Enlightenment and secularism, but they are busy reacting to this and engaged in fundamentalist re-commit with all the ugly 'we kill heretics' nonsense. May take some time for them to come out the other side and realize religion is a sickness.

[Bluenorthwest]

3. In terms of your point 1, you make the same mistake many others make. It is not 'hundreds of years

ago' that all the bad things happened, and a great deal of the progress on human rights is also relatively recent. About 150 years ago, the US had a slave economy, this is brutality and denial of human rights at the most extreme, exploitation as culture. Right about then, when the US was bringing that atrocity to an end, our good friends at the Vatican were losing secular rule over the Papal territories, over which they had ruled for hundreds of years. Each Pope had an official executioner who chopped off heads from the bodies of civil criminals who had been accused, tried and convicted by the Vatican of various crimes. It was an outside military force that made them cease this practice. The final Papal Executioner lopped off his last of 516 heads in 1865. Today the US and the Vatican claim to be things they simply were not, not hundreds of years ago at all. The Vatican claims to be super morally opposed to the death penalty, which it liberally imposed for centuries, they use that stance to prop up their anti contraception stance 'oh life is so precious to the eternal Church which has always valued all life'.
So there has been progress, but it's pretty freaking recent. There have been great wrongs, some of them not long ago enough to rationalize the affected rhetoric of innocence out of either the US or the Vatican.
Pretending it was all very very long ago and about witch burnings and such is sort of self serving. Even mentioning the Crusades is pointless, it was long, long ago and was proceeded by many Islamic incursions and conquests in Christendom including the sacking of St Peter's in Rome and the occupation of Iberia. War and then war, wars have atrocities....but slavery and the governing of the Vatican was not war, that was just how those people rolled.
That's how they rolled, and yet today they parade about judging everyone in fucking sight. And claiming to have always been righteous a bit too often and a bit too strongly.

[Agnosticsherbet]

4. Progress does not mean that extremism has changed its nature and I don't think it has

changed the entire world all that much.

Currently there are no Christian groups murdering people on that scale, but if you check out the Christian Identity Movement or the Dominionism or Klu Klux Klan (just to name a few) it has happened in the not to distant past and there are advocates of religious totalitarianism among us now who are quite capable of such crimes. Up until the 1950's lynching of blacks in the south was traced to both racism and right wing Christian movements, both forms of extremism.

A lot of Hitler's notions came out of a extremis Christian views and extremist evolutionary views.

But it doesn't just have to be religious extremism.

Check out Pol Pot and the Killing Fields. Pol Pot was a communist that believed in an idealized view of a Peasant Farming society put between 1.5 million and 2 million people to death.

The Tutsi murdered between 50000 and 200000 Hutu in the 1972 and then between 800000 and a million Hutu in the 1994. Thee was not real ethnic, linguistic, or religious differences. It was class warfare between the Cattle herding Tutsi and the farming Hutu. So extremist ideas of social class resulted in warfare.

Yes, progress has happened but humans, whether out of religious extremism or from some other ideological extremist idea, haven't changed all that much.

[NightWatcher]

5. I think some Progress can trigger increased fundamentalism

As some religions feel that their hold is slipping (ie, society starts to progress away from their fairy tales and ridiculous dogma) that they must increase their grip to a strangle in order to try to grasp what little bits they can.

Society takes a few steps forward and the fundies overreact and try to pull it back down a few thousand years. Society takes a few more steps and the fundies......

How dare you discover answers using critical thinking and science, we'll burn a few of you for being witches and heretics. Drop to your knees and profess your adoration and praise to the all loving, benevolent deity or we'll cut your heads off.

[Marr]

6. I don't think any of those things follow, except half of your second point.

Groups like ISIS, or religious fundamentalist outfits in the west who can't operate the same way (though I have zero doubt they would, if they could), are morally and intellectually inferior to others. Their mentality is from the middle ages; anti-science, irrational, xenophobic, intolerant, repressive, viciously tribal, etc., etc.

That doesn't mean they're exempted from the expectation to act like modern humans. Far from it-- their refusal to come out of the dark ages (and their attempts to drag us all back into one) is why so many people have disdain for them.

[Kelvin Mace]

7. Religion is little different than it was 500, 1000 or 2000 years ago

What is different is that many governments are secular and don't allow the kind of conduct religions would indulge in if they were still in charge. For example, some "mainstream" Christians in American only got around to repudiating slavery as in 1995, despite the fact that the secular government did it in 1868. Present day Dominionists would see the return of stoning and executing people for witchcraft.

[hifiguy]

8. As he often does, the greatest mind of the last millennium has the last word:

"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth." Albert Einstein

[braddy]

10. Christianity was fine until it got mixed up with government after a few centuries, by Rome,

Islam was created as violent by a merchant who had been a peaceful businessman, but who became a warrior chieftain as Islam's creator, Islam was created as a war machine.

[Tsiyu]

11. There are other options

people may be more enlightened, but people still each have their dark sides.

ISIS members aren't dumber; they are using religion the way it's been used for years.

Laws in many nations protect us from the fundies, so things have indeed improved, but wherever there is hatred, anger and poverty, people will rise up. Some will be peaceful; some will use religion to make their case for violence.

So: 1 ) things have improved; 2 ) all who use the name of their god to kill are not stupid, but are merely opportunistic.

[TheKentuckian]

12. Your concerns are reliant on some assumptions that don't logically follow

You are thinking under the assumption that progress is evenly and equally distributed when it never has been. The ability to build precision megastructures (see the pyramids), understanding of science, and use of advanced mathematics was way ahead of the west at one time is just one example.

It also assumes no regression is possible but history tells us that yes people go Dark Age on occasion and much is lost and must be discovered anew.

You also dangerously assume that "enlightenment" comes out of some increase in intelligence and I would argue that there is nothing to support that at all.and is pretty much just as much a fantasy as the deluded folks that think Jesus road a dinosaur have.
Seriously, it is little different on true scales than the people who wring their hands wondering why we haven't evolved beyond something the norm a generation or two past. Evolution is a long process, mutation can happen anytime.
I don't know how you can argue humans have more intelligence than they did 10,000 years ago much less a mere 500.

There is no reason to believe either option you provide as they are logically untenable and yet it doesn't negate the idea that fundamentalist religion has similar violent streaks.
I suggest we are seeing rawer, less constrained fundamentalist religion that what we might call it in our culture that just hasn't had a reformation not helped by by lack of stable government which has increased dependence on religion rather than a consistent secular alternative for societal structure. This is then magnified by now hundreds of years of interference by "infidels" who can play easy fall guy for the deprivations of their leaders and of course for the crimes of the dictators forced upon others.
Even if all other factors were equal (and this a dubious proposition) you are talking a religion significantly newer than say Christianity based on that why would it be shocking they might be a few hundred years behind schedule unless you start with the assumption that anything new will automatically be an improvement on what currently exists by carrying over any progress already made.

There is also the assumption is that other fundamentalists are "more advanced" rather than fewer in numbers and more constrained by a much larger population of much more secular people and governments that have been allowed to largely operate and evolve with the society for generations.

No humans have not evolved beyond shit.

No fundamentalist domination is not indicative of intelligence.

No, I don't believe our fundamentalists are really any better if all things are equal. Forced ultrasounds and the like aren't the goal line but rather road markers and as much as they can (somehow) get by with in the moment.

[tanyev]

13. Perhaps the progress that has been made is much more fragile than we want to believe.