When God sanctions killing, the people listen

[atommom]

New research published in the March issue of Psychological Science may help elucidate the relationship between religious indoctrination and violence, a topic that has gained renewed notoriety in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. In the article, University of Michigan psychologist Brad Bushman and his colleagues suggest that scriptural violence sanctioned by God can increase aggression, especially in believers.

The authors set out to examine this interaction by conducting experiments with undergraduates at two religiously contrasting universities: Brigham Young University where 99% of students report believing in God and the Bible and Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam where just 50% report believing in God and 27% believe in the bible.

After reporting their religious affiliation and beliefs, the participants read a parable adapted from a relatively obscure passage in the King James Bible describing the brutal torture and murder of a woman, and her husband's subsequent revenge on her attackers. Half of the participants were told that the passage came from the Book of Judges in the Old Testament while the other half were told it was an ancient scroll discovered in an archaeological expedition.

In addition to the scriptural distinction, half of the participants from both the bible and the ancient scroll groups read an adjusted version that included the verse:

"The Lord commanded Israel to take arms against their brothers and chasten them before the LORD."

The participants were then placed in pairs and instructed to compete in a simple reaction task. The winner of the task would be able to "blast" his or her partner with noise up to 105 decibels, about the same volume as a fire alarm. The test measures aggression.

As expected, the Brigham Young students were more aggressive (i.e. louder) with their blasts if they had been told that the passage they had previously read was from the bible rather than a scroll. Likewise, participants were more aggressive if they had read the additional verse that depicts God sanctioning violence.

At the more secular Vrije Universiteit, the results were surprisingly similar. Although Vrije students were less likely to be influenced by the source of the material, they blasted more aggressively when the passage that they read included the sanctioning of the violence by God. This finding held true even for non-believers, though to a lesser extent.

The research sheds light on the possible origins of violent religious fundamentalism and falls in line with theories proposed by scholars of religious terrorism, who hypothesize that exposure to violent scriptures may induce extremists to engage in aggressive actions. "To the extent religious extremists engage in prolonged, selective reading of the scriptures, focusing on violent retribution toward unbelievers instead of the overall message of acceptance and understanding," writes Bushman "one might expect to see increased brutality"

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-02/afps-wgs022307.php

[no_hypocrisy]

1. God doesn't kill. He "smotes". Gives him a justifiable reason

for wholesale massacre.

[TechBear_Seattle]

2. It is not God who sanctions killing

It is the power-hungry, deluded fanatics who claim to speak for God who sanction killings. Big, big difference.

[Orrex]

6. If, by "power-hungry deluded fanatics" you mean the bible's authors...

Then you may be correct. But you still can't realistically speak for God, who may or may not sanction killing and who certainly isn't above a little bit of brutal smiting now and then.

[Meshuga]

14. Some of the authors of the bible

wrote stories that made the God of the Bible look harsh. But they were writing tales and I don't think their intention was to say, "Hey reader, go out and kill some people."

[Meshuga]

13. Totally agree

There are the fanatics and the leaders who use God as a weapon for their own interests.

[saltpoint]

3. I'll leave the statistical parsing to the clinical psychologists, but am more

inclined to think that exterior triggers motivate inherent tendencies toward authoritarianism.

Because I said so. Wait till your father gets home. Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about. If you sin you will burn in hell. The wages of sin is death. Etc. These common admonishments are authoritarian and are not unrelated to the religious impulse toward authoritarian deities.

Zeus, Odin, and Jaweh don't like it when you piss them off.

Nietzsche warns us to distrust anyone in whom the impulse to punish is too strong. Fred Phelps comes to mind as an easy example, but there are more subtle others who are always at one control panel or another.

I call them hellfire-mongers sometimes, because they like dangling others like spiders over the fire like the famous imagery.

In the name of the same 'God' used in U of M's Bushman's clinical trials, the witch is burned, the woman taken in adultery is stoned, Matthew Shephard is beaten and left to die. My guess is that what's being observed is the tendency toward authoritarianism and not exactly the relationship of belief in or obeyance of 'God.'

[atommom]

4. I wish the subjects had been screened for their authoritarian tendencies.

I suspect you're right, and that those who became more violent were more authoritarian.

[saltpoint]

5. Hi, atommom. I'm in far left field on clinical knowledge, but

if Prof. Bushman would like to undertake a study on authoritarian tendencies as you suggest, he could start with my junior high school teachers!

What a study it would be, too.

[Orrex]

7. And for their own religious views

I suspect that not every student at each of the universities necessarily embraces the beliefs/non-beliefs inherent in the schools' respective charters.

Unless we know whether the body of tested students subscribes to religious faith or not, then the tested aggression seems only weakly correlated to religious belief.

[atommom]

8. You'd probably have to read the full studies to get those details.

It does say that the participants reported what their religious beliefs were, so I'd expect to see that info in the full article.

[varkam]

11. FYI

In studies, authoritarianism is highly positively correlated with religious beliefs such that the more religious an individual is, the more like he/she is to have authoritarian personality traits.

[saltpoint]

15. Hello, varkam. I'm embarrassed to say I don't know those studies,

but it really seems to make sense, at least in some of the people I've known or been around.

Thank you for that insight and info.

_______
I love your "hobby" in your profile. Excellent!

[kiahzero]

16. That also depends on the religion.

Certain religions are more authoritarian than others, and some are downright anarchical.

[struggle4progress]

17. Link please

[varkam]

19. One study that I am aware of was conducted by

Bruce Hunsberger and Bob Altemeyer, authors of "Atheists: A Groundbreaking Study of America's Nonbelievers" in which they discuss the results of social-psychological research that they conducted on atheists and fundamentalists including measures of authoritarianism. This is the link to the Amazon listing, though you can probably find it at your local public library (which is where I read it) if you felt so inclined.

[struggle4progress]

20. Saying "fundamentalists tend to be authoritarian" is not the same as saying

that religious individuals are more likely to have authoritarian traits, which was your original claim, because (as you are no doubt aware) the "fundamentalists" comprise only a fraction of religious observers

[varkam]

23. Point taken.

Perhaps I should have worded it slightly differently. IIRC correctly, they also surveyed religious moderates though I do not recall those results off-hand. And considering that the majority of the American population believes that Jesus is coming back, I don't think it's a stretch to say that the shoe just might indeed fit.

On the other hand, I think my original statement is a fairly reasonable assumption to make. If people with no religious beliefs tend to score low on authoritarianism and people with strict fundamentalist religious beliefs score very highly, then it's probably not a leap of faith to make the statement that "the more religious one is the more likely they are to possess certain authoritarian traits".

[struggle4progress]

25. So you claim: to be "more religious" is to be "more fundamentalist"

Otherwise, how could you believe evidence that non-religious tend to score lower than religious fundamentalists (in measured authoritarianism) suggests that the more religious are more likely to be authoritarian?

There have, of course, been all manner of "fundamentalists" -- what distinguishes the fundamentalists is rigid belief in some fixed doctrine.

Religious fundamentalists (for example) believe literally in some rigid interpretation of religious doctrine.

Communist fundamentalists (who are less common today and were never representative of all communists) believed rigidly in a fixed interpretation (for example) of the writings of Marx or Lenin or Mao.

I have also met individuals whom might properly be called "scientific fundamentalists" (though they are seldom good scientists): these are people who learn a fixed textbook version of some scientific "fact" (perhaps the best version of the "fact" known when the textbook was published) and who ever afterward continue to insist that the "fact" they learned is "true," even if later studies suggest a different interpretation of the true situation.

On this point of view, "fundamentalism" of any sort is itself an indicator of authoritarian tendencies.

I think it would be silly to argue that authoritarian tendencies of "scientific fundamentalists" suggest that the more scientific a person is, the more likely that person is to be authoritarian.

Many of the Communist fundamentalists were ideological atheists and were authoritarians. But of course it would be silly to argue that this shows that atheists to be authoritarians than nonatheists.

And I find your argument just as weak as these parallel arguments

[varkam]

27. Scientific fundamentalists

I'm sure that you have probably met (and argued with) people whom you take to be "scientific fundamentalists". I'm a scientific fundamentalist when it comes to things like gravity. If someone tells me that gravity does not exist, I probably will make a funny face at them.

I think operationally defining what being more scientific means is a bit trickier than doing the same with religion, mostly because there really is no one truth in the realm of science. It's all evidence and probability based. In your example, I would say that a "scientific fundamentalist" is not really scientific at all because it implies that they refuse to examine new evidence and revise their own beliefs. That's actually kind of the opposite of what it's supposed to mean to be scientific.

With religion - Christianity, for example - there is usually a holy text or a bible of some sort. Religious fundamentalists usually take it all to be the literal word of God, whereas religious moderates may believe some of the bible but not other parts. So in this context, I intend to use fundamentalism not in a pejorative sense, but as a descriptor of how much of the bible one takes to be true. Perhaps another way of putting it is the more claims in the bible that one accepts as truth, the more likely they are to score high on a measure of authoritarianism.

[struggle4progress]

29. I already said "scientific fundamentalists" are seldom good scientists

One can identify them, however, by criteria similar to those one uses to identify "religious fundamentalists" -- namely, that they have inflexibly adopted a fixed interpretation of the doctrine that they have learned. And we completely agree that such rigidity makes such people poor scientists.

I completely disagree, however, with your view that religiosity is properly measured by rigid adherence to (say) a belief in the inerrancy of some scripture. Because you hold this view, your claim that religious people are more likely to be fundamentalists seems obvious to you -- because it reduces to a content-free intellectual tautology.

To define religiosity the way you propose, is to adopt the fundamentalists' interpretation of it. But not being a fundamentalist myself, I see absolutely no reason I should accept your insistence on the fundamentalists' views as definitive, especially since you have little interest in or sympathy for religion. To my view, religious fundamentalists make a theological bumble, analogous to the scientific bumble made by scientific fundamentalists

[varkam]

32. I think I got it.

I agree with you, and I concede the point. It would be interesting to see the RWA scale administered to a random sampling of religious moderates and see how that stacks up. I still think that even religious moderates would tend to score higher than atheist samples being that acceptance of tradition (e.g. religion) is one major factor of RWA - but I'm not aware of any such studies and so it's just speculation.

I do, however, take issue with your assumption that I have little interest or sympathy for religion. I have pretty much always had a great interest in religion - which incidentally may be why I am an atheist. I don't have sympathy for religion per se, but I do have a great deal for people regardless of what they believe, just to be clear.

[atommom]

22. Altemeyer is publishing a book on the web that encapsulates

his research on authoritarianism, and addresses its relationship to religion too. It's interesting reading.

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/%7Ealtemey/

[varkam]

24. Very interesting reading

Thanks!

[struggle4progress]

26. Altemeyer's book primarily discusses the relation of evangelical or fundamentalist religious views

to authoritarian views.

It does not (as you claim) really address whether religiousity itself is authoritarian

[varkam]

28. Atommom never claimed that, btw.

And for the record we're already discussing the matter in the ST above.

[struggle4progress]

31. Thanks: you seem to be right that I'm misquoting her

[atommom]

33. That wasn't really what I meant, but he does say that religion isn't necessarily authoritarian.

For another example, non-fundamentalists churches can extend their hand to
fundamentalist faiths. People often think that low RWAs are all atheists and agnostics.
They’re not. Most (62%) of the low RWAs in my big 2005 parent study said they
were members of some religion--typically liberal Protestants or Catholics. A solid
majority of moderates are religious too, and often church-goers as well. Overall,
people who believe in God and have religious inclinations are not high RWAs, and
they are well-positioned to broaden those who are.

[Evoman]

9. I agree with this study.....whenever someone mentions a violent passage in the bible, I feel like

kicking some ass. But I don't. Because I don't want to get my clothes dirty.

[cosmik debris]

10. I'd like to see an opposite study

Where god sanctions turning the other cheek and forgiving your enemies.

I wonder what result we would see?

[NMMNG]

18. That would be interestin indeed

:thumbsup:

[varkam]

12. Shocked. Shocked I tell you.

:sarcasm:

[struggle4progress]

21. The sociological groups (a population in Amsterdam and Utah) don't seem ...

... likely to be well-matched in all respects other than religious belief

[The Straight Story]

30. Or when the state/bush do so via war and executions :) (nt)

[redqueen]

34. Exactly.

It's the obedience to authority that is the issue.

One word: Milgram. No deity or gov't sanction needed... just someone to tell them what to do.