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If you're interested in psychological experiments gone wild, you should also check out the Stanford Prison Experiments.
| quote: | Originally posted by mr.bison
Then why do different religions have different behavioral outcomes? Why do people practicing one kind of religion tend to be more dangerous/violent then people practicing another kind of religion. Jainism for example?
Do you seriously think that no religious teaching is capable of convincing a good moral person to do horrific things?
I think Sam Harris makes a good point in this video. A point i have never seen refuted. What are your thoughts of the point he is trying to make? |
You've been posting in nothing but syllogism, false choice, and straw-man fallacy to get to this point, which is some money shot featuring Islam as your target. The most valid question pertains to why differing regions have different outcomes which is easily understood because nearly everyone in those regions either is or has recently been subject to the rule of an authoritarian regime that made use of hard-line Islamic clerics in order to focus the anger of their populace onto something other than the regimes they operated under. That's not to say that all people who've suffered under authoritarian regimes are prone to being terrorists. In fact it's an astonishingly small fraction of that population accounting for terrorism, in general.
Saddam Hussein said, "Where there is a person, there is a problem. Where there is no person, there is no problem." The essential annihilation of self and subsequent loss of power is given redress in the narcissistic solution on offer from extremists. A meaningless, banal existence of servitude is granted a means of escape in the noble sacrifice, on the order of (even orders of magnitude greater than) winning the lottery in its reward. A source, for all the World's evil, is fictitiously characterized and targeted for divine retribution and to the young idiot, bedeviled by poverty, he is given the means to become a hero.
From where I sit, violent extremist fall into three sub-types: The born extremist has been sent to Madrassas, from an early age, and taught an extremist ideology. These morons are owed the credit of the nightclub bombing in Bali and the The 2008 attacks in Mumbai. The home-sick extremists, most of whom are credited with attacks in England and attempted attacks within the Continental United States, are made up of highly educated yet misplaced souls who are unable to find personal fulfillment in other activities, have found themselves isolated and therefor susceptible to radical cells operating within the periphery of local Mosques or on the internet. While more educated, this subtype more closely resembles Timothy McVeigh, who returning home, found himself isolated and gravitating towards interests he felt would allow him to serve a "higher" purpose. The third type is the disgruntled Muslim, who, were it not for the fact that they were Muslim, would not be so closely associated with having committed an act of terror and would be more known for having committed a spree killing. Resembling many mass-murderers, Nidal Malik Hasan was just as well known for his professional incompetence, among his peers, as he was for being a Muslim.
Klebold, Harris, Cho, and other non-Muslim (and presumably non-religious) shooters collectively outnumber my disgruntled Muslim, partly dismissing the association you're trying to make. The non-religious shooters are more closely related to the final two subtypes to a degree that religion being a factor, can nearly be ruled out. The Muslim perpetrators of violence, while doing so in the name of their religion, had made that vain association out of a need to rationalize their decisions opposing having it be as much of a motivator. Timothy McVeigh displayed traits of Paranoid Personality Disorder which roughly approximates the surrogate belief system inculcated in terrorist recruitment.
So, short answer: No. It could just as well be Christianity. In fact, it has been. Jim Jones and the People's Temple speaks eloquently to that. The Branch Davidians in Waco also illustrate that violence is non-denominational. Don't forget about Heaven's Gate, which had nearly nothing to do with religion, at all.
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my old stuff, not quite up to snuff - but I still dig it - UPDATED 9/23/2012
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