I recently watched one of the most brutal and upsetting films I've ever seen, called The Stoning of Soraya M. I suppose the title of this 2008 film should have warned me away, but I really don't believe that anything could prepare viewers for the graphic, bloody and excruciatingly prolonged scene that gives the film its name. It's the story of a 35-year-old mother, falsely accused of adultery by her bullying husband and local mullah, who is convicted under Islamic law and executed by the men of a rural Iranian village. The stoning, based on a true story, took place in 1986, but the small-mindedness and hate-filled religiosity are medieval.
The Stoning of Soraya M. is an indictment of Islamic fundamentalism and misogyny in post-Revolution Iran. The outrage of the film derives from the fact that this cruel execution is prescribed by Sharia law. Yet we all know that Islamic fundamentalists don't have a corner on religious intolerance and hateful violence. It's one of the paradoxes of human history that religious faith, the wellspring of morality and universal love, is also the source of so much cruelty and injustice, including cold-blooded murder.
Why is it that religious belief and teaching do not lead to moral action? What is it about religious thinking that it can create both kindness and hatefulness from the same basic beliefs? Philosophers and theologians have struggled for centuries over this riddle of human behavior, and more recently, psychological scientists have begun applying their experimental tools to explore this baffling truth. Two of these experts on religious cognition, Jesse Lee Preston and Ryan Ritter of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have an original hypothesis about the disconnection between religion and morality, and some preliminary evidence to back it up.
One possibility, Preston and Ritter say, is that the good side of religion -- the altruism, community building, inclusiveness -- is not universal at all, but instead is reserved only for others of the same church or sect -- or in the case of Soraya's Iran, only the fundamentalist men. In this sense, religion is not just a belief system, but also a form of group affiliation, an in-group that excludes many more than it welcomes. The love and kindness are tightly restricted.
This does not of course preclude a personal and spiritual aspect of religion, including a genuine concern for all others, even those who don't attend the same church or mosque or temple. Religious belief can be inclusive rather that exclusive, promoting the kind of altruistic behavior most of us associate with the great religious teachings. The love and kindness are universal.
According to Preston and Ritter, these two distinct sides of religious beliefs reflect the difference between institutional religion, on the one hand, and God on the other. Religion and God are not synonymous. They have different psychological roots, and lead to very different human actions. That's the idea that the Illinois scientists decided to test in the lab, by priming peoples' thinking and observing their behavior. They suspected that reminders of religion would promote insular thinking and restrict caring to the in-group. Reminders of God, by contrast, should activate concerns for moral virtue more broadly, leading to a more inclusive kind of generosity.
In the first experiment, volunteers sat at a computer screen, where they played a game called the "Prisoner's Dilemma," which gives each player a choice between being cooperative or self-serving. In this version of the game, cooperation required personal sacrifice, and it was also anonymous, so there was no expectation of payback. Although the volunteers were playing the game with an unseen partner, they were given a quick glimpse of the other player's photo. Sometimes, the other player was white; others time, Indian. In other words, they knew if they were being asked to cooperate with someone like them or unlike them.
Before playing the game, the volunteers were subliminally primed -- some with the word God, others with the word religion. The idea was to see if those primed to think about religion would be more generous toward their own in-group than were the others. And they were, dramatically so. The concept of religion clearly made them want to circle the wagons and help their own. What's more, those primed to think about God -- not about religion -- were more cooperative with out-group members, compared to the religiously primed. In fact -- and this was surprising -- those thinking of God were more generous to outsiders than they were to insiders -- suggesting a kind of "egotistic" generosity. It seems they were motivated by a desire to appear selfless, more than they were motivated by genuine altruism.
The scientists wanted to explore this dynamic further. So in a second experiment, they looked at the effects of priming on acts of charity in a real-life situation. The study was done in the spring of 2009, shortly after the first outbreak of swine flu. People were confused and a bit panicked about the risk of illness and death -- and scientists still had no clear answers. The number of confirmed cases was rising daily, though at that point they had only been reported in the U.S. and Mexico.
The scientists took advantage of this public health threat to conduct their study. As before, some volunteers were primed to think about religion -- specifically their own church affiliation -- and others were primed to think about God. Then all the volunteers took a short survey about their health, nutrition and exercise habits. This was meant to get them thinking about their own health. Finally, all were given the opportunity to allocate a charitable donation to the American Red Cross and the Mexican Red Cross, dividing the cash up in any way they chose. The scientists wanted to see if those who were thinking about their own church would act more or less charitably toward Americans and Mexicans.
The results were basically the same as before. As Preston summarized at this week's meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, in Chicago, those with religion and church on their minds gave more money to Americans than to Mexicans. That is, they restricted their charity to others like themselves. Those with God on their minds gave more to people unlike them -- showing the same out-group bias as before. Interestingly, religious identity trumped even nationality as an in-group identity: Catholics -- but not non-Catholics -- gave more money to the Mexican Red Cross when primed with religion, but more money to the American Red Cross when primed with thoughts of the deity.
Religion also trumps nationality in the tragic death of the guiltless Soraya M. She is not the victim of secular law, and indeed the only secular authority -- the mayor -- must be tricked into condoning the punishment. She is the victim of the more powerful religious law, applied mercilessly by an insular group of zealots. The hero of the story is Soraya's aunt, the devoutly religious Zahra, who would sacrifice herself to save Soraya. She connives to leak the story to a traveling journalist, and thus to the world, and in the final scene, as she delivers the incriminating evidence to the writer, it is Zahra who proclaims: "God is great!"
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Dr. David Liepert: What's Al-Sharia, and What's Wrong With Sharia Law?
"Monotheism is the “great unmentionable evil” at the heart of our culture, Gore Vidal thundered in the Lowell Lecture at Harvard in 1992, and his charge has been picked up widely and unthinkingly by educated people.
The accusation is in fact ignorant, prejudiced, and dead wrong. On the one hand, monotheism is unquestionably the most innovative and influential belief in human history—for instance, its link to the rise of science. On the other hand, more people in the last century were slaughtered under secularist regimes, led by secularist intellectuals, and in the name of secularist ideologies than in all the religious persecutions in Western history combined—more than 100 million by the communists alone. The point is not to trade charges and countercharges about whether religion or secularism has produced more evil but to challenge secularists to engage in serious discussion about public life with a great deal more honesty and humility."
Os Guinness
Ditto for your claim about secular slaughter v religious.
Knowing what happens in the core of a star doesn't set off a nuclear bomb: it takes an ideology to do that, and often a religious one.
You try to defend religion by calling secularism a religion as an insult. Talk about cognitive dissonance: yikes.
"Secularist regimes" weren't rational, nor do they represent what it is to be rational. Besides, their system of governance reflected a religious system, with ultimate power residing at the top.
"God" can mean so much and so little and so differently. Psychology goes on in the brain but the variety of existential meanings that the brain can come up with are numerous and far from not trivial. It's fascinating how the brain does it all.
What we need is information about how our government, in our name, can execute innocent people. We have conclusive evidence of that. I want to know why we ignore that kind of evidence.
That is clearly subject self-reports. Measuring them against a choice between a gift to a U.S. charity and a foreign charity, the only choices available, borders on the significance of the ridiculous.
:-)
A man in their group gathered sticks on the Sabbath. Moses, at the direction of God, had the poor man stoned to death. It appears that breaking any Hebrew law was likely to bring down the whole house of cards. This delightful story can be found in Numbers 15:32-36.
If he was stoned on the Sabbath, wouldn't the stoners need to be stoned (for working).
. . .or
they say, "We can't stone you today so we will stone you tomorrow. We can't restrain you (work) or imprison you (work) but, tomorrow, we'll stone you.
What's the stone-ee going to do? Say, "Gee, I gotta stick around and see that."
The answer? They were never together in the first place!
Religion has absolutely NOTHING to do with morality! People either act moral or they don't, they either are religious or they aren't...they are independent of each other.
And as to the "wellspring" you refer too, where is it? It hasn't EVER EXISTED!
Imagine, if I did some crime, and I allowed another person to be electrocuted for it, who would find me cleared of all charges, who would find me no longer to be held responsible. How is a religion the well spring of morality when it's built on human sacrifice and scapegoating moral responsibility in exchange for servitude? When morality is based on a reward/punishment system, it's not morality, it's obedience.
The truth is you can't blame religion when it's used to rationalize evil any more than you can blame politics for the Holocaust. It's not the hammer's fault the nail gets bent - it's the bozo swinging it who's to blame.
No fundamentalist Christians follow the Bible to the letter. When to follow something would be inconvenient or outrageous then that's a parable. When following something would reinforce a socially conditioned response - such as thinking less of glbt people - then it's literal, not parable.
Case in point for fundamentalist Christians, it's deemed, conveniently, to be a parable:
"Women should be silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but should be submissive, as the law also says." (1 Corinthians 14:34)
A story about hospitality and lack thereof, on the other hand, that's literal, about sodomy....
BASIC ERROR #1.
We are hardwired for it. It's not too difficult to see that many mammals have some similar traits, especially primates and canines.
Much of human moral progress has taken place in an environment where almost everyone is, if not actually religious, at least brought up being told that they ought to be -- an environment, moreover, where religion has claimed to be the sole wellspring of morality. So it's no surprise that many moral leaders were religious, just as many moral derelicts were. In an environment where religion forcibly controlled discourse on everything from science to fashion, it's no surprise that it monopolized moral discourse as well, as far as it could. It's a testament to human conscience and ingenuity that moral thought and action was able to progress under such circumstances.
See Leviticus 20:13 if you're not familiar with what I'm referencing.