Yeah its kind of a lot of info, but what if there is some serious merit to what Scott Atran is saying with regard to the motivation for extremists/terrorists in countries that are predominantly Muslim? This would completely change the worldview that I think most Atheists and Christians have(without direct experience of Muslim countries themselves).

Yes, was my default position. I would like to read some of his stuff and look at its merits and the methodology, but so far everything he is saying just seems the opposite of reality. Its like he has become an Atheist apologetic for the Islamic world because he genuinely likes the people. I am not saying you can't like people you study, but when that liking could be construed as losing your objectivity, then you are no longer following the scientific method. It would be interesting, if once I read his stuff I was convinced of his ideas, but the evidence would have to be compelling, and have unparalleled methodological constraints being utilized to counter all of conventional wisdom and evidence.

I was just wondering if anyone here agreed with him? I doubt it, but that would be interesting to hear their perspective on such matters.

But, occupation and oppression by what?  Another group with the overall defining identity of a particular religion.  They certainly don't think that it's a bunch of bakers or mechanics or Arnold Schwarzeneggar fans taking their land, it's 'those jews'

And why do the jews claim the land... because god gave it to them

How does one get from a soccer match to a Fatwa against a cartoonist?  I'm not seeing the connection.

Do soccer players have a higher than normal rate of being suicide bombers in secular countries?  They love soccer in the Netherlands, and I can't remember the last time I saw a Dutchman lopping off the head of an infidel.

Are soccer moms in trouble in America? 

I'm casting my vote for "Full of Shit."

I think Sam and Hitchens tend to overdramatize the threat of Islamic Fundamentalist extremism, but it is a very palpable concern. I would say religion is not the sole cause for most wars, but often goes hand in hand in the in-group vs. out-group mentality in play there. There are some wars that have been caused by religion.

As far as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there are a ton of disparate issues at hand, but to take religion out of the equation as Atran does, is wholeheartedly deluding oneself to the realities on the ground. True, I think anyone who feels they have had their land taken from them and are being occupied unrighteously by a set of people with an opposite worldview would be drawn to violence. To say that the only reason these people have been fighting is because God was indian-giving realtor in his holy lands provides an underlying reason, but does not address the entirety of the issues.

Scott Atran is so smug, I have been watching some of his responses to others in Beyond Belief and his ideas and rationalizations seem to show quite a bit of compartmentalization at work. The things he says about Al Qaeda are quite fascinating if they are true.

The answer probably does lie somewhere in between, but I think having discourse on competing opinions and vetting them out is the best way to get closer to the truth.

You have no idea how much this argument pisses me off.

If everyone were atheist, Communism will still be with us. It is NOT a religion, it's a fucking political ideology.

It pisses me off when people apply to people like Stalin or Hoxha, because it comes off as 'Well, see, they weren't actually atheists, they had religions of their own.' or 'Well, they projected themselves as Gods.' and even 'See, it's still religion's fault!!!'

Calling something a fucking 'religion' does not make it so.

There is a good point that these people have a lot to be angry about. The US government was not particularly nice in the ways it went about fighting communism and screwed over quite a few countries. The middle east also had several crusades thrown at it. Plus anyone growing up in a war zone who has seen family and friends die is going to be more than a little screwed up and upset.

However I think it is primarily religion that is driving it forward and not letting wounds heal. All of Europe was at each others throat for thousands of years and they are getting along much better now. The US also fought a war against the British empire, but they are both buddies now.

It is religion that feeds the Palestinian belief that Israel should be wiped from the face of the earth (I'm not saying that Israel are the good guys, there are no good guys in that conflict). I have seen videos of kindergarteners with guns shouting they they want to die for allah at a school assembly (I think the link was on Gisburne).

There are also christian terrorists in some of the muslim countries.

It's hardly the "fault" of religion, but the human tendency toward religious thought is what these guys were tapping, there's no doubt about it. Just look at the policy of Stalin, Hitler, Kim Jong Il or Saddam Hussein of plastering godlike pictures of themselves on every available wall. Each with different professed political ideologies, all with the same mechanisms of authority. Whether you want to call it "state religion" or not doesn't change the fact that the behaviours are exactly the same.

Tell that to the Scientologists. They're getting a tax break just like every other religious organization. And they've never stopped being an unlicensed mental health clinic.

If that were all it was, then there wouldn't be the extra aspect of veneration of a single individual. It's definitely social conformity, but that doesn't explain the veneration and focusing all "justification of effort" on the leader.

Of course, but religious and political conformity in those cases look an awful lot alike. In fact, it's very difficult to tell them apart.

The 'justification of effort', it could be nationalism, or kinship. A better life for your nation or kin (Remember, it's not just you, it's your genes and offspring.) All the leaders offered that (hence the veneration..), so it was a game of follow the leader for a better future for you, and your family.

To wit:

Do you know of parents who want the best possible life for their child and will make personal sacrifices to achieve it?

What about people who want the best for the people in their nation or even the world and will make personal sacrifices to achieve it?

Now this leader comes along and offers this. The best nation, the best people. All you have to do is follow him.

I'm not the one who brought it up.

... in heaven.

... on earth as it is in heaven?

... and you get to go to heaven.

The mechanisms are so similar that they're almost indistinguishable. People willing to submit and follow are drawn to religious and totalitarian "safety" in equal numbers. It's very appealing to believe in safety. Religious movements thrive on the belief that a safe afterlife can be promised, just as totalitarianism thrives on the promise of safety on the earthly plane. Both are illusory, but highly appealing.

I'm torn about this, primarily because there's just not much real information out there.  Suicide attacks go way back, and they're not nearly as strongly correlated to religion as they are to extreme conditions.  If you really want to kill someone, and the only way to do it is to kill yourself, you're going to do it.

If you were to hand deliver a bunch of long range missiles to a bunch of Islamic terrorists, I feel pretty certain they'd use them up before they went on another plane flight.

The real question, I think, is whether or not the wars themselves are being fueled to a significant degree by religion.  Next time you get a chance to do interviews on an Army base, ask a few questions about God and Country and Christian virtue.  You'll see that many of our fightin' boys are highly religious, and those views play a part in their service.  Note also that we have very few suicide missions.  This is primarily because we have big boomies and don't need to do suicide missions.

I don't know if it's the most effective tool.  I don't like saying things without some backing, and I just don't know of any way to demonstrate the truth of this.  I think it's obvious that martyrdom is a good motivator, though.

I was not equating my belief on what I think is the strongest motivator with what is actually occurring. This was not meant to be a statement of fact, and was not written as such. I also try to back up my conjectures with facts, but I just don't think there is enough evidence on the subject, analyzed and deconstructed, to draw a single conclusion about the most potent motivator(if there even is one motivator that can be said to be more influential than another). If there is, and I am not aware of it, I would surely take that into account and reconstruct my beliefs accordingly. This definitely could be a phenomenon of several competing social pressures acting on individuals and groups creating the responses we see, and I do expect that to be true. My point is only that I think that there may be a causal link(which can be correlated) implying belief in an afterlife may cause a person to more readily discard this human life in hopes of getting a redo in the next, or eternal bliss. That is my only conjecture.

As for your big bombs versus body bombs hypothesis, of course there is economically influenced battlefield strategy in this argument as well. I am not denying that.

I tend to take words literally.  It's why I tend to write so many.  I like to be clear.

If people really do believe in an afterlife, we would expect to see a correlation between religions that teach it and actions such as suicide bombings.

I'm not 100% convinced that most people really believe in an afterlife, so I'm conflicted.  The Japanese are not a small exception to the stereotype of religious nuts being suicide bombers.  My brain is not firing on all cylinders, but I seem to recall a pretty direct correlation between military need and resorting to suicide tactics, regardless of prevalent religion.  It's built into human nature to sometimes sacrifice for the group.  I think religion probably enhances this effect, but to what degree, I'm hesitant to say.

I'm convinced that religion is a very effective tool to sell war in the first place.  Once you're in the army, it's pretty easy to get you to do whatever is needed.

Wow, that was quite a thesis throatmeal! Yes, I think Atran's work has been to subjectively influenced by his love of arabic culture, language, etc. Its like he has created a modern version of a "noble savage" and those that don't fit in his box are tossed aside as mere idiots. Truth be told though, I am not aware of a lot of people doing this kind of work(in mainstream media) and so I think he is getting a huge piece of the pie in respect terms due to the decreased visability of contrary opinions, although I am pretty sure that Atran's position is in the minority.

Atranomical...lol

It was a sarcastic joke, Godasyou, his respect was ATRANomical, not ASTROnomical. I think he has as much respect for Islam as Scott Atran, which is to say, none.

I wrote: "I jokingly wrote that I have an "Atran"omical amount of respect for Islam, which, obviously I do not, as he obviously does."

To clarify, Atran's reverence for religion is a logical result of the principle  "a bias towards being unbiased" . I didn't mean to suggest Atran's direct respect for Islam, but rather pointing out the consequesces of his uncompromising respect for the aforementioned principle.

I also would like to draw some parallels here, I'd like to know what everyone thinks. After digesting Stephen Jay Gould's concept of non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA), and recognizing some intuitive appeal in it, I looked for something outside of Gould's area of expertise to help me to effectively extrapolate this concept and compare the results against the accepted general concepts of reality. I came across a reference to NOMA in a Huffington Post blog about the ignorance of religion by Sam Harris:

                                       "Likewise, Stephen Jay Gould's notion of "non-overlapping magisteria"

                                        served only the religious dogmatists who realize, quite rightly, that

                                        there is only one magisterium."

I interpreted Harris' comment to mean that there but one magisterium, namely reality, and that any division (with regard to reality in itself) of it's natural spectrum during the mental process of assimilation,  was ultimately artificial, aribitrary and athropocentric, resulting in an aberrant ability to assimilate reality and subsequently a skewed perception of reality in iteslf.

I think the intuitive appeal to the NOMA concept is more specifically a practical appeal to the inherent human processes of data assimilation. We as humans, simply can not appreciate reality in it's completeness. One exemplifying reason is the empirical disconnect that one is forced to encounter when trying to assess, integrate or compare different orders of magnitude. 

While the concept of NOMA is a successful way to aid in our assimilation of information, we have to proceed with caution when applying it as a description of reality-in-itself. It success is as an anthropocentric method for, not necessarily as an absolute reflection of. One could argue in fact, that reality begat humans and humans begat logical ideas and methods. This is really qualified by many historical examples, particularly from within fields that correctly use objectivity and logic as a sort of divining rod for truth.

This is pretty abstract stuff, so I am refining my postion for the benefit of everyone reading this. I think that people who subscribe to this ill-conceived approach, like Gould and perhaps Atran, are really just conflating organically non-proximal aspects of reality. Concepts designed to assess reality accurately are developed precisely because we desire and need a more complete/accurate picture of reality. In an effort to do this, we design the methods to work with our innate mental mechanisms that collect, parse and collate information. In other words, our mental nature both begets and qualifies our methods of data assimilation. Reality-in-itself, however, is not naturally parsed and compartmentalized. It is infinite and spectral, evidenced in the nature of the visible light spectrum juxtaposed with our compartmentalized categorization of the range of colors. If you accept these concepts as congruent with reality-in-itself then you have to accept the lost nuances and subtleties of reality-in-itself as well, as well as the unpredictable consequences that stem from their acceptance and application. Reality is spectral and infinite in it's composition. Our methods for assimiliating reality are a reflection of our human incapacity to assimilate both the whole set and the collective sub-sets simultaneously.

As I pointed out before, this is pretty abstract stuff, and as such has no mass rhetorical appeal, so I may postpone using this in an actual debate about this stuff. That being said, I think it is important to explore our subscriptions on an abstract philosophical level in an attempt to reduce susceptibility to various dogams as well as to the dangers of individual or group subjectivity especially when making attempts at truth-extraction for common social benefit.

-Nick (Throatmeal the Outcast)

Nick, sign up! More of us means fewer of them!

(Okay, not really, but at least you could then drop the "outcast&quot

Unfortunately no registration without respondification

Lol!

As for NOMA, good insight, I personally agree with Dawkins as he states in the God Delusion that NOMA was really just an olive branch from Gould's science to religion to get them to accept some of science's teaching and create a wedge into the issue of religion not butting its ugly head into purely scientific affairs, like the teaching of evolution, or punctuated equilibrium. Reality is just that, reality. There is no my reality is this and your reality is that(and I am not talking in the philosophical subjective "how we see the world way&quot. There is a god, or there is not. Life evolved and is evolving, or it is not. There is an objective truth to these questions. To dismiss real evidence and say we are asking different questions, your views don't interfere with mine, is an epic mischaracterization of the nature of reality, and does a disservice to both science and religion. The are mutually exclusive explanations for reality, and the olive branch of reverence that has been given by some scientists, while done in good faith, should be rescinded if honesty and truth are truely prized over the illusion of "respect" for one's beliefs.

Theoretically, a true theist can have secular motives up to the point where it conflicts with their bullshit religious texts. In reality, truly secular motives are a threat to theistic viability, in obvious contrast with the common Christian argument of biblically-derived morals, for example. Having truly secular motives, presumably derived from some sort of secular moral template, is a tacit rejection of, and is at odds with a theistic origin of morality. If these motives are derived from theistic morality (::scoff:, then these motives aren't secular, they are theistic. One cannot claim to be a true theist and accept the concept of a truly secular positive moral impetus simulataneously.

A peer-reviewed social science paper isn't operating with the same level of objectivity as a peer-review paper from the hard sciences, for obvious reasons. The concept of reflectionism was adopted by anthropology to allow for the inherent bias that is the result of filtering social observations through an external observer. Atran's denial of all other interpretations of data, other than his own, for whatever reason, is a tacit rejection of reflectionism. This is also supported by WVO Quine's concept of there being no cross-cultural "sameness of meaning", specifically with regard to radical field (work) translations. Quine argues that the field linguist, as an example, has to import his own conceptual sceme as a means to make sense of the culturally distinct behaviors of those being observed.  The resultant translation is tainted by the bias of the observer's conceptual sceme, and is thus limited in it's purity and it's accuracy.

By the way, what exactly is an "agnostic deist theist"? I assume that you are making a joke?

I am not an anthropologist, however my best friend from childhood is, and I consulted him on the matter of reflectionism.

-Nick, (Throatmeal The Argumentative)

MODERATOR: I still haven't received my account info, although I registered last week and sent a follow up inquiry to RRS, with no reply.

As opposed to those 'fake' Theists?

You have it backwards. Most Theists derive their theist motives from secular motives. How do I know this? Theists are spread out like butter on toast, ,there are those against abortion, those that aren't, those that are Democrat, those that are Republician etc...

No universality from a universal belief system.

Think for a second, does Atran come to the data because of his own conculsions, or does he come to the conclusions based on the data. Atran seems like an intelligent guy and actually, you know, took the time to study the issue at length so I bet it's the latter.

I'm against the fundamentalists.

I'm not against personal God adherents and their tactics, I'm not against religion, or anything like that.

 I'm not a 'fake' Theist. I don't even think there is such a thing as one.

Did you read what I wrote?

 Me: "In reality, truly secular motives are a threat to theistic viability, in obvious contrast with the common Christian argument of biblically-derived morals, for example." 

You: "You have it backwards. Most Theists derive their theist motives from secular motives." 

I think you are getting my argument twisted. You are supporting what I already argued for. You had asked in an earlier post why theists can't have secular motives, assuming that you believe that they can. As shown by my argument, I agree with you that everyone has ultimately secular motives, sourced in an evolved secular morality. However, I do not agree that they are:1) employed or regarded as secular motives by those theists who would be employing these motivesor2) recognized as secular by other theistic observers of these motivated actions. 

If these views  (1 & 2) were abandoned by theists then this would be a cannibalization of the very foundation of their theism. In order to be a "true" theist, you have to accept certain revealed moral edicts as the divine word of god. You can't be a "true" theist and acknowledge a byproduct of human evolution as the source for your morals. Similarly, you cannot cherry-pick your alleged theistic morals or reinterpret them on an individual level without damaging your claims to theism. The claim to theism diminishes the more you acknowledge and employ sources outside of your religious texts as motivators. This is why I wrote: "One cannot claim to be a true theist and accept the concept of a truly secular positive moral impetus simulataneously."

Obviously, I believe theism to be inherently unlogical and contradictory. I was merely highlighting one of the ways that this is so. 

As for your opinion on Atran:

I can say Christopher Langan seems, and in fact is, a remarkably intelligent guy. However his intelligence doesn't necessarily translate to the veracity of his pet theory, the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe, which has in fact been rejected by a number of physicists as being essentially untenable and non-falsifiable, though Mr. Langan would urge you to think otherwise. Further, you ignored the reasoning in my critique of Atran's speech/debate, and rebutted with this:

"Think for a second, does Atran come to the data because of his own conculsions, or does he come to the conclusions based on the data. "

You seem to believe that anthropological fieldwork, which is based on observation, is somehow as logically rigorous as a replicable, falsifiable scientfic experiment. A burden of proof is on those, like Atran and Gates, who are trying to put forth their non-falsifiable collection of observations and professional interpretations as absolute truth. We have to rely on them and them alone based on FAITH. The Nazis believed the Jews to be inferior based on their own interpretations of their own observations and field work. Should we have believed them, too? On what grounds? I'm sure they had some brilliant social scientists in their employ. Is that a good enough reason?

The bottom line is this: orthodoxies, in all of their rigid certitude, and in all of their forms are eventually dangerous. It matters not where the idea of suicide bombings originated, it matters if they are employed and why. If Islam or any other closed-loop mechanism designed for mass control can adopt a particularly effective and abject method of proliferation then it's obvious that their sacred texts, coupled with an inherent rejection of logical discourse, certainly don't prohibit, and could in fact be construed as encouraging this method.  

As an aside, I should point out that I am against war and murder in all but extreme cases. I am against the invasion of Iraq, I am against all dogmatic regimes and orthodoxies, and I am against anti-intellectualism. 

For what it's worth, I think a more complete picture of the turmoil in the Middle East can be explained by the clash of exploitative US foreign policy with conceptually malevolent theocracies. Our US foreign policy is influenced by the fact that we are the staging ground for world capitalism. This foreign policy evolved from, and has in turn refined our right-skewed, limited-spectrum, seemingly closed-loop two-party duopoly.  Full-spectrum political manipulation is a byproduct of profit protection achieved through a sort of "unionization of the elite", in the silent, hulking forms of the Trilateralist Commission, the Bilderbergs, et al...  This is effectively one orthodoxy clashing with another orthodoxy (though admittedly not that neatly packaged), a horrible outcome being almost guaranteed.   

As my interest is to provoke change through objectivity, I feel we need to protest through logical disourse in every area where dogmatism reigns supreme, not limiting it to religion/theism. 

Recommended reading:  

"Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management" Edited by Holly Sklar

"The Anglo-American Establishment - from Rhodes to Cliveden" by Carroll Quigley"Word and Object" By W.V.O. Quine

"Philistine and Genius" By Dr. Boris Sidis

 - Nick (Throatmeal, Instant Apple-Cinnamon.)