Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Rationality challenge: Understand why I posted it here.
Bonsu Rationality Challenge: Reinvent the meaning of “God” I used to ironman the position. Start by ironmaning it yourself.
“Men have forgotten God” → “Men have lost certain beliefs and practices that strengthened social stability, and thus provided (despite their actual falsehood or even ridiculousness) a certain local optimum.” ?
It’s an example of how even absurd amounts of research can fail to move a religious thought. I think too many people will fail to get the joke and the potential for abuse is too high.
In abandoning one’s religion, one also abandons an ethical system. If this lacuna is not filled in by another ethical system that works at least passably well, the consequences for personal and political behaviour can be dire.
For decision-theoric reasons, the dark lords of the matrix give superhumanly good advice about social organization to religious people in ways that look from inside the simulation like supernatural revelations; non-religious people don’t have access to these revelations so when they try to do social organization it ends in disaster.
Bonus challenge accepted, blind mode—no peeking at comments, take my word.
“God” = the objectively present, difficult-to-disentangle historical trends of the West, and the memetic strains that caused those trends, chiefly Universalism and its Christianity section. So here, a Universalist culture has violated Universalism’s own naturally-evolved barriers and safety measures, and suffered for it by landing in a shallow circle of Hell. But Solzhenitsyn wasn’t very Universalist, I’d say—not like Zizek and Moldbug and yours truly take it—so he couldn’t see that Universalism can only stay alive while moving ever onwards and unfolding itself.
Also: this quote should be way way up there! And the Obamas of today shouldn’t be quoted so much—all is dust, and all will be dust. But history will sort its Right and Left… in due course.
(help help will newsome is taking me over with his computational theology konkvistador you know you saw it help)
Meta-level point: It is possible to steel-man someone’s position into an argument that they would not actually endorse. I think that might be what you are doing here.
Rationality challenge: Understand why I posted it here.
I’m trying to be more whimsical in my posting on LW, but I’m not sure that “rationality,” “optimization,” or any other special virtue in this community is advanced by this provocative post or its religious-language framing.
A key of Marxist thought is the rejection of the idea of God. The Marxist morality that drove the Russian revolutionaries was different than Christian morality.
I don’t the an inherent problem with blaming the Russian revolution on that change in morality. It’s a bit like putting the blame that the crusades happened on Christianity.
In Christianity the meek somehow inherent the earth while staying meek. In Marxism they do it through running a revolution and overthrowing the old order.
In Marxism there’s no difference between empirical predictions about the far future and moral claims. Marx basically got the idea that you can make empirical predictions about how moral standards will be at the end of history.
According to Marx all actions that move the world in the direction of being more in line with the moral standards at the end of history are morally good.
You’re making a category error. Historical materialism just doesn’t have anything to say on the subject of morality, certainly nothing so silly as that. At the end of history the universe will be dirt and dust, but I haven’t seen any Marxist who cares (though I think I did once encounter someone who concluded from this and Aristotelian teleology that morality is whatever maximizes entropy, lol.)
More generally, even if we can make reasonable claims about what Marxists’ and Christians’ effective moralities, asking whether these are the same moralities or not is a confused question, for entirely different reasons.
At the end of history the universe will be dirt and dust
You’re misreading the Marxist “end of history”. To Marx, history is the story of class struggle, and so once there are no more classes there is no more history.
You might both be confusing Marxist and Marxian thought.
Adherents of Marxian economics, particularly in academia, distinguish it from Marxism as a political ideology and sociological theory, arguing that Marx’s approach to understanding the economy is intellectually independent of his advocacy of revolutionary socialism or his support of proletarian revolution.
I’m certainly not confused, but those trying to make that distinction might be. His political and sociological theories followed directly from his economic theories—refuting the labor theory of value is really sufficient to defeat Marx entirely, or at least eliminate anything that wasn’t already said better by Hegel.
For Marx history is the process of social changes. When that process of changes reaches it’s end, you have Marx’s end of history. For Marx that’s a communist society in which all workers get equal pay and life happily ever after. Afterwards there are no social changes, therefore there’s no history.
Marx makes a prediction that this communist society will come about. Things that move the world closer to that prediction are morally good for Marx.
Not in this comment specifically - just a general thing about your view of economics’ relation to social structures having similar focus (determinism etc) to the Marxist view. TimS has called you out on it recently, no?
But still, “moral fashion doesn’t ever cause revolutions on its own” is a statement any Marxist would sign under. So in this regard you ironically proved closer to Marxism than the view you kinda-opposed as insufficiently strongly worded (“causal link about as evident as for crusades and Christianity”). See?
Not in this comment specifically—just a general thing about your view of economics’ relation to social structures having similar focus (determinism etc) to the Marxist view. TimS has called you out on it recently, no?
But still, “moral fashion doesn’t ever cause revolutions on its own” is a statement any Marxist would sign under. So in this regard you ironically proved closer to Marxism than the view you kinda-opposed as insufficiently strongly worded (“causal link about as evident as for crusades and Christianity”). See?
Wait, why are the Crusades not a good example of religion causing people to do evil things? Do you think they weren’t evil, or that religion wasn’t to blame?
I’m confused. Yes, D-Day was a good thing. Yes, D-Day was violence in service of democracy.
What does this have to do with whether (1) the Crusades were a good thing, or (2) whether religion (particularly Catholicism) was a substantial cause of the Crusades?
The crusades are often portrayed as violent Christians invading Muslim lands, which forgets that the Muslims violently took those lands from Christians in the first place.
On the other hand, no one complains that the battle of Normandy consisted of violent democracies attacking the lands of the Third Reich.
We could debate the reasoning that led the Western and Northern Europeans to militarily support the Byzantines until the heat death of the universe—but it’s not a particularly interesting discussion.
But the Crusades did spark a lot of in-group / out-group violence in Europe itself. De-tangling the Crusaders related pogroms from the base rate of pogroms in Europe is very difficult—but it is at least plausible that the increased religious fervor was a partial cause of the Crusader pogroms.
edit: To put it another way, I’d argue the conquest of traditionally Christian territories under the Rashidun and Ummayad Caliphs was due to religion in the same way the Spanish conquests in the Americas were—enabled and justified by religion, but motivated primarily by the desire for wealth and fame. I can go into further detail if anyone wants, though I doubt that is the case.
The crusades are often portrayed as violent Christians invading Muslim lands, which forgets that the Muslims violently took those lands from Christians in the first place.
Fair enough.
What about what the Conquistadores did in the Americas, or what the Inquisition did to heretics? Were they good things too?
The Conquisadores destroyed the human-sacrificing Aztecs. A better example for religion causing people to do bad things would be the Aztecs themselves.
The main suffering caused by the Spanish was through the unknowing introduction of European diseases, not because of their religion. I haven’t studied the issue of the invasion of the Inca but I haven’t heard it religiously motivated either.
My point remains that the actions of the Aztecs are a far better example of religion causing people to bad thing.
The conquest of the Inca was probably a mixed religious / imperialist motive on the part of the Spanish—as was basically all activity by the Spanish throughout the New World. But the occupation throughout Latin America also had a substantial religious component—including religious justification of the plantation system and harsh conversion practices.
In short, I am unsure how frequent the human sacrifice component of Aztec religion was performed. But it would need to be quite frequent to exceed the suffering caused by the Spanish governing practices in the New World—even excluding suffering caused by introduction of new disease.
Finally, I mostly agree with Eugine_Nier above that the brutally of warfare in that era cannot reasonably be counted as evidence of evil on par with the evil of human sacrifice or human slavery. For example, Medieval siege created massive suffering, but that’s just the cost of war in that era. Calling it evil is the same as calling war evil—a position I’m willing to consider, but acknowledge is quite extreme..
In short, I am unsure how frequent the human sacrifice component of Aztec religion was performed. But it would need to be quite frequent to exceed the suffering caused by the Spanish governing practices in the New World—even excluding suffering caused by introduction of new disease.
Unfortunately this is a controversial subject in academia—largely because it informs arguments like this one, but also because of sparse primary evidence. I’ve seen estimates as high as 250,000 sacrifices a year in Aztec-controlled territory, although more conservative figures put the number an order of magnitude lower; I’d probably be more inclined to accept the latter, given the relatively small population of the Aztec states of the time. Aztec use of prisoners of war as objects of sacrifice is pretty well documented (though there’s some controversy over the role of the so-called flower wars), but even with that input it seems to me that there’d be some basic sustainability concerns.
I’ve heard estimates even lower than that, but I’m not sure how credible they are.
The main suffering caused by the Spanish was through the unknowing introduction of European diseases, not because of their religion. I haven’t studied the issue of the invasion of the Inca but I haven’t heard it religiously motivated either.
From what I understand it would be more credible to blame said behavior on “capitalism” than “religion”. What with the invading to take the land and natural resources (gold, for example).
IIRC what little “statistics” and population estimates I’ve seen of native americans and aztecs in particular, a bunch of hotspots around the world today are doing much, much worse damage both per-capita and especially in terms of raw numbers.
Any number of them could reasonably be attributed to religion, but they could also be attributed to a bunch of other factors, which would be better described overall as “anti-epistemology” or just generalized stupidity.
Well, taking estimates from various of the top search engine hits and wikipedia, I arrive at an uppper 95%-confidence bound of 7% (rounded up) of the aztec population sacrificed systematically per year on average (during the peak of the empire, though, probably not sustained for more than a decade if even that), using the lower 300k total peak population and the (probably over-)estimated 20k number for annual human fatal sacrifices. The actual ratio was most likely much lower than this, but I wanted to challenge myself a bit.
By comparison, the ongoing war(s) in Afghanistan are estimated at a total three million deaths (upper bound also). This is over 34 years however, and the population estimates at the start were of 15 million, with current estimates around 30 million (this is all according to wikipedia data, though). This brings us to an average 0.5% deaths from war, rather than systematized sacrifice, which is arguably different and not quite the same as “religion causing people to do bad things”.
Similar data from similar sources on the Darfur case give a 1.1% figure, though I only used the pre-war 6-million population for this and the ratio would be higher if I had excluded the massive amount of people who fled or were displaced soon after that whole nightmare began.
So I’m running short on time here and won’t go analyzing other examples I had in mind, but in retrospect it seems I don’t quite have such clear-cut numbers here, and while I find the 20k/year estimate for aztec sacrifices ridiculously unlikely compared to the estimates for Afghanistan or Darfur, it would be reasonable to take my previous statement on per-capita with a large dose of salt. However, the “raw scale” point is certainly valid—even the impressive 20k/year figure pales in comparison to the 66k/year of Darfur or the 88k/year of Afghanistan, or some other figures that could be found with some more digging, and I’m quite sure that if we had better timeline data the total sum of the aztec sacrifices throughout their entire history wouldn’t even come close to the World Wars, for obvious reasons of scale.
And of course, for the concentrated killing-as-many-people-as-quickly-as-possible-by-doing-stupid thing, I now feel somehow obligated to point at them evil nuclear bombs. Because, y’know, they certainly win at the (deaths/second)*stupid formula.
Mass murder, theft, and enslavement don’t become okay just because contemporaneous plagues have a higher death toll. And yes, the former tended to justified in religious terms, for whatever you think that’s worth.
The argument I was responding was “The Spanish occupation caused more suffering”, therefore it bloody well is relevant to figure out how much of that suffering was the result of religious motivations and how much of it wasn’t.
If the argument is supposed to be about “mass murder, theft and enslavement” instead about “suffering”, then the argument should have said “mass murder, theft and enslavement” rather than “suffering”.
And nowhere do I see any place where I say or imply that mass murder, theft and enslavement are “okay”—I’d appreciate it if you keep the Principle of Charity in mind when you’re responding to people.
You’re right, you didn’t “imply mass murder, theft, and enslavement are okay”, you neglected to mention them entirely, despite them being relevant to your claim that “the actions of the Aztecs are a far better example of religion causing people to bad thing”, unlike disease. You made no argument against the claim that the suffering inflicted by the Spanish directly exceeded that caused by the Aztecs (#3 in TimS’s post). Instead you simply noted that disease caused “the main suffering”, and restated your previous position. What would you accept as a charitable interpretation of that?
I could also play the game where I claim you implied human sacrifice is okay, but that would be falling to your level. Hence: end of discussion on my part.
Well, they achieved that by exterminating them (well, they didn’t even have to try that hard—infectious diseases did much of the work for them—but still...) rather than by converting them, so the cure was worse than the disease.
the battle of Normandy consisted of violent democracies attacking the lands of the Third Reich.
Um… technically that’s a geographical impossibility. Once the democracies liberated French territory (violently taken by the Third Reich from France in the first place) and launched offensives beyond the “lawful” borders of Germany as drawn under the Treaty of Versailles, it wasn’t called the “Battle of Normandy” anymore. Normandy is a mid-sized region on the northwestern French coast. (Wikipedia article)
You are being extremely uncharitable to Eugine’s point. D-Day or “Battle of Normandy” is a reasonable shorthand for the Allied liberation of France and followup invasion of Nazi Germany.
That depends where you draw the line. The Third Reich considered Vichy France a client state, dependent on but legally separate from itself. The north and west of France, including Normandy, fell under German military occupation after 1940 (as did the rest of the country after 1942), but that ostensibly represented wartime defense needs rather than a permanent territorial claim.
Germany did administer some French lands as part of itself during the war, all in France’s northeast along the German border. There’s some indication that territorial expansion would have proceeded further had the Nazis won, but most of the Third Reich’s annexations took place east of Germany’s prewar territory.
I think according to this definition ‘norminal’ Christians as a whole are people who forgot God. Therefore those who don’t forget God aren’t ‘norminal’ Christians. As all ‘norminal’ Christians forgot God, that should also be true for those ‘norminal’ Christians that do violent things are also “forgetting God”.
Does that help you? I don’t think so.
In case you care, I’m no Christian even when my surname is Christian. When forced to label I choose ignostic.
A lot of self proclaimed atheists who get blinded by their faith. They think that the meme they identify with God is the thing that most people mean when they say God.
Very often that leads to misunderstanding of arguments such as the argument made by Solzhenitsyn. It gets reduced to the question “did God intervene to punish people who forget him” and “will Christian’s always act moral?”.
You lose a lot of details. What changes in a society if people socialize in workers unions instead of going to church?
Re: nominal. Could be a True Scotsman fallacy. Discuss.
I think you are trying to set up a true scotsman as a strawman.
People generally do neither where I come from. So what?
You live in the 21st century. It doesn’t make much sense to analyse events from the early 20st century by imposing your 21st century perspective.
In our times the average person didn’t replace the social enviroment that churchs provide and is more lonely than his ancestors were. He’s postmodern in the sense that he doesn’t have a strong loyality to a single framework. A lot of atheists do have some loyality to academic science and spokespeople like Richard Dawkins but that loyality isn’t strong enough to die for.
In Willpower Roy Baumeister (who’s no theist) argues that partly as a result of not believing in God willpower is now lower than it was in the past.
Debating Church v. nothing to replace it is different than debating Church v. early 20st century Marxism (and the institutions that got created after the revolution was “successful”).
Answering a question about the effects of believing in God is depends a lot on the zeitgeist of the time you are speaking about.
But to get back to the issue of “true Christian’s”, the people who go to church because their parents went to church are different than the people who have spiritual experiences and believe in God because of those experiences.
A few days ago I was debating a Christian theology student. He follows in the foodsteps of his father who’s a priest. He had to admit to me that he has no good argument for why he prefers Christianity is more true than Islam. He believed that everybody get’s to heaven regardless of how he lives his life. According to him there are a lot of people in his faculty who see things similarly. On the other hand those fellow students with spiritual experiences have racidally different views than him.
If you want to speak about the effect of being Christian, self labeling as Christian isn’t necessarily the best criteria. Spirtiual religious experiences or spending a lot of time in Christian rituals are likely to be more important than self labling.
A few days ago I was debating a Christian theology student. He follows in the foodsteps of his father who’s a priest.
It gets him his daily bread, then? :-)
He had to admit to me that he has no good argument for why he prefers Christianity is more true than Islam. He believed that everybody get’s to heaven regardless of how he lives his life.
To some Christians, that is outright heresy. Does he have any arguments for why he prefers his Christianity to any other Christianities?
According to him there are a lot of people in his faculty who see things similarly. On the other hand those fellow students with spiritual experiences have racidally different views than him.
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Rationality challenge: Understand why I posted it here.
Bonsu Rationality Challenge: Reinvent the meaning of “God” I used to ironman the position. Start by ironmaning it yourself.
“Men have forgotten God” → “Men have lost certain beliefs and practices that strengthened social stability, and thus provided (despite their actual falsehood or even ridiculousness) a certain local optimum.” ?
It’s an example of how even absurd amounts of research can fail to move a religious thought. I think too many people will fail to get the joke and the potential for abuse is too high.
In abandoning one’s religion, one also abandons an ethical system. If this lacuna is not filled in by another ethical system that works at least passably well, the consequences for personal and political behaviour can be dire.
For decision-theoric reasons, the dark lords of the matrix give superhumanly good advice about social organization to religious people in ways that look from inside the simulation like supernatural revelations; non-religious people don’t have access to these revelations so when they try to do social organization it ends in disaster.
Obviously.
Seems legit.
Bonus challenge accepted, blind mode—no peeking at comments, take my word.
“God” = the objectively present, difficult-to-disentangle historical trends of the West, and the memetic strains that caused those trends, chiefly Universalism and its Christianity section. So here, a Universalist culture has violated Universalism’s own naturally-evolved barriers and safety measures, and suffered for it by landing in a shallow circle of Hell. But Solzhenitsyn wasn’t very Universalist, I’d say—not like Zizek and Moldbug and yours truly take it—so he couldn’t see that Universalism can only stay alive while moving ever onwards and unfolding itself.
Also: this quote should be way way up there! And the Obamas of today shouldn’t be quoted so much—all is dust, and all will be dust. But history will sort its Right and Left… in due course.
(help help will newsome is taking me over with his computational theology konkvistador you know you saw it help)
Meta-level point: It is possible to steel-man someone’s position into an argument that they would not actually endorse. I think that might be what you are doing here.
I’m trying to be more whimsical in my posting on LW, but I’m not sure that “rationality,” “optimization,” or any other special virtue in this community is advanced by this provocative post or its religious-language framing.
For a more detailed discussion go here.
A key of Marxist thought is the rejection of the idea of God. The Marxist morality that drove the Russian revolutionaries was different than Christian morality.
I don’t the an inherent problem with blaming the Russian revolution on that change in morality. It’s a bit like putting the blame that the crusades happened on Christianity.
Was it really? For example, “the meek shall inherit the earth” transfers basically unchanged.
In Christianity the meek somehow inherent the earth while staying meek. In Marxism they do it through running a revolution and overthrowing the old order.
That sounds like an empirical prediction, not a moral claim.
In Marxism there’s no difference between empirical predictions about the far future and moral claims. Marx basically got the idea that you can make empirical predictions about how moral standards will be at the end of history. According to Marx all actions that move the world in the direction of being more in line with the moral standards at the end of history are morally good.
That’s not completely relevant, as “the meek shall inherit the earth” was a Christian claim.
You’re making a category error. Historical materialism just doesn’t have anything to say on the subject of morality, certainly nothing so silly as that. At the end of history the universe will be dirt and dust, but I haven’t seen any Marxist who cares (though I think I did once encounter someone who concluded from this and Aristotelian teleology that morality is whatever maximizes entropy, lol.)
More generally, even if we can make reasonable claims about what Marxists’ and Christians’ effective moralities, asking whether these are the same moralities or not is a confused question, for entirely different reasons.
I’ve seen several compelling arguments along similar lines.
Compelling? Do you mean compelled to reject the premises or compelled to accept the conclusion?
Mostly, I was compelled to author the grandparent comment. So not very compelling.
You’re misreading the Marxist “end of history”. To Marx, history is the story of class struggle, and so once there are no more classes there is no more history.
You might both be confusing Marxist and Marxian thought.
I’m certainly not confused, but those trying to make that distinction might be. His political and sociological theories followed directly from his economic theories—refuting the labor theory of value is really sufficient to defeat Marx entirely, or at least eliminate anything that wasn’t already said better by Hegel.
OK, sorry for the superfluous advice then. I have only had a cursory glance at your discussion.
Marx burrowed the idea of history from Hegel.
For Marx history is the process of social changes. When that process of changes reaches it’s end, you have Marx’s end of history. For Marx that’s a communist society in which all workers get equal pay and life happily ever after. Afterwards there are no social changes, therefore there’s no history.
Marx makes a prediction that this communist society will come about. Things that move the world closer to that prediction are morally good for Marx.
I’d say that’s like putting the blame for the battle of Normandy on democracy.
Very, very well put! (FYI, Eugine_Nier appears to be pro-democracy)
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^ looks just right in rot13, too! Black Speech!
I can’t tell whether you understood my point, or completely misunderstood it. I don’t see where I was “thinking like a Marxist”.
Not in this comment specifically - just a general thing about your view of economics’ relation to social structures having similar focus (determinism etc) to the Marxist view. TimS has called you out on it recently, no?
But still, “moral fashion doesn’t ever cause revolutions on its own” is a statement any Marxist would sign under. So in this regard you ironically proved closer to Marxism than the view you kinda-opposed as insufficiently strongly worded (“causal link about as evident as for crusades and Christianity”). See?
TGGP defends economic determinism here.
Heh! Cool, thanks.
Ok, so you did misunderstand my intent.
My point, was mainly that the Crusades are not a good example of “religion causes people to do something evil”.
Wait, why are the Crusades not a good example of religion causing people to do evil things? Do you think they weren’t evil, or that religion wasn’t to blame?
That depends on what you mean by those terms. Was the battle of Normandy a good thing?
I’m confused. Yes, D-Day was a good thing. Yes, D-Day was violence in service of democracy.
What does this have to do with whether (1) the Crusades were a good thing, or (2) whether religion (particularly Catholicism) was a substantial cause of the Crusades?
The crusades are often portrayed as violent Christians invading Muslim lands, which forgets that the Muslims violently took those lands from Christians in the first place.
On the other hand, no one complains that the battle of Normandy consisted of violent democracies attacking the lands of the Third Reich.
There probably would be people complaining if D-Day had occurred four centuries after the fall of France.
We could debate the reasoning that led the Western and Northern Europeans to militarily support the Byzantines until the heat death of the universe—but it’s not a particularly interesting discussion.
But the Crusades did spark a lot of in-group / out-group violence in Europe itself. De-tangling the Crusaders related pogroms from the base rate of pogroms in Europe is very difficult—but it is at least plausible that the increased religious fervor was a partial cause of the Crusader pogroms.
If it’s a question of whether religion has a history of motivating violence, it’s worth considering why the Muslims took those lands to begin with.
I agree that’s a better example. One thing to notice is that the propensity of a religion to cause violence varies by religion.
Plunder and glory?
edit: To put it another way, I’d argue the conquest of traditionally Christian territories under the Rashidun and Ummayad Caliphs was due to religion in the same way the Spanish conquests in the Americas were—enabled and justified by religion, but motivated primarily by the desire for wealth and fame. I can go into further detail if anyone wants, though I doubt that is the case.
Fair enough.
What about what the Conquistadores did in the Americas, or what the Inquisition did to heretics? Were they good things too?
The Conquisadores destroyed the human-sacrificing Aztecs. A better example for religion causing people to do bad things would be the Aztecs themselves.
1) There no rule that says the Spanish and the Aztecs can’t both be wrong.
2) That doesn’t resolve the invasion of the Inca in South America
3) The Spanish occupation over the next few centuries probably caused more suffering than the Aztec (or possibly even the Crusades).
The main suffering caused by the Spanish was through the unknowing introduction of European diseases, not because of their religion. I haven’t studied the issue of the invasion of the Inca but I haven’t heard it religiously motivated either.
My point remains that the actions of the Aztecs are a far better example of religion causing people to bad thing.
The conquest of the Inca was probably a mixed religious / imperialist motive on the part of the Spanish—as was basically all activity by the Spanish throughout the New World. But the occupation throughout Latin America also had a substantial religious component—including religious justification of the plantation system and harsh conversion practices.
In short, I am unsure how frequent the human sacrifice component of Aztec religion was performed. But it would need to be quite frequent to exceed the suffering caused by the Spanish governing practices in the New World—even excluding suffering caused by introduction of new disease.
Finally, I mostly agree with Eugine_Nier above that the brutally of warfare in that era cannot reasonably be counted as evidence of evil on par with the evil of human sacrifice or human slavery. For example, Medieval siege created massive suffering, but that’s just the cost of war in that era. Calling it evil is the same as calling war evil—a position I’m willing to consider, but acknowledge is quite extreme..
Unfortunately this is a controversial subject in academia—largely because it informs arguments like this one, but also because of sparse primary evidence. I’ve seen estimates as high as 250,000 sacrifices a year in Aztec-controlled territory, although more conservative figures put the number an order of magnitude lower; I’d probably be more inclined to accept the latter, given the relatively small population of the Aztec states of the time. Aztec use of prisoners of war as objects of sacrifice is pretty well documented (though there’s some controversy over the role of the so-called flower wars), but even with that input it seems to me that there’d be some basic sustainability concerns.
I’ve heard estimates even lower than that, but I’m not sure how credible they are.
From what I understand it would be more credible to blame said behavior on “capitalism” than “religion”. What with the invading to take the land and natural resources (gold, for example).
IIRC what little “statistics” and population estimates I’ve seen of native americans and aztecs in particular, a bunch of hotspots around the world today are doing much, much worse damage both per-capita and especially in terms of raw numbers.
Any number of them could reasonably be attributed to religion, but they could also be attributed to a bunch of other factors, which would be better described overall as “anti-epistemology” or just generalized stupidity.
Any examples?
Well, taking estimates from various of the top search engine hits and wikipedia, I arrive at an uppper 95%-confidence bound of 7% (rounded up) of the aztec population sacrificed systematically per year on average (during the peak of the empire, though, probably not sustained for more than a decade if even that), using the lower 300k total peak population and the (probably over-)estimated 20k number for annual human fatal sacrifices. The actual ratio was most likely much lower than this, but I wanted to challenge myself a bit.
By comparison, the ongoing war(s) in Afghanistan are estimated at a total three million deaths (upper bound also). This is over 34 years however, and the population estimates at the start were of 15 million, with current estimates around 30 million (this is all according to wikipedia data, though). This brings us to an average 0.5% deaths from war, rather than systematized sacrifice, which is arguably different and not quite the same as “religion causing people to do bad things”.
Similar data from similar sources on the Darfur case give a 1.1% figure, though I only used the pre-war 6-million population for this and the ratio would be higher if I had excluded the massive amount of people who fled or were displaced soon after that whole nightmare began.
So I’m running short on time here and won’t go analyzing other examples I had in mind, but in retrospect it seems I don’t quite have such clear-cut numbers here, and while I find the 20k/year estimate for aztec sacrifices ridiculously unlikely compared to the estimates for Afghanistan or Darfur, it would be reasonable to take my previous statement on per-capita with a large dose of salt. However, the “raw scale” point is certainly valid—even the impressive 20k/year figure pales in comparison to the 66k/year of Darfur or the 88k/year of Afghanistan, or some other figures that could be found with some more digging, and I’m quite sure that if we had better timeline data the total sum of the aztec sacrifices throughout their entire history wouldn’t even come close to the World Wars, for obvious reasons of scale.
And of course, for the concentrated killing-as-many-people-as-quickly-as-possible-by-doing-stupid thing, I now feel somehow obligated to point at them evil nuclear bombs. Because, y’know, they certainly win at the (deaths/second)*stupid formula.
Mass murder, theft, and enslavement don’t become okay just because contemporaneous plagues have a higher death toll. And yes, the former tended to justified in religious terms, for whatever you think that’s worth.
The argument I was responding was “The Spanish occupation caused more suffering”, therefore it bloody well is relevant to figure out how much of that suffering was the result of religious motivations and how much of it wasn’t.
If the argument is supposed to be about “mass murder, theft and enslavement” instead about “suffering”, then the argument should have said “mass murder, theft and enslavement” rather than “suffering”.
And nowhere do I see any place where I say or imply that mass murder, theft and enslavement are “okay”—I’d appreciate it if you keep the Principle of Charity in mind when you’re responding to people.
You’re right, you didn’t “imply mass murder, theft, and enslavement are okay”, you neglected to mention them entirely, despite them being relevant to your claim that “the actions of the Aztecs are a far better example of religion causing people to bad thing”, unlike disease. You made no argument against the claim that the suffering inflicted by the Spanish directly exceeded that caused by the Aztecs (#3 in TimS’s post). Instead you simply noted that disease caused “the main suffering”, and restated your previous position. What would you accept as a charitable interpretation of that?
I could also play the game where I claim you implied human sacrifice is okay, but that would be falling to your level. Hence: end of discussion on my part.
Well, they achieved that by exterminating them (well, they didn’t even have to try that hard—infectious diseases did much of the work for them—but still...) rather than by converting them, so the cure was worse than the disease.
Um… technically that’s a geographical impossibility. Once the democracies liberated French territory (violently taken by the Third Reich from France in the first place) and launched offensives beyond the “lawful” borders of Germany as drawn under the Treaty of Versailles, it wasn’t called the “Battle of Normandy” anymore. Normandy is a mid-sized region on the northwestern French coast. (Wikipedia article)
You are being extremely uncharitable to Eugine’s point. D-Day or “Battle of Normandy” is a reasonable shorthand for the Allied liberation of France and followup invasion of Nazi Germany.
I know, I know. It’s just that I’m a pretty hardcore (read: obsessive) World War 2 geek :).
The Third Reich considered northern France a part of itself.
That depends where you draw the line. The Third Reich considered Vichy France a client state, dependent on but legally separate from itself. The north and west of France, including Normandy, fell under German military occupation after 1940 (as did the rest of the country after 1942), but that ostensibly represented wartime defense needs rather than a permanent territorial claim.
Germany did administer some French lands as part of itself during the war, all in France’s northeast along the German border. There’s some indication that territorial expansion would have proceeded further had the Nazis won, but most of the Third Reich’s annexations took place east of Germany’s prewar territory.
That religion wasn’t to blame. Read the grandparents, most notably this.
EDIT: Wait, no. I had that backwards.
Did the (nominal) Christians who did violent and terrible things forget God too?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn doesn’t speak about “why people do violent things?” in the quote but about why the Russian revolution happened.
I wasn’t asking Solzhenitsyn, I was asking you.
I think that question is illformed.
If I look into (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nominal)[webster] the definition of ‘norminal’ that applies here seems to be: “3a : existing or being something in name or form only ”
I think according to this definition ‘norminal’ Christians as a whole are people who forgot God. Therefore those who don’t forget God aren’t ‘norminal’ Christians. As all ‘norminal’ Christians forgot God, that should also be true for those ‘norminal’ Christians that do violent things are also “forgetting God”.
Does that help you? I don’t think so.
In case you care, I’m no Christian even when my surname is Christian. When forced to label I choose ignostic.
A lot of self proclaimed atheists who get blinded by their faith. They think that the meme they identify with God is the thing that most people mean when they say God. Very often that leads to misunderstanding of arguments such as the argument made by Solzhenitsyn. It gets reduced to the question “did God intervene to punish people who forget him” and “will Christian’s always act moral?”.
You lose a lot of details. What changes in a society if people socialize in workers unions instead of going to church?
Re: nominal. Could be a True Scotsman fallacy. Discuss.
People generally do neither where I come from. So what?
I think you are trying to set up a true scotsman as a strawman.
You live in the 21st century. It doesn’t make much sense to analyse events from the early 20st century by imposing your 21st century perspective.
In our times the average person didn’t replace the social enviroment that churchs provide and is more lonely than his ancestors were. He’s postmodern in the sense that he doesn’t have a strong loyality to a single framework. A lot of atheists do have some loyality to academic science and spokespeople like Richard Dawkins but that loyality isn’t strong enough to die for. In Willpower Roy Baumeister (who’s no theist) argues that partly as a result of not believing in God willpower is now lower than it was in the past.
Debating Church v. nothing to replace it is different than debating Church v. early 20st century Marxism (and the institutions that got created after the revolution was “successful”). Answering a question about the effects of believing in God is depends a lot on the zeitgeist of the time you are speaking about.
But to get back to the issue of “true Christian’s”, the people who go to church because their parents went to church are different than the people who have spiritual experiences and believe in God because of those experiences.
A few days ago I was debating a Christian theology student. He follows in the foodsteps of his father who’s a priest. He had to admit to me that he has no good argument for why he prefers Christianity is more true than Islam. He believed that everybody get’s to heaven regardless of how he lives his life. According to him there are a lot of people in his faculty who see things similarly. On the other hand those fellow students with spiritual experiences have racidally different views than him.
If you want to speak about the effect of being Christian, self labeling as Christian isn’t necessarily the best criteria. Spirtiual religious experiences or spending a lot of time in Christian rituals are likely to be more important than self labling.
It gets him his daily bread, then? :-)
To some Christians, that is outright heresy. Does he have any arguments for why he prefers his Christianity to any other Christianities?
Do they all differ from him in the same way?
I thought you might go down that route, and you did.
Maybe it isn’t strong enougnh to start a war for either. Are we so much worse off without that kind of Willpower?
No, I didn’t argue that true Christian’s don’t commit violent acts. I made a bunch of claims but that isn’t one of them.