Religion, Violence, Tolerance and Progress: Nothing to Do with Theology
medium.com
medium.com
The traditional Christian view of same-sex activity derives from more direct statements made by Paul, and Jesus’s general statements about sexual immorality. What Paul actually meant about homosexuality depends on ambiguous translations from the original Greek. Moreover, Jesus’s prohibition on sexual immorality depends on what counts as sexual immorality. Christian denominations that accept same-sex marriage interpret these statements differently. This is particularly easy in Protestant Christianity because it accepts that the Bible is the work of people and that it must be interpreted.
On one hand, I think you’re correct that a lot of this is results-driven rationalization—looking at the Bible anew with the desire to reach a particular end goal. That in and of itself isn’t necessarily that big of a deal, though. We do the same thing in the law, with texts that are far less ancient and where the original meaning is far more apparent. The Supreme Court just decided this year that Congress had already banned discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity back in the 1960s.
But there have also been theologically relevant changes. It wasn’t until the 21st century that it became widely accepted as a matter of science and sociology that homosexuality is innate and not a choice. These facts are enormously important theologically. Christianity is not in the business of affirming peoples’ choices. But an overriding principle is that God created each person individually and knows and loves each person. Within that framework, an orientation that is innate is very different from behavior that is a choice. Moreover, an overriding purpose of Biblical marriage is to have and raise children. In the United States, large scale studies showing that huge numbers of gay couples were raising children together were released in 2011, based on 2010 census data. This went largely unnoticed among folks who don’t see child rearing as an essential purpose of marriage and life generally, but is tremendously important for deciding that same-sex unions fall within Christian (and other traditional) understandings of what is a marriage.
I don't see it just from reading this verse (and knowing the section).
On sexuality being innate/not a choice. The Bible does not prohibit any innate characteristics, it prohibits actions. Actions are always choices. Homosexual actions are what the bible prohibits, the Old Testament first and then repeated (and quoted) in the New Testament.
Marriage is not involved in these prohibitions.
Turns out, only 30 percent of U.S. Protestants believe in both sola fide and sola scriptura.
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2017/08/31/poll-most-p...
That’s because as far as I can tell, the purpose of “religion” is to assist in tribal bonds. Even though it’s not explicitly stated, it helps serve as a proxy for people to figure how closely to align themselves with another.
When I was a child, I wondered why people who didn’t believe in the assumptions of a religion or act according to them still stated they belong to that religion or performed certain rituals and traditions relating to the religion.
I came to learn it’s because it helps serve as a signal to where your political allegiances might lie and helps manage your priorities and subtly inform others.
Non “religious” societies may have weaker tribal bonds or allegiances with each other, so in times of conflict, they may be unable to create the group dynamics that enable them to survive and/or thrive. Of course, my whole theory might be wrong and maybe there are better signals nowadays.
Above 1500 people, a group needs a non-personal method to tag who is trustworthy and who might be plotting you harm.
Religion fills the gap nicely, gives you a reason to trust the other person. Works well, until it doesn't.
Long way of providing scientifically derived support to your statement on the "purpose" of religion.
This is a constant misunderstanding of what constitutes Islamic theology. Islamic teaching are made up of the Quran and Sunnah, the Holy text and ways and teachings of the Prophet Muhammed respectively; there is a whole science of hadith that form accept elements of the latter. This is the approach of the majority of Muslim communities.
There is an a sect of Islam that only followed the Quran but it has traditionally not been as widespread.
The funny thing is that Taleb is making something of the same point, but still makes that mistake when it comes time to talk about theology.
Sorry but while this may be well meant from the author it is just wrong. I'm arabic native speaker and can provide more details.
First the quran was revealed in a span of 23 years. And when dealing with drinking, the quran took a step by step approach. At first, a general warning was given to forbid Muslims from attending prayers while in a drunken state (Quran, 4:43).
"O you who believe! Do not approach the prayer while you are drunk, so that you know what you say"
Then a later verse was revealed to Prophet Muhammad which said that while specifically alcohol had some medicinal benefits, the negative effects of it outweighed the good (Quran, 2:219).
"They ask you about intoxicants and gambling. Say, “There is gross sin in them, and some benefits for people, but their sinfulness outweighs their benefit.”"
Finally, “intoxicants and gambling” were called “abominations of Satan’s handiwork,” which warned people with self-consciousness to not turn away from God and forget about prayer, and Muslims were ordered to abstain (Quran, 5:90-91).
"90: O you who believe! Intoxicants, gambling, idolatry, and divination are abominations of Satan’s doing. Avoid them, so that you may prosper. 91: Satan wants to provoke strife and hatred among you through intoxicants and gambling, and to prevent you from the remembrance of Allah, and from prayer. Will you not desist?"
The Prophet Muhammad also instructed his companions to avoid any intoxicating substances (paraphrased), “if it intoxicates in a large amount, it is forbidden even in a small amount.” For this reason, most observant Muslims avoid alcohol in any form, even small amounts that are sometimes used in cooking.
Do you know how this is resolved or interpreted?
[1] https://www.quora.com/The-Quran-Do-later-teachings-and-verse...
I'll not proclaim to be an expert by any means.
* A good-sized portion who are "in name only" adherents
* A large group who are "in good standing" but not necessarily strong adherents
* A minority, and likely a small minority, who are "sweat the details" adherents.
For instance, among Americans who identify as Catholics, only 40% attend Mass weekly. But only about 22% of Catholics say they ever go to confession, and only 2% go regularly.
So although a person might identify as Catholic, the importance of their faith and their adherence to its doctrine is going to vary from person to person, and my guess is that for the majority of U.S. Catholics, their religion does not hold as much sway on their behavior as other factors -- including their political affiliation.
Granted, there are some cases where the distribution is different. If your religion is especially insular or vulnerable, or if it is controlled by people with great political power, there are probably fewer casual adherents.
Nevertheless, I don't think it's especially helpful to talk about Catholics or Jews or Muslims or what have you without making the distinction between these different levels of adherence.
But I do think the author makes a good point that many of the activities, attitudes (and atrocities) we attribute to religious groups are really the result of other cultural factors that use religion as a mantle. Look at the Catholic-Protestant conflicts in Northern Ireland; these were undeniably political groups that used the Catholic and Protestant labels to identify themselves, even though they weren't fighting over doctrine -- they were fighting over power.
> The (Protestant) Puritans who inhabited New England and the Salafis of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf have nearly identical theologies, based on shared communitarianism (refusal of a centralized authority), iconoclasm (absence of representation, of saints, and of any elaborate aesthetics), absence of an organized “church”, and very stern practice of the religion.
None of these things are theology. They can be informed heavily or indirectly by it, but theology is primarily about how we understand God, not the second order effects.
For example, in Catholicism, the Church is supposed to have some level of divinity carried over from Christ. That would make the central authority of the church part of how they understand god, or their theology, so lacking those things would become part of Protestant theology.
>theological doctrine relating to the church
And the few other things I checked also considered it part of the greater theology.
So the word 'theology' != "formal beliefs", whether or not that affects Taleb's brief thesis.
Theology proper is richly coupled with the nature of the church, since the church is so richly coupled with God.
These passages, in particular, caught my eye:
> ...the notion that religion determines attitude and culture fails historical logic. And trying to change the theologies makes absolutely no sense. You need to change the mentalities, and cultural norms — if you can.
> The robust alternative, that people imitate the (contagious) mores of those of their group, tradditionally defined by religion, makes vastly more sense. People like to dress, act, even think in broad terms within the style of others members of their group, people they identify with — what we tend to loosely call “identity”.
The same logic, I think, applies to groups in the US who self-identify as liberal or conservative. People in each group dress, act, and yes, even think in broad terms within the style of others members of their group. Trying to change either group's theology with reasoned arguments and proven facts would be... a fruitless exercise.
This logic reminds me of Paul Graham's essay about keeping one's identity small ( http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html). Quoting from it:
> I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan.
> If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
> The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.
I love this characterization by David Wong, it goes in depth about the divide.
You can still maintain the overall point, by arguing that prevailing attitudes drove the theology rather than the other way around. Supercessionism became drastically less popular after seeing the 20th century consequences of anti-semitism, moreso than pure reflection on scripture or anything like that.
In this First Things piece by David Novak, he talks about a distinction between "hard" and "soft" supersessionism:
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/02/supersessionism-...
You can see a defense of this soft supersessionism in this piece by the late Avery Cardinal Dulles:
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2005/11/the-covenant-wit...
1. It implies that theological texts can't give any clearly definable meaning. This means that the Quran and the New Testament are essentially equivalent in terms of their impact on society. He needs to present me more evidence than he did in backing up this very strong claim.
2. It implies that there is a single predominant factor in explaining group behavior. This is a fallacy of the single cause. Sure, group-think plays a part. However, it would be very hasty to say that theology doesn't play a part as well in forming that group-think in the first place.
The Puritans had a view of theology very very different from the Catholics. They believed that their salvation was fundamentally God's choice (Calvinism) instead of their own (Arminianism). You might make the point that this refutes point 1. above, except that this 'theology' didn't come out of thin air, it came from a very literal reading of the New Testament (Romans 8:29-30 for example). This theology - particularly the doctrine of total depravity coupled with predestination - has practical implications on how one would craft the _policy_ of new institutions. This in turn necessarily trickles down into freedoms, human rights, and finally economics. The burden of proof is on the author of this article to explain how this set of beliefs (let alone Weber) are not hugely impactful on traditional western values.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
At a more specific level, I think this is very useful for thinking about programming language communities and how they affect behaviour.
That makes no sense as a takeaway here. The author's argument is that while religious theology doesn't drive the cultural norms, the religious boundaries define a grouping wherein people tend to converge on or copy cultural norms. Thus, you end up with a particular religious group behaving like X, even if X didn't come from the religion itself.
One could easily apply the same reasoning to visible ethnic groups: they don't behave similarly because of their ethnicity, but the ethnicity defines a grouping where the people within tend to converge on shared cultural norms regardless. Ergo, you would indeed end up with people within said grouping behaving similarly, and then it follows that increasing diversity of which groups you hire from would increase diversity of cultural norms or thought/behavior.
I do think there's something to 'shared experiences' across ethnic groups to an extent, though it probably won't have as strong an effect as sharing a religion, given that religion is at least nominally a choice, and has an explicit ideology backing it. Nevertheless, you see this effect when you see viral memes with captions like "only asian american kids get this" -- obviously these don't apply universally, but there's enough of something there to drive their virality. Hell, sometimes it may be as simple as shared experiences dealing with racism.
> Saying that people naturally converge on a shared culture based on their skin color just sounds like thinly veiled racism.
I don't really see how you got this from what I said.
He said ethnicity, not skin colour. Ethnicity is a quite broad and fluid concept which you could assign to any distinguishable cultural group which has some shared history, shared norms or values etc.
As such, it's entirely valid to say that if you belong to a certain ethnicity, statistically you're quite likely to converge personally on many of its norms and values. That doesn't mean all muslims are alike, but two muslims are more alike, ceteris paribus, than a muslim and a non-muslim.
That also doesn't exclude that there can be many different ethnicities at play at the same time, e.g. there are asian (e.g. Indonesian) muslims and african (e.g. Moroccan) muslims. And again, a muslim moroccan is more alike a Moroccan jew than perhaps an Indonesian muslim. Because Morocco has a culture, and Moroccans as an ethnicity converge to many of its norms and values, just like Indonesians in Indonesia.
And so indeed, Black Americans are a distinct ethnicity from African Americans (for lack of better terminology), agreed. And within those ethnicities its willing or unwilling members converge on the norms/values in those groups. I don't see how that's controversial. That doesn't mean they're all copies or mindless drones. Nor does it mean the members cannot have other ethnicities which they also converge on.
I'd say the fact members of group A statistically tend to be more likely to exhibit than outside members, the characteristics of group A (i.e., converging weakly or strongly to norms/values of group A), is so obvious that it is almost a truism that isn't worth stating, and hardly controversial or thinly veiled racism.
This combined with new laws proposals from Germany could soon have a substantial impact on Tech by mandating various regulations on such platforms.
The effect of such regulations that could be endorsed by the two biggest and most influential members of the EU and could lead to a drastic change in the tech world in Europe.
>In France right now the topic is extremely controversial due to recent events
For those not aware last week a teacher was decapitated : https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/world/europe/france-teach...
>Social networks which are blamed openly by the public opinion for their amplifying effect.
What are your source for public opinion here? Yes, mainstream media are bold on the social networks. The same mainstream media which are all owned by the wealthiest people of the country and still abundantly financed by the State to survive.
Mainstream media message is not "the public opinion", which is understandably diverse.
Actually, you don’t have to dig much into what penetrate even in the mainstream media to see opinions going from "well, if our proposal to harden the political system as we wish is unconstitutional, we just have to edit the constitution first" to "the same incompetent political class that led our country to the current wave of terrorism is now willing to burn the few remaining public liberty we can enjoy".
The question is not whether a topic is controversial or not. I can make a controversy on the color of your socket – or on endianness[1]. The question is whether we can treat a subject properly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu#History_...
Example from this article: "Nor does comparing theologies make sense, unless of course one has been brainwashed by sociology texts and becomes unable to think with minimal clarity".
Why is anyone reading anything from this man? Am I missing something?