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Comment by VictorPath | Hacker News Reader

> evolutionary hunter-gatherer behavior and other various strains of pseudo-scientific bullshit, but all of those are equally as faith-bound as religion given that there is no possible way to devise reasonable (or ethical) experimentation on how past humanity

What past humanity? There are hunter gatherer bands roaming around the Amazon right now. They seem to exhibit at least as much "upstanding behavior" as the evangelicals sloshing around the US.

Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc. I don't see how irrational beliefs about burning bushes, virgin births, walking on water, resurrections result in "upstanding behavior". If this were the case evangelicals would be the epitome of "upstanding behavior", but they are not.

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> There are hunter gatherer bands roaming around the Amazon right now. They seem to exhibit at least as much "upstanding behavior" as the evangelicals sloshing around the US.

Considering how violent are cultures of hunter-gatherers, I’d say that they are much less morally upstanding. But, they provide a good data point here: the hunter gatherers are typically highly religious. It’s just their religions are pretty bad at creating positive societal outcomes. Not all religions are created equal in that aspect.

> Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc.

If you look at the reality instead of aggregated statistics and packaged narratives, you will find that gun deaths in US very much are not of the charts in places where religiosity is off the chart. If anything, these two things are negatively correlated: the more religious a place is, the fewer gun deaths (despite no scarcity of firearms among the religious).

>how violent are cultures of hunter-gatherer

WW2 killed 75 million people. Tell me again, who has the more violent culture?

Context matters. The proper tool to use is to compare what percentage of lives met a violent end annually.

Normally in the US it's about 1 in 17,000 according to the CDC

https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/datasources/nvdrs/ind...

In Sweden its more like 1 in 83,000

Ancient stats are a little hard to come by and different groups were more or less warlike losing between an estimated 1 in 100 to 1 in 3000

Big events like WW2 are very noticeable but ancient people were in fact very violent because not shockingly people are violent.

As importantly is the context in which violence appears in ancient society driven not my large scale political movements but by resource scarcity. A continually expanding human population in the absence of modern civilization would not have achieved present population size but they would certainly have continued to grow leading to greater scarcity and increasing conflict. That is to say that they were more violent on average already and they would be more so in the modern context.

It's a lot of facts and figures, but it kind of misses the mark. Wars today are also from resource scarcity.

Leibingsraum was explicitly part of the reasoning for invading France.

I know it's a natural instinct to defend modern living as more peaceful, and to some extent that may be true. But modern society has also created atrocities that ancient people could never dream of.

> If you look at the reality instead of aggregated statistics and packaged narratives, you will find that gun deaths in US very much are not of the charts in places where religiosity is off the chart. If anything, these two things are negatively correlated: the more religious a place is, the fewer gun deaths (despite no scarcity of firearms among the religious).

We can debate what off-the-chart means, but when we cross-reference the states with the highest gun death per capita (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...) with the states that are the most religious (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/29/how-religio...), we find a lot of overlap.

Correlation is not causation, but I can't see how we can claim these two are negatively correlated.

Okay, and in those states, where do those gun deaths happen? The religious parts? The believers are doing the killings?

Look, I’ll make this straight, because there is a lot of willful ignorance here. Overwhelming majority of gun homicides happen in large cities, where the religiosity is low, and very few in suburbs and rural areas, where religiosity is high. Moreover, people committing those gun homicides are very rarely practicing religious people, and neither are most of their victims.

Not sure if that is true, did you know that Black people are significantly more religious than White people?

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/26/black-men-a...

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