CNN summarizes the latest Pew Report:
“The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists
People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it.”
Surprised? 😉
Graph source: “Data from a Pew Research Center survey conducted April 14-21, 2009, among 742 American adults.
P.S. Prior Pew graph of Wealth vs. Religiosity
Oh, a total shocker. Yeah, right! Were the unaffiliated still religious? Did they look at atheists??
i was just reading about the Roman Inquisition which was established in 1542 by Pope Paul III. Conrad Tors, one of the Inquisitors, declared, "I would burn a hundred innocents if there was one guilty amongst them."
also, in 1208 when the Church of Rome sent armies to wipe out the Cathar communities and they weren’t sure how to distinguish the Cathars from the Catholics, the Abbot of Citeaux said,"Kill them all, the Lord will recognise his own."
torture is rife in religious texts, although i have yet to read of it being condoned in any humanist texts.
also, i thought this article from an ex-FBI agent was interesting too…
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/opinion/23soufan.html?emc=eta1
If it was indicated the suspected terrorists could have been of Christian persuasion, would this outcome been the same???.. Hmmm
Thanks for the info.
I’m an atheist, but I have to wonder about any deeper extrapolations out of such a poll. Specifically if you were to look at the history of Communist Russia and Communist China. I would argue that by far they tortured and mass murdered more people than any other two groups in history.
It’s the altruism that binds the fervor of the religious zealots, the hard Socialists (Hitler, Chavez, Mussolini), and the Communists (Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong-Il, Fidel). That is to say, the belief in the right to sacrifice human life as an ethos (to the state, to the altar, to ‘the people’, to the earth, to anything) as a core fundamental philosophical tenet is what binds all vicious religious beliefs and all vicious political beliefs. Do you really think the USSR was truly atheistic for example? All they did is replace the Christian god with another figure to pray to in the use of the state (it’s why Europe is less religious than America; they’re more socialistic, they swap one icon out for another, they worship collectivism). Do you think the left is less religious than the right in the US as another example? They just swap out the conservative god for environmentalism and socialism. Faith is the issue in question there: believing in something without reason to, is the rough definition of faith. It’s the fundamental premise of being anti reason.
Just my 2 cents.
And yet… we have the gulags of the USSR, the Cultural Revolution, the Killing Fields of Pol Pot, North Korea, etc, etc. Tis a puzzle how these non-religious societies could run so far afoul of a Pew Poll. The godless societies have NOT been paragons human kindness. Me thinks someone needs to go back and review the meaning (or lack thereof) of that poll. Just saying… 😉
(Hint: I think you’ll find that the most/many atheists are also dems, who happen to be using this issue to prosecute policy differences….)
The differences are slight. They are all a quarter dark-orange, which is appalling. The figure is a bit of a visual lie in that the two closest responses have the contrasting colours. I therefore don’t much trust the rest of the methodology either. e.g. how well controlled are the responses to "sometimes" vs "rarely".
i think it’s a valid point that as we all know, non-religious people and organisations are also capable of torture. however, the subtle difference here may be that the citizens living under a totalitarian state such as those mentioned above, often live in fear and do not necessarily personally condone the immoral actions of the state. these doctrines are also usually confined to their particular geo-political borders – for instance, as far as i’m aware, there are no organisations around the world espousing the doctrinal virtues of kim jong il, or pol pot.
religious doctrine and memes on the other hand, often know no boundaries and infiltrate across racial, cultural, geographical and political borders. wherever you go, you will find people from the religious right fighting fervently against issues such as gay rights, abortion, contraception and evolution, to name but a few. these are ideas that are reinforced through their religious belief system.
non-religious people are not exposed to or affected by such doctrines and so it is probably more likely that they have come to their own set of belief systems through study, research, debate, and discussion. having said that though, i am sure that there are also a large subset of non-religious people who are not necessarily humanist at all, and who may not have given much thought to these matters. after all, religion and politics have always been taboo subjects that many are happy not to engage in.
@Jonathan_Ruff – I used to be an atheist too until I figured it was a contradiction in terms. . (if you think about it ) so now I’m an agnostic, I don’t disbelieve anything a priori. In order to function, we do need to have some beliefs tho, which is the issue. My current working solution is to believe in (1) what I can experience or prove by myself, then in (2) what other people I trust believe and (3) what people I trust have written. No easy matter for anyone, since our parents and environment have their own biases, inevitably.
Getting back to the religiosity / torture correlation, I would presume one would also find a high correlation between basic FEAR and religiosity. (nels1, we agree somewhat, tho see fear as the original issue) Because, if you think about it, questioning everything is a very scary endeavor, it feels much safer and simpler to become a believer of a doctrine (religiosity, "science", "capitalism", "free markets", "socialism" ..) I put quotes because these mean different things to different people. The more fearful we are that anything might threaten our comfortable system of beliefs, the more we feel justified in using whatever means to protect it. Including torture.
And unfortunately there is often little that can be done to change one’s attitude but hard knock s. Personal corollary: I wish to be as sensitive to signs I might be wrong … so as to experience as mild reality awakening shocks as possible.
Further thoughts .. how can we limit the exploitation of fear by politicians et al.
fCh: Seth Godin had some interesting musings on that in his book Tribes…
"Tribes are about faith.
Heretics are the new leaders.
Faith is critical to all innovation.
Faith is the cornerstone of humanity; we can’t live without it. But religion is very different from faith. Religion is just a set of invented protocols
In order to lead, you must challenge the status quo of the religion you’re living under.
Without religion, it’s easier for faith to flag. It’s no wonder that religion has been around forever.
So successful heretics create their own religions.
You can do this on purpose."
-fCh-
I’ve been an entrepreneur for about 13 years, since I was 15 and started my first company. In that time I’ve built, started, run (including bricks & mortar radio stations I inherited when my parents died) about 10 different businesses. I’ve never found faith to be a benefit to my efforts. And here I’m defining faith as believing in something you have no reason to believe in. I can’t imagine starting a company or creating a product that I have no reason to believe in. I’ve found believing in myself to be critical; believing in the product or business I’m building; believing in the people I work with; but these are all things I have a reason to believe in and thus aren’t faith oriented at all. My beliefs there are supported by an effort of reason.
Some people would argue you need faith to stand against the skepticism of others and doubters – to really go against the crowd. I’ve been doubted my whole life, and any entrepreneur of course will tell you that pretty much everything you ever do will be doubted. Other people’s doubts aren’t my concern though: I believe in what I’m doing, driven by my own passion and zeal for creating, exploring, building something new, and the love of seeing it actually come to life.
I prefer to paraphrase Peter Drucker: my task as an entrepreneur is the elimination of risk. In that process I seek to protect my ‘baby’ (whether it’s a business, invention, etc.), by intentionally and knowingly wiping out the threats to it in the process of cultivating and building it out. I don’t see how that requires faith. I also don’t see how going against the established order, as a heretic, requires faith. I believe it requires self confidence, to do what you choose to do regardless of what others think. I separate confidence from faith; some use those terms interchangeably conceptually. One issue I see here with Godin, is that he’s clearly not defining faith as believing in the easter bunny; and starting your own religion as meaning moving to Utah and starting up a cult; even though he’s playing with the concepts to extend them out to a more benign premise (he would obviously define starting your own religion as something akin to what Jobs did, and the ‘followers’ at Apple as being driven by more than money (since they have never been paid as well as their peers in the valley)).
this is getting meaty, now. where’s the Alieness? i wish i wasn’t so taken up with working deadlines… have to be lazy here:
"Sri Syadasti Syadavaktavya Syadasti Syannasti Syadasti Cavaktavyasca Syadasti Syannasti Syadavatavyasca Syadasti Syannasti Syadavaktavyasca"
in other news, on this fine and sunny May evening, why is it that flies coming in through my lounge window home in on the central ceiling light, and fly underneath it describing weird geometrical shapes, turning extremely sharp, angular corners? i have puzzled over this for years…
anyone?
just read this as well on an incredibly effective interrogator during WWII who never resorted to torture to get his results…
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ben_macintyr...
Steve, the distinction between faith and religion, as well as Godin’s connection to entrepreneurship, are necessary complement(s) to the conversation!
Jonathan, from what you write, I’m glad to see you belong to a happy lot. If reason is what keeps you going all the way, indeed, why bother with faith?
At a different level of conversation, I think Boosh has given faith and religion a bad name, in a world and time they had been under stress anyway. To keep the conversation close, Godin, and a whole niche in branding for that matter, repurposed religion for secular ends. What does this tell one? Religion and faith are in us; we ignore them at our risk.
I wonder what religion the state department is then, since they actually performed the torture, vs. speculating?
BTW – any christian who advocates inflicting violence or pain on another, is by Jesus’ definition, not a christian at all. "Whatsoever ye do to the least of these, you do also to me". So ‘statistics’ on so-called Christians who advocate violence is actually an invalid data set to start with. Along the lines of "Who would Jesus Bomb?"
Maybe the real issue is the personality of people who use one thing or another, as an extension of their agenda’s, to exercise some control over others while blaming another, whether it be religion, economics or technology….in truth, any can be abused, used as a scapegoat, or actually used well. Karmically, justifying torture on someone else justifies it being done to yourself… with someone else’s values being ‘justifyied’ by your pain.
– Ghandi : "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind"
Me buried in work! Sorry, I saw the earlier beacon, but couldn’t come in to the conversation. Thanks for having me in mind. :))
Anyway, this call to come in aroused some reflexions in me on why I was reluctant to participate in certain conversations online since some time. I believe that the subject (the way of discussing down flickr actually) really does not attract me much anymore, because it always lead to lot of misunderstanding. Some topics are too complex to reduce them to spare comments, and those cropped comments mixed up in a simmulacra of conversation seriously injure and belittle the core of the issue discussed, imo.
And so does belittle the compulsive need for quantification in figures (statistics) of abstract/philosophic mattters where feeling, faith, beliefs and or very personal experience and worldview (and confusions) of each unique person are envolved in. This "statisticfication" of almost everything which I see flooding the media and everywhere.
So I decided to only talk about certain issues in person (live dialogue). The shortness of expression of the internet ends up in a lot of misuse of the subject discussed and a banalization of it. And I prefer to preserve myself from that.
We been there already -some of you remember- and it’s not been a nice place to be for me at least. Left some bitter aftertaste and a feeling of emptyness and some impotence because of all this I explain.
Btw, searching for the word "banalization" to check if it existed same in english as in spanish, I encountered this article
gadfly.igc.org/liberal/genius.htm
And actually it talks exactly about what I mean. I loved his reference to Marcuse’s "one-dimmensional man". Talks more in general about masterpieces, music, arts, etc. You might want to read it?
Hope you understand, and hope i had explained myself clearly enough!
Huh, they forgot to poll muslims both here and there (mid-east). I wonder where they stand on this issue…
Also notable for being left out are those who are jewish. Were they simply not asked, or not reported? The cynic in me believes the data was collected but not shown because it didn’t support the slant of the story. I’ll have to read the study to find the answer I guess. It used to be you could trust the media to report an unbiased story, to fairly represent and summarize a study like this. But now so many "media" outlets and reporters seem to have an angle they are pushing that you have to go to the source material to get a good feeling of the study.
It would be an interesting study to poll people worldwide regarding what is torture and if it should be used.
Given the recent political rhetoric, I wonder how many of the Christians surveyed thought that "terrorist" meant "Islamic Terrorist." I think it’s a lot easier to advocate torturing someone you believe is going to Hell anyway. How different would the results be if the question was worded, "Christian Terrorist?"
fascinating question. Bet it would pop a fuse for some folks.
David G: I can’t speak to embedded biases, but they do offer the following footnote: "Other religious groups are not reported due to small sample sizes." With a random survey of only 742 people, you won’t get many Muslims and Jews (0.6% and 1.7% of the U.S. population respectively).
Umm given that the unaffiliated group size is less then 100 Im sure the error is at least 1% if not greater. This graph is misleading. Also in part that the words "often, sometimes and rarely" are poorly defined measures.
But do you doubt for a moment that someone with a religious fundamentalist mindset is more likely to torture and kill than a scientist?
Just read a couple of provocative books over Xmas break:
"Between the thirteen and nineteenth centuries, as many as 1 million European women, most of them poor and many of them widowed, were executed for witchcraft, taking the blame for bad weather that killed crops."
(Levitt & Dubner, Superfreakonomics)
versus
"When Kevin Kelly was traveling in China in 2006, he found that every elementary school in every village had a sign over the door in Mandarin with the following guidance:
LOOK UP TO SCIENCE.
CARE FOR YOUR FAMILY.
RESPECT LIFE.
RESIST CULTY RELIGION.”
(Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline)
I don’t disagree. I’m just saying its not a very scientific poll. Which is a bit ironic given its subtle implications.
To me a religious fundamentalist mindset is the mindset of somebody easily swayed without the need for careful logic. It seems one could have a fundamentalist religion that forbid torture under any circumstances and the plot would/should reflect that.
A proper ‘scientific’ response to the question: "Do you support torture of suspected terrorists?" would be: "What is the context and what type of torture?" The point being a good scientist cannot give a blanket response without cringing.
If I had a magic wand I would make available the highest degree of education to everybody on the planet and watch religion become an academic study. But I don’t and the world is what it is.
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