I think of it as a purity test. If one is willing to accept obviously absurd and contradictory material without evidence, (they call this faith,) it means they are just the sort of uncritical person that’s likely to go with the program without pushing back. It’s like how the Nigerian prince e-mail scammers intentionally include grammatical and spelling errors, because the people who overlook that and reply anyway are far more likely to be successfully scammed.
Each religion has a slightly different flavor of absurdity. They all rely on indoctrination and a lack of critical thought to persist. They all have the capacity to become extremist and frequently do. It’s only a matter of time until the men who claim to speak for god(s) say their god(s) want violence.
While extremism isn’t limited to Abrahamic religions, the story of Abraham, the one they all have in common, is a pretty fucked up story. The moral is: if you hear voices that tell you to kill your son, you should do it without question because that’s definitely God testing you. That’s a dangerous lesson to teach children, some of whom will grow up to be schizophrenic.
God said to Abraham, “Hey, kill me a son.” Abe said, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on.” God said, “No.” Abe said, “What?” God said, “Abe, you can do what you like, but the next time you see me coming, you better run.” Abe said, “Alright, where you want this killing done?” “Out on Highway 61.”
I didn’t even need your link to know the story. What kinda all-powerful being needs faith? For that reason, why would they need to procreate? These are just the surface-level plot holes in that book.
I didn’t even need your link to know the story. What kinda all-powerful being needs faith? For that reason, why would they need to procreate? These are just the surface-level plot holes in that book.
I didn’t even need your link to know the story. What kinda all-powerful being needs faith? For that reason, why would they need to procreate? These are just the surface-level plot holes in that book.
Interesting question. Out of curiosity I tried googling to see if anyone has done an analysis of historical cycles of religious extremism and didn’t find any hits; if you find anything I’d be interested.
Do we need a standardized unit of religious extremism to calculate this? If so, I propose the Khomeini.
We probably do if there is no precedent. What does one standardized Khomeini unit represent? The number of extremists generated in a given amount of time compared to the non-extremist population? I don’t know if I have the knowledge to begin that conversation.
1 Khomeini = creation of 40 million religious extremists? (The approximate population of Iran just after the Islamic revolution there.)
Although, it can be a difficult problem for people quantizing such things to even classify what counts as extremism.
We’d probably have to offer how we interpret extremism. For the purpose of this excersize I would define extremism as an Individual’s willingness to commit to a doctrine without compromise. Since, most of the fighting we see across the globe today is due to some fully binding ideology that specific populations will not compromise on. With that definition set, we need to look at some average population numbers to make a value of 1 Khomeini meaningful at a glance.
I’d imagine that you would have a hard time isolating cases of rising religious extremism from the rising social/political/economic upheavals that occur at the same time. These things tend to all go hand in hand, and which one is cause vs which one is symptom is not always obvious.
I think of it as a purity test. If one is willing to accept obviously absurd and contradictory material without evidence, (they call this faith,) it means they are just the sort of uncritical person that’s likely to go with the program without pushing back. It’s like how the Nigerian prince e-mail scammers intentionally include grammatical and spelling errors, because the people who overlook that and reply anyway are far more likely to be successfully scammed.
Each religion has a slightly different flavor of absurdity. They all rely on indoctrination and a lack of critical thought to persist. They all have the capacity to become extremist and frequently do. It’s only a matter of time until the men who claim to speak for god(s) say their god(s) want violence.
While extremism isn’t limited to Abrahamic religions, the story of Abraham, the one they all have in common, is a pretty fucked up story. The moral is: if you hear voices that tell you to kill your son, you should do it without question because that’s definitely God testing you. That’s a dangerous lesson to teach children, some of whom will grow up to be schizophrenic.
God said to Abraham, “Hey, kill me a son.” Abe said, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on.” God said, “No.” Abe said, “What?” God said, “Abe, you can do what you like, but the next time you see me coming, you better run.” Abe said, “Alright, where you want this killing done?” “Out on Highway 61.”
Well last minute before plunging the knife into the son the Abraham stopped. Although it is worth noting that the disagreement over who is his rightful heir has caused so much bloodshed since antiquity til currently. Source: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis 22%3A1-19&version=ERV
I didn’t even need your link to know the story. What kinda all-powerful being needs faith? For that reason, why would they need to procreate? These are just the surface-level plot holes in that book.
I didn’t even need your link to know the story. What kinda all-powerful being needs faith? For that reason, why would they need to procreate? These are just the surface-level plot holes in that book.
I didn’t even need your link to know the story. What kinda all-powerful being needs faith? For that reason, why would they need to procreate? These are just the surface-level plot holes in that book.
Is there a way to calculate the velocity of the vicious cycles we have encapsulated ourselves in?
Interesting question. Out of curiosity I tried googling to see if anyone has done an analysis of historical cycles of religious extremism and didn’t find any hits; if you find anything I’d be interested.
Do we need a standardized unit of religious extremism to calculate this? If so, I propose the Khomeini.
We probably do if there is no precedent. What does one standardized Khomeini unit represent? The number of extremists generated in a given amount of time compared to the non-extremist population? I don’t know if I have the knowledge to begin that conversation.
1 Khomeini = creation of 40 million religious extremists? (The approximate population of Iran just after the Islamic revolution there.)
Although, it can be a difficult problem for people quantizing such things to even classify what counts as extremism.
We’d probably have to offer how we interpret extremism. For the purpose of this excersize I would define extremism as an Individual’s willingness to commit to a doctrine without compromise. Since, most of the fighting we see across the globe today is due to some fully binding ideology that specific populations will not compromise on. With that definition set, we need to look at some average population numbers to make a value of 1 Khomeini meaningful at a glance.
I’d imagine that you would have a hard time isolating cases of rising religious extremism from the rising social/political/economic upheavals that occur at the same time. These things tend to all go hand in hand, and which one is cause vs which one is symptom is not always obvious.