How are various religions and cultures coexisting so relatively well in the Americas and much of Europe?

[Loren Pechtel]

Mr. Pechtel said:



I believe you are correct. Didn't an FBI agent write a book about this very thing back in the late 80's where his thesis was that most terrorist groups and their top leaders were proxies for governments or well off individuals?

I'm not aware of such a book but it wouldn't surprise me.

The reality is terrorism is expensive--something has to pay the bills.

 

[Underseer]

Hundreds of years from now, what will the historians and sociologists say are the reasons for this fortunate pocket of peace that we enjoy?

Lawyers.
You don't need to firebomb your opponent if you can just sue them out of business. Or write laws to drive them away.

There's just as much conflict, but it takes place in well-lit rooms with suits and money.

You won't find too many Sunnis and Shia waging court battles against each other in America.

My dad is really politically active in local politics, so every so often he gets involved in stupid local crap, such as a local government trying to make it impossible for a new mosque to be built. Obviously, the members of the mosque have to fight a legal battle against city hall to get their mosque built, and thanks to freedom of religion, the local government usually fails to stop them (although they do generally succeed in wasting a lot of money, effort, and aggravation, which I suspect is the whole point).

The thing is, when things like this happen, the members of the mosque aren't waging that legal battle alone. Plenty of non-Muslims like my dad get involved in the fight as well, and people from other religious minorities are more inclined to pitch in than people from the religious majority (although some of them do also). Religious minorities tends to help each other because they know darned well it could be their place of worship that has a problem with city hall next year.

While these legal battles create animosity between the religious majority and the religious minorities, they also tend to create a bit of camaraderie among different groups of religious minorities, even religions that might otherwise be enemies on different political issues.

 

[Shadowy Man]

How about in a country like India? Are the Sunnis and Shias fighting each other there?

In that part of the world its the Sunnis versus the Sufis.

How much violent fighting is there between them?

 

[ryan]

What about Iran, North Korea, Iraq (prior to 2002) etc. These countries are/were relatively peaceful under oppression.

Yup. The real cause of such violence is somebody pouring money into it. Almost always it's an outside group and if it isn't it's a group with access to outside funds.

I think this is it. This seems to be more or less the best reason so far.

Does anyone have any reasons why it's not?

 

[Sabine Grant]

I think it happens here in the states a lot more than thought but it often goes unreported or is disguised as something else.

Take for example the Amish bishop who went to prison for attacking and then cutting off the beards of men he considered apostate.

Also, a Muslim man started a restaraunt where I live. It started off doing well but when locals found out he and his family were Muslim they stopped going. I heard it vocalized by many people that his being Muslim is why they wouldn't eat there and many people actually openly rejoiced when he closed down. If you put those same people on tv most would probably say that they just didn't like the food and it wasn't because he was Muslim.

I don't go around advertising to people I am Muslim lest people do things to me too.

Just browsing through this thread and your remark catching my attention : I am so sorry that you feel that you have to be cautious about revealing your religious identity.I can understand why though. Post 9/11 revealed the extent of prejudice targeting American Muslims. Some became targets of opportunities for very ignorant Americans who dump everyone in the same bag while associating the term Muslim to systematically plotting to "Islamize" the US . We do have the same type of very ignorant folks in my own country of origin, France. They are fueled by xenophobic groups who spread hate and fear mongering about our own Muslims.

When you have time, go check the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center and you will be able to see the extent of anti Muslim sentiments the SPLC has uncovered and denounced in several States. They have been doing an excellent and thorough job monitoring anti Muslim groups in the US who feed ignorant people with all that fear/hate mongering crap.

 

[BH]

Sabine,

Here is the thing that gets me. I do not have a family to have to support so I can easily get by on what I make. I am not rich but am tight with my money and make what most here would consider a middle class salary. And as part of the incentive program where I work I am eligible for bonuses every month. I usually get some bonus and every so often get the most I am supposed to be able to get. Since there is no mosque where I live and none of the Muslims here need help as my way of paying zakat I buy shoes on clearance and donate them to the needy. Over the past 8 years or so I have done it I probably have given away close to a thousand pairs. My clearance can be dirt cheap, but still name brand, so good quality too.

My town has around 20 to 25 thousand people in it and I ask that these shoes be given to locals. The local school district a few years back said over 70% of the kids live at or below poverty line. Sometimes I'd like to see the looks on these bigots faces if they were told a Muslim shoed their kids or themselves when they just did not have the money for them, or their house burned down, or their shoes stolen, ect. Instead of sticking bombs on kids I stuck shoes on them by Allah's will.

What did Islam do for these people? Certainly nothing bad.

 

[BH]

Yup. The real cause of such violence is somebody pouring money into it. Almost always it's an outside group and if it isn't it's a group with access to outside funds.

I think this is it. This seems to be more or less the best reason so far.

Does anyone have any reasons why it's not?

Here is the thing about Muslim terrorist groups. Some of their recruitment videos have been posted on Youtube and academic websites. One I watched showed a woman wearing skimpy clothes and not have a hijab on. Basically, they were saying die a matyr and get this hottie with big breasts, big bottom, and nice face. But the thing is if these so called terrorists were really Muslim_TM they would know that they should not be making videos of almost naked and nonhijabed women in the first place. I suspect they are looking for people who are unlearned as well as deluded-mental and most definitely have ulterior purposes whose desire to glorify Allah is last on the list if even on the list.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I think this is it. This seems to be more or less the best reason so far.

Does anyone have any reasons why it's not?

Here is the thing about Muslim terrorist groups. Some of their recruitment videos have been posted on Youtube and academic websites. One I watched showed a woman wearing skimpy clothes and not have a hijab on. Basically, they were saying die a matyr and get this hottie with big breasts, big bottom, and nice face. But the thing is if these so called terrorists were really Muslim_TM they would know that they should not be making videos of almost naked and nonhijabed women in the first place. I suspect they are looking for people who are unlearned as well as deluded-mental and most definitely have ulterior purposes whose desire to glorify Allah is last on the list if even on the list.

I think the real criteria is gullible.

 

[fromderinside]

Hopelessness is a major driver of conflict. Removal from being able to compete is a negative effect of inequality. Providing opportunity counters drive to gain assets loss fostered by to much equality. Krugman. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/o...ty-is-a-drag.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&_r=0

What about Iran, North Korea, Iraq (prior to 2002) etc. These countries are/were relatively peaceful under oppression.

Yeah. Things are peaceful if we don't count the persons eliminated by the state.

 

[Perspicuo]

What about Iran, North Korea, Iraq (prior to 2002) etc. These countries are/were relatively peaceful under oppression.

Yeah. Things are peaceful if we don't count the persons eliminated by the state.

Do I smell the smell of smugness?

Remember how we were pacified. Centuries of hereditary bullies with levels of violence that would put the Wild West to shame. Until the big cheese of bullies came: the national monarch. The bully who outbullied them all, making violence a state monopoly. Murder was modified from being a crime against the individual and his family (therefore feuds), to being a crime against the Crown ("the State", in modern terms). Then we started to behave, and get serious about civil rights.

We need to let the Arabs evolve. Yes, it's a travesty in the eyes of the modern world. But these are not Latin Americans or Japanese. You could impose democracy on the Japs and Panamanians, but not the Arabs. Both the Japanese and Latin Americans have had a similar evolutionary process as Northern Europe. The Japanese with the Shoguns and then the Emperor. The Lat.Am.s with the Spanish Monarchy (and a full century and a half of trying to be democratic, since the 1820s). We were just a step away from functional democracy. The Levant Arabs are mostly leagues away from that. The best you can find among them is the Hashemite Monarchy in Jordania, which is basically at the evolutionary level of 18th century Western Europe, for comparison.

So, Putin was right about supporting Syria's Al-Bashir. Sure there has been State brutality. But let them fix it themselves step by step. ISIS and the current Iraqi post-Hussein chaos show that strong central governments in those coutries are actually something good (well: better than the other available options!). All the rest-of-the-world has to do is keep them in check, NOT topple them!

 

[Jokodo]

For example, why aren't Sunnis and Shiites fighting each other here? And the most obvious, how are Islamic and Christian people living so peacefully together. It's a fortunate mystery, but it's one that I think is important to understand.

The news reminds us everyday of what could be from such a diversity of cultures and religions. How is it that there is little to no religiously fueled conflict in the Americas?

Hundreds of years from now, what will the historians and sociologists say are the reasons for this fortunate pocket of peace that we enjoy?

Lack of power.

Christianity dominates totally right now. Islam gets along with Christianity because they don't have any numbers behind them, so they basically lay low and put up with a lot.

If you have the numbers of Islam, Sunni or Shiite or hell, Druze, start growing, you will start seeing conflict.

Right now you have some Christians saying their faith is above the law and their morality should be in schools, courts and government. They are usually shouted down and made to feel stupid and saner heads prevail.

Let a population grow of some people who, like evangelicals, are not only strict with their religion, but their religion is also a social structure, but, unlike Christians, are not hemmed in by 'turn the other cheek' and then you will start seeing major problems.

Christians hemmed by 'turn the other cheek'? You must be kidding.

During the Counter-Reformation, Catholic Christians killed or expelled an estimated two thirds of the population in the part of the country where my mom is from, where most had turned to protestantism. In the part of the country where my dad is from, protestantism never took hold as much, so the only had to kill and expell a large minority of the population.

When the Counter-Reformation met resistance in Bohemia, the  Thirty Years' War broke out, reducing the population of the entire region (that is, all of todays Germany + Austria + Czech Republic + Benelux + parts of Eastern France and Northern Italy) by about one third. And while it is true that the war was in a large part about power and influence, and alliances in some stages cut across the Catholic-Protestant devides, it remained nominally a religious war. In this, it was exactly like "religious" conflicts in the Middle East today.

It's true that fundamental Christians in the USA today are hemmed (and good luck for us), but any hypothesis that claims they are hemmed by something intrinsic to Christianity fails a simple comparison to reality. "turn the other cheek" was part of the Bible as much 400 years ago as it is today.

For your education: Wikipedia about the death toll of the 30 Years' War:

So great was the devastation brought about by the war that estimates put the reduction of population in the German states at about 25% to 40%.[62] Some regions were affected much more than others.[63] For example, Württemberg lost three-quarters of its population during the war.[64] In the territory of Brandenburg, the losses had amounted to half, while in some areas an estimated two-thirds of the population died.[65] The male population of the German states was reduced by almost half.[66] The population of the Czech lands declined by a third due to war, disease, famine and the expulsion of Protestant Czechs.[67][68] Much of the destruction of civilian lives and property was caused by the cruelty and greed of mercenary soldiers.[69] Villages were especially easy prey to the marauding armies. Those that survived, like the small village of Drais near Mainz, would take almost a hundred years to recover. The Swedish armies alone may have destroyed up to 2,000 castles, 18,000 villages and 1,500 towns in Germany, one-third of all German towns.[70]

 

[fromderinside]

Yeah. Things are peaceful if we don't count the persons eliminated by the state.

Do I smell the smell of smugness?

No you don't. I was just illuminating issues left out when one chooses a top down leviathan. When the Arabs, eastern Europeans, Asians, actually arrive at a point where they understand humans are humans and find its important to treat them all equally they will get to where we are which is finding ways to get past color, language, sex, when assigning value to humans.

 

[Togo]

Do I smell the smell of smugness?

No you don't. I was just illuminating issues left out when one chooses a top down leviathan. When the Arabs, eastern Europeans, Asians, actually arrive at a point where they understand humans are humans and find its important to treat them all equally they will get to where we are which is finding ways to get past color, language, sex, when assigning value to humans.

Wait, we treat people equally, regardless of colour, sex and language? Since when?

 

[Kharakov]

By equally, we mean that we treat everyone differently equally.

 

[skepticalbip]

By equally, we mean that we treat everyone differently equally.

Is that like "We are all the same because each and every one of us is different"?

I guess that is more reasonable than, "I'm a nonconformist so I need to get tattoos and piercings like all nonconformists do."

 

[Kharakov]

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTwV3vG73cU[/YOUTUBE]

 

[fromderinside]

No you don't. I was just illuminating issues left out when one chooses a top down leviathan. When the Arabs, eastern Europeans, Asians, actually arrive at a point where they understand humans are humans and find its important to treat them all equally they will get to where we are which is finding ways to get past color, language, sex, when assigning value to humans.

Wait, we treat people equally, regardless of colour, sex and language? Since when?

I presumed we understood as a leviathan cohort we should or attempt to do those things. When was the last time you saw anything other than extinction that was an evolutionary absolute?

 

[JonA]

When people do extreme things it's for a cause. The cause is generally related to a bad guy doing something bad, whether it's Israel trying to clear out Palestinians from Palestine so they have the country themselves, through to the evil Obama trying to force his liberal values on healthcare on innocent american companies.

What religion does is allow people to justify their actions. Someone annoying you isn't grounds for killing them, or a supreme court challenge. Someone being morally evil can be, on religious grounds. So religion is invoked to justify precisely what wouldn't be easy to justify ordinarily, whether it's killing oneself, or denying employees healthcare. It helps moral justification of action.

This is a view built largely on Western secular morality. In the West, people derive their morals secularly; they do not decide what is right or wrong based on what is in a book—any book—but based on their own judgement of decency, fairness, equality, humility, and humanity. We may find plenty of people, especially in the U.S., who argue that their morality comes from God, from reading the Bible. But when we ask them the typical questions asked of such people ("If God told you to rape children, would you start raping children?"), their inability to provide a resounding "yes" response—and instead weaving around various excuses to dismiss the issue—betrays the fact that their morality is secular; it is not religious.

That any of their morals have correlates in religious texts is coincidental: they established their morality first, and found the religious morals that agreed with it. And this attitude toward morality is the basis of statements such as those you make: "What religion does is allow people to justify their actions." This is true of a world built on secular morality; but this is not true of a world built on religious morality.

Your opinions are completely colored by the mindset of secular morality, and so you simply cannot comprehend a world, a society, a culture, in which people sincerely and truthfully (not only through lip service) derive their morality from religious authorities. I cannot comprehend it either. I can learn about it, and perhaps understand it. But I can never really feel it and empathize with such derivations of morality; my belief in secular morality is so deep that it cannot be shaken.

Suicide bombers aren't blindly killing people they would ordinarily like - there are still perfectly understandable motives for the attack and for the target.

That you hold such a sentiment is frightening. I cannot understand anything in the motives of a suicide bomber. It is incomprehensible to me; the thought of killing other people because they are different. There is never an understandable motive for murder.

Sectarian violence is a world-wide thing, from the US experience with the Black Panthers and the KKK, to The violence in Northern Ireland between protestants and catholics, to the conflicts between tribes in Africa. These are conflicts about whether a community can resist outside influences from alien cultures, and the poorer you are, the more of a survival lifeline your community is.

Things like the KKK and Black Panthers do not compare to the violence of Islam or African tribal conflicts. Again, you are clouded by your Western mindset that conflict is rooted in some understandable aspect of the human condition. But this is not true. It cannot be true. Conflict has real causes, and we can eliminate those causes. To believe the contrary, that some people are just bad and we will always have to suffer them, is to give up hope for peace.

I believe peace a worthy-enough goal to not give up hope for it.

'Islam' is too vague. Most Muslims aren't involved in sectarian violence any more than most Christians are or most practicing Jews are.

Again, you need to understand that Islam is a moral system; the people who practice Islam derive their morality from their religious authorities. And every one of those religious authorities (Koran, hadith, etc.) preach the same thing. There is no vagueness about it.

Jon

 

[Loren Pechtel]

When people do extreme things it's for a cause. The cause is generally related to a bad guy doing something bad, whether it's Israel trying to clear out Palestinians from Palestine so they have the country themselves, through to the evil Obama trying to force his liberal values on healthcare on innocent american companies.

What religion does is allow people to justify their actions. Someone annoying you isn't grounds for killing them, or a supreme court challenge. Someone being morally evil can be, on religious grounds. So religion is invoked to justify precisely what wouldn't be easy to justify ordinarily, whether it's killing oneself, or denying employees healthcare. It helps moral justification of action.

Often religious references turn out to be references to moral values, ones which some atheists may even share. Not all, but some.

But the action itself isn't because of religion. Suicide bombers aren't blindly killing people they would ordinarily like - there are still perfectly understandable motives for the attack and for the target. They're using it as a justification of their means.

What you are missing is that it's usually for a deceptive cause. Suicide bombers aren't acting rationally, they're brainwashed into it. If not, they were already suicidal.

 

[4321lynx]

When people do extreme things it's for a cause. The cause is generally related to a bad guy doing something bad, whether it's Israel trying to clear out Palestinians from Palestine so they have the country themselves, through to the evil Obama trying to force his liberal values on healthcare on innocent american companies.

What religion does is allow people to justify their actions. Someone annoying you isn't grounds for killing them, or a supreme court challenge. Someone being morally evil can be, on religious grounds. So religion is invoked to justify precisely what wouldn't be easy to justify ordinarily, whether it's killing oneself, or denying employees healthcare. It helps moral justification of action.

Often religious references turn out to be references to moral values, ones which some atheists may even share. Not all, but some.

But the action itself isn't because of religion. Suicide bombers aren't blindly killing people they would ordinarily like - there are still perfectly understandable motives for the attack and for the target. They're using it as a justification of their means.

What you are missing is that it's usually for a deceptive cause. Suicide bombers aren't acting rationally, they're brainwashed into it. If not, they were already suicidal.

Sure they are brainwashed. So are all religious people too, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, even Buddhists, etc etc. Religion is brainwashing.