Not surprising.
is this an empirical fact you are quoting? Because that right there looks like a GENERALIZATION, not an "empirical fact."
False dichotomy. Many empirical facts (and nearly all useful empirical facts) are also generalizations. Dogs tend to be bigger than cats is an empirical fact and a generalization.
An empirical fact is something you learn based on collecting data from an external source. It is NOT something you extrapolate based on anecdotes or media reports.
So you are telling me that a Jehovas Witness who is personally committed to his religious ideas will support authoritarian policies to impose his ideas on others; do you have evidence this tends to be true?
You are telling me that a Mennonite who is personally committed to his religious ideas will support authoritarian policies to impose his ideas on others; do you have evidence this tends to be true?
You are telling me that a Quaker who is personally committed to his religious ideas will support authoritarian policies to impose his ideas on others; do you have evidence this tends to be true?
You are telling me that a Jew who is personally committed to his religious ideas will support authoritarian policies to impose his ideas on others; do you have evidence this tends to be true?
You are telling me that a Methodist who is personally committed to his religious ideas will support authoritarian policies to impose his ideas on others; do you have evidence this tends to be true?
You are telling me that a Conservative Evangelical who is personally committed to his religious ideas will support authoritarian policies to impose his ideas on others; do you even have evidence that THIS tends to be true?
First, lets be clear that this is compete red-herring on your part. The question is whether, as you claim, political authoritarians tend to have less commitment to their personal faith. I told you that the empirical data shows this is the opposite of what is true. Also, the thread is about Muslims and in the OP I gave you empirical data supporting the opposite of what you claimed is true. So, your efforts to deflect the conversation to particular tiny subsets, like Jehovah's that are 0.8% of US Christians s an irrelevant rhetorical game to avoid dealing with the falseness of your prior claim.
But, your game further reveals your scientific and statistical illiteracy, so lets play it.
The "all" I was referring to, was the 3 faiths of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. The empirical facts show a correlation between commitment to those faiths and authoritarianism.
Quakers, Jehovahs, etc. are subsumed under Christianity and are not a different faith from it. The fact of a correlation between variables does not require that every individual data point fall exactly upon the regression line. So, your red-herring objection is equal to objecting to the statement that "height is correlated with weight" by saying, "Do you have evidence that height is correlated with weight in my family?" "Do you have evidence that height is correlated with weight in my wife's family?", etc..
The evidence is that within the faith of "Christian" there is a reliable correlation, based on many large and varied samples. Thus, the evidence is that the relationship applies to most random comparisons you would make between people who belong to that category.
In addition, Sub-sects of Christianity differ in terms of the level of personal commitment to the faith they command and the amount of doubt and superficial Christmas-only "adherence" that its adherents can get away with. Thus, it is nonsensical to divide the larger faith of Christianity this way when one of the variables involved is the same as the one used to divide the subgroups. That is akin to asking, "In my family, where everyone is in th 1st percentile of obesity, it height correlated with weight?"
For example, 88% of Evangelicals are "absolutely certain" in the belief in God, 74% say religion is "very important" in their life, with 63% reading scripture at least once per week, and 54% attending services 1 or more times per week.
In contrast, only 64% on Catholics are "absolutely certain" in the belief in God, only 54% say religion is "very important" in their life, with only 25% reading scripture at least once per week, and only 38% attending services 1 or more times per week.
IOW, a huge % of the variance in personal religious commitment is tied to the particular sect one is in. Thus, that variance is lost when you examine only a single sect at at time, which of course means (if you can grasp basic statistics) that an covariance between that dimension and any other (like authoritarianism) will be limited.
And to be absolutely clear: there is personal conviction of religious faith and moral conviction as a faith-driven political issue. These are separate things, and different sects of Christianity and Islam approach them in different ways.
These are conceptually distinct but in fact empirically related things. That is the whole point. Empirically, the more personal conviction Christians and Muslims have in their religious faith the more they support authoritarian force in imposing those beliefs upon others. It also makes perfect theoretical sense, since the God concept central to these religions and out of which all their variants grew is one of an ultimate authoritarian dictator whose will determines what is allowed and who commands genocidal death to those who disobey or don't believe.
Those who want to limit religion to "personal choices" not only pray less often (which was shown in the PEW data I linked in the OP), but other research shows they attend religious services less often, they report thinking about God or their religion less often, using their faith less in their daily decisions, and have more doubts about whether their own beliefs are true.
And in between "limit religion to personal choices" and "spread god's will over all the land" there are those for whom political activism is not even a significant religious activity. This is also true in Islam.
And that continuum of how much one wants their beliefs is correlated to the continuum in how strong one's commitment to their personal faith is. IOW, how much Islam or Christianity defines oneself as a person and their thoughts and actions.
You are confusing the preference to limit religious faith to the personal level (thus keep it out of politics), with having a strong personal faith that the God of the Bible or Quran actually exists.
Not at all. I am recognizing that faith-based political activism is NOT a major tenet of the Christian religion and is actually a niche activity that becomes relevant only to a small number of highly prolific religious sects. Homosexuality and abortion are wedge issues for religious conservatives that overshadow just about all other possible issues; they are not, on the other hand, all that relevant to the Christian religion and are mentioned rarely -- if at all -- in scripture.
Your conception of what it means for your religious faith to relate to your politics is absurdly simplistic. It isn't simply about using scripture to be an activist on a myopic issue. The kind of politicians and party one votes for is a political action, and is reliably related to people's personal religiosity. Life is politics. Government is just one vehicle via which people can and do impose their politics and their religion on others on a daily basis. To claim that Christianity isn't about politics to be completely ignorant of both. Christianity is almost entirely about politics and was invented precisely to have a political impact. Politics is about power and all of monotheism is most fundamentally about power and who does and should have it, namely an unchallengable supreme dictator. God is as political a concept as their is.
Put simply: believing that gay marriage should be illegal has nothing whatsoever to do with one's belief that God exists. That's a political and moralistic belief, not necessarily religious one.
The illegality of homosexuality is an authoritarian position which devalues tolerance and individual liberty to live as one chooses, so long as others are not harmed. The core defining features of the Abrahamic God are that he is an intolerant authority who commands obedience without question, is extremely intolerant, has no value for liberty, and dictates what people must think, feel, and do in their private lives. Belief in and worship of anything close to the God described in either the Bible or Quran is inherently to devalue liberty and tolerance and support authoritarian control. This makes one far more likely to accept laws against homosexuality. IF you reject this authoritarian conception of the Universe and of morality, and the laws people should live by (hint: Jesus talked about "the law" all the time and "laws" are central to all monotheism), then one would reject such laws, regardless of how one feels personally about homosexuals. The authoritarianism that is foundational to monotheism enables one to support one's personal preferences as the law of the land, since "God's will" is nothing more than the preferences of religious adherents in the first place.
This is why support for gay marriage is so consistently negatively related to one's level of personal religiosity, one's strength of faith in God, one's reading of religious scripture, and the importance one places on religion in one's life.
They are both empirically and logically related.
Many Muslims, also, have political and moralistic beliefs that have little or nothing to do with their religion. The Pashtuns are the most obvious example of this, with the concept of Honor Killings and acid attacks and the constant threatening and/or murder of girls for attending schools. These are based on Islamized Pashtun tribal culture and have little or nothing to do with Islam or the Quran. The same is true of Boko Haram, whose campaign against education has a lot more to do with reactionary anti-westernism than it has to do with Islam or the Quran.
Nonsense. The intolerant violence commanded by Islam against people for doing no wrong other than being non-believers inherently legitimizes and enables the kinds of violence you are referring to. Not to mention, the numerous aspects of the Quran that depict women as inferior, essentially property who should be beaten and raped at will. In addition, faith is the definitional anti-thesis of reason and thus all education that promotes reason or knowledge gained by it. Education is inherently a threat to all faith based beliefs, thus promotion of faith based beliefs promotes the devaluing of education at minimum and attack of it whenever that threat is more immediate.
On the other hand, YOU are clearly confusing "strong personal faith in God" with "political conformity."
The monotheistic God concept is fundamentally about political power and about conformity. That is the primary function for which it was invented and violently spread from inception to today. Faith is fundamentally about conformity. Faith is anti-reason and deference to emotions that are easily manipulated via social coercion. The promotion of faith is the promotion of mindless conformity.
I'll get to the rest of the wrong ideas in your post in the new year.
