Ed Yong has an excellent post reviewing new research which suggests that collective religious rituals are more predictive than religious belief as to support for suicide bombings. The novelty and insight from these studies is that they decompose the independent dimensions from which religious phenomena are constructed. Consider for example that religion may consist of:
A) Belief in supernatural agents
B) Participation in communal rituals
C) Regulation of personal behavior under religious law
D) A metaphysical system which explains the nature of the universe
And so forth. A study like the one above suggests that it is the second, communal rituals, which heighten the ingroup-outgroup biases which often lead to religiously motivated atrocities. By analogy we can compare these to politically and ethnically motivated violence. Religious actors from within the phenomena in question naturally blur the boundaries of these individual components, and so naturally may claim that it is the "Will of God" which demands that they act in the way they do. Similarly, unbelievers whose own first-hand knowledge of religion is slight may naturally take the words of these violent actors on the fact of it. Researchers such as Scott Atran and Robert Pape have shown that in fact variations in belief have little to do with these actions in the name of belief.
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You may be interested in the work of Loyal Rue, who argues that religion is not about God, but social commitments, along with Sosis and others.
Rue, Loyal. "Religion Generalized and Naturalized." Zygon 35, no. 3 (2000): 587-602.
Rue, Loyal D. Religion Is Not About God: How Spiritual Traditions Nurture Our Biological Nature and What to Expect When They Fail. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.
yeah, i've read his book. the title was plagiarized from his book obviously ;-)
This is in line with studies supporting the idea that evolutionarily, religion, particularly the arcane rituals, is primarily a mechanism for group cohesion, separating in-group from out-group. Acts like suicide bombing (as well as more benign activities) that require extreme cohesion and surrender of self would logially make use of these mechanisms.
The 'god' part is just the personification of the group mindset.
From Ed's typically excellent summary:
"During the interview, he asked them either how often they prayed or how often they visited a synagogue, and later about their support for a famous suicide attack - the Cave of the Patriarchs Massacre [...] About a quarter (23%) of the interviewees who had synagogues on their minds described the attack as "extremely heroic". However, just 6% of those who were asked about prayer did so, and an in-between 15% agreed when neither thought was planted."
The ordering between effects (synagogue > nothing > prayer) is the single most counter-intuitive result I've seen in a long, long time.
Somewhat tangential.
My observation has been that the people who view religious texts as largely irrelevant as causative factors in how the religious act are generally the same people who view genes as irrelevant to any social outcome. The concepts I think are psychologically linked. Saying that human nature is a tabula rasa explicable by social forces and historical narratives slides easily into seeing religions as blank slates explicable by social forces and historical narratives. So Christianity is not the teachings of Jesus, but rather some nebulous human entity subject to social pressure and change, and Islam is not the teachings of Muhammed but likewise.
As in the genes / environment debate, both sides are right in what they say to some extent or another, but the tabula rasa side more often tries to obliterate any relevance of genes / texts whatsoever, while their opponents do the opposite much less often in my observation.
It is also the case that lefty pinko types reject both gene explanations for social outcomes and text explanations for religion related outcomes. Part of this is the concept of equality. Specifically multiculturalism. It is offensive to them that blacks may be inherently less clever than whites on average, but it is also offensive to them that Christianity may be inherently more ethical or even just more compatible with current human rights standards (if we're morally relativist) than Islam. Particularly this combination gets their goats, saying that Buddhism is more peaceful than Christianity does not do so to anywhere near the same extent, just as saying Jews are smarter on average than white Gentiles doesn't have quite the same effect as saying whites are smarter than blacks in the race / IQ debate.
There are so many parallels here. One could almost say that both are simply manifestations of a wider issue.
There's also a special category of "religion" that I don't see discriminated very often: forms of naturalism that see human values embodied in the natural world, without explaining them by godlike persons or spirits.
Alchemy, astrology, Chinese geomancy, and many forms of traditional medicine and asceticism (self-training) are like that. All of them have a scientific or empirical substrate, and any also have a supernatural warrant or explanation, but not all of them do.
A quick poke at Google Scholar didn't turn up any materials from Atran or Pape indicating variation in degree of belief was so neutral. Scriptural Inerrancy (for whatever value of "scripture") seems to have a connection from my (layman's, statistically unverified) perspective.
Anyone know of data to point me at?
My observation has been that the people who view religious texts as largely irrelevant as causative factors in how the religious act are generally the same people who view genes as irrelevant to any social outcome
a group of individuals called psychologists & anthropologists have found that texts are largely irrelevant as causative factors. you just spent a whole lot of time rambling on when your initial assumption is manifestly false.
see they're books *in gods we trust* & *born to die*.
Peep, that just sounds completely wrong. Razib is a person who thinks genes matter. Religious teachings are part of that nebulous thing called "culture" which blank-slaters think is really important. The "New Atheists" (pretty much all lefties) like to point to passages from religious texts that strike us as offensive & backward today as part of their critique of religion, and Razib has argued against Harris & friends because of the thesis you object to. Sam Harris has claimed that Islam is especially violent and that given a suicide bombing one can almost infallibly guess that the perpetrator is a Muslim, fundamentalist Baptist Vox Day points out in The Irrational Atheist that it just ain't so (and Harris would know better if he read Pape).
@TGGP, you said...
Perhaps I'm taking this out of context (and if so, I apologize), but I'd say who you attribute suicide bombings to depends on the context. If you were talking about the Second Wold War, then you'd probably be inclined to attribute any kind of suicide type attacks to the Japanese.
here's the problem with harris: when scott atran pointed out that in the early 1980s there were christian lebanese suicide bombers he had a "does not compute" expression on his face. i tend to give harris props for judging islam the way liberal atheists normally judge evangelical xtianity, but at some point it's tiresome that he seems to feel that having his heart in the right place is substitutable for homework.
Suicide bombing is Tamil, though they never get the credit they deserve.
Is this really so surprising? You can have atheistic religions quite easily -- what determines a religion is not claims about deities, but doctrine and the nature of that doctrine's justification.
It is most certainly not manifestly false. That is rhetoric. You are taking one variable, support for suicide bombing, and correlating it with acts of observance rather than belief. That is nothing like a full picture. You are producing propaganda. I see it.
It is well known that Muslim scholars use texts to support their arguments. If we take two practices amongst (some) Muslims with which current western morality has problems, say female genital mutilation and execution of apostates, the former has one disputed (in authenticity) hadith which mildly approves but does not prescribe, and the latter has multiple verses in various places in support.
The Islamic fundamentalist, by definition, and when using the original meaning of the word fundamentalist (as first applied to Christians), will have much more trouble opposing the latter than the former. This is logic rather than sociology. It is a truth.
It is foolish not to categorise these as distinct in relation to Islam itself, since Islam is a set of teachings and not just some sociological phenomena.
Your logic would render the like of
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7264903.stm
irrelevant.
Correlations that appear to go against texts are predicated on ignorance. Therefore underlying problems are hidden. Censor me if you will, this blog is your property, and as someone with relatives who are Muslims you have a dog in this fight, but these problems will not go away.
My point, you are doing nothing more than those who produce such equally technically true evidence to obfuscate the relation between genes and outcomes.
This is straw man. The fundamental problems with Islam in relation to liberal democracy are not defined in it's propensity to produce suicide bombers in any set of particular environmental conditions. It's like comparing skin tone to IQ. Skin tone is not race. The correlate is there, but the causative sequence is not identified.
Common sense says that a warlord's invented religion will produce more religious violence ceteris paribus, but in a particular set of environmental conditions it won't be true. However to swing from this to no causative effects of texts is simply wrong. It's obfuscation.
you might be right. you might be wrong. but i do know that you are an ignorant mouth farter (ergo, the appeals to logic and definitions). i stopped listening to this sort of bullshit several years ago. i actually don't discount all the hypothesis you're presenting, but i'm pretty sure you're a retard who doesn't know what they're talking about. anyone who starts talking about 'ceteris paribus' in this context really is a idiot and doesn't have something called 'facts' from which to construct a model, ergo theorizing and common sense. jesus. yes, follow up comments from you will be deleted moron :-)
Could quite easily make the argument that the LTTE fits the model, if their ideology is considered faith-based (as the last 2 years seem to support) with some exceptions.
1. Rigid personal behavior guidelines--marriage, cohabitation, drug use--but as a result of a 'civil' theology predicated on personal 'purity' and it's alleged effects on fighting fitness.
2. The overarching belief that autonomy can come only as a result of armed conflict. Not metaphysical but given the preponderance of evidence against it, how does one describe it?
3. communal rituals--what any armed outfit would do in addition to martyr celebrations and 5-minute hates from the dear leader.
they're usually anti-religion as long as it doesn't conflict with the cause or bring down pesky NGOs looking for human rights violations. You can see Prabhakaran at hindu and christian (not muslim) ceremonies but you can't see the gun pointed at the priest's back.
how do military organizations and para-military organizations fit the model?