Are religious people more violent than nonreligious people?

[ThomasMT]

Deus vult!

You patronize the expression as if it were never used with righteous application.

 

[AlbMagno]

That graphic doesn’t look like correlation at all.

 

[Jbrady]

You patronize the expression as if it were never used with righteous application.

It has been cheapened by all those “Christians” who use it as a justification to hate Muslims. It’s never used in any other context nowadays.

 

[meltzerboy2]

Some religious people tend to become zealots, fundamentalists, regardless of their particular religion. And from these strongly prejudiced attitudes, it is but one or two steps toward unjust discriminatory practices and the eruption of violent behavior. Religion, when carried to such extremes, has turned to violence in the history of the world. Surely, however, it is not the only reason for conflict; land, money, and political power are other huge motives on a grand scale. But religious people have made their fair contribution to the suffering of humanity throughout the ages.

 

[Jbrady]

Surely, however, it is not the only reason for conflict; land and political power are other huge motives on a grand scale.

It would be a mistake to think of a desire for religious doctrine as distinct from a desire for land or political power. They are almost always intricately intertwined and impossible to tease apart.

 

[meltzerboy2]

In the case of Hitler, for example, I believe they are separate. Maybe in his case, associated with the spreading of the Aryan race and the elimination of the Jewish “race,” but not really a religious agenda.

 

[Hume]

Do you have a citation or is that just a feeling? But let’s assume you’re right. That’s all of human history vs. <100 yrs. Non-religion for the win?

In fairness, There was somewhere around 2.25 billion folks on the planet when WW2 broke out.

There were fewer than a billion folks around at any given time for all of human history until roughly 1800.

 

[Jbrady]

In the case of Hitler, for example, I believe they are separate.

You’d be quite wrong there. Nazism was influenced by religion in many ways, and Hitler personally frequently appealed to religious sentiment in his writings and speeches, even though he was not a believer himself. There were plenty of religious collaborators as well, both Catholic and Protestant. Hitler also tried to get control over both churches and integrate them into his totalitarian system.

And then there was the whole quasi-religious cult built up around Hitler and the Party.

Particularly in regards to anti-semitism, the Nazis built upon a rather robust Christian foundation, often quoting Catholic and Protestant writing word for word. Yes, they developed their own brand, but they did not start from scratch.

 

[Hume]

In the case of Hitler, for example, I believe they are separate. Maybe in his case, associated with the spreading of the Aryan race and the elimination of the Jewish “race,” but not really a religious agenda.

I’d somewhat agree. Jews were just a classic scapegoat for the last 2000 years or so of European history. Familiarity.

I think the underlying issue is radial devotion to any ideology; religious or secular. Religion has shown adept at producing zealots willing to commit violence as has the ideologies that arose in the 20th century after “god was discovered ‘dead’” in Europe the century prior.

The fascist and communist ideals were nothing if not pseudo-religion.

 

[meltzerboy2]

It depends in part on how you define religion. And, yes, the Nazis used whatever means they could to convince people they were doing the right thing. But a RELIGIOUS AGENDA on the part of Hitler himself? He appealed to Protestant Christian theology, or his own warped version of it, but was not himself interested in spreading any particular religious belief around the world. Political power, land, and the Aryan race: those were his main interests.

 

[Jbrady]

But a RELIGIOUS AGENDA on the part of Hitler himself?

We’re talking about two different things. You’re talking about Hitler the individual person, and I’m talking about the conflict he unleashed. I answered in response to your post about conflicts.

 

[AlbMagno]

If you define religion like that, positivism can be a religion. Videogames can be a religion. Sex-culture can be a religion. The man cannot live in an hyper-rational, dehumanizing vacumm, he/she needs transcence.

 

[Weave]

I think for there to be any true correlation there would need to be more than one variable. Multivariate regression could add more independent variables that could account for the perceived correlation to the dependent variable here.

Also, some religions are more violent than others while some people identify with a religion but live contrary to it. And even if there was a correlation, it doesn’t mean that that religion is false just because it’s practitioners are bad people. Just because I’m a sinner who acts contrary to my faith sometimes doesn’t mean that the faith is false or the cause of my immorality.

 

[Hume]

If you define religion like that, positivism can be a religion. Videogames can be a religion. Sex-culture can be a religion. The man cannot live in an hyper-rational, dehumanizing vacumm, he/she needs transcence.

Radical devotion to some sort of idealism provides it.

So all hail the Fuhrer! or the State! and so on…

 

[AlbMagno]

Radical devolution isn’t a necessary consequence of religion.

 

[Hume]

Radical devolution isn’t a necessary consequence of religion.

Neither is it a necessary consequence of adherence to 20th century ideological god-replacers. But it tends to produce violent zealots all the same, as we can readily observe.

 

[Peaceable]

In India (a Hindu nation) if a suicide bomber blows something up, the family is arrested & sometimes killed. They do that eliminate the “martyr” suicide bomber who does it to give his family money.

Wow, I didn’t know that. Do you have a reference or particular case in mind?

 

[AlbMagno]

And science tends to produce nuclear and biological weapons. And?

Correlation does not mean causation.

 

[ATraveller]

To me this is a good indication that the 0.25 correlation is just related to poverty, not religion itself.

It is good you see this. The world is complex. Just placing two variables together and then drawing a conclusion out of that is silly.

r=|0.25|?
If this conclusion (religious people are more violent than nonreligious people) were published in a publication with the usual rigour found in the natural sciences, it would be laughed at. A good correlation requires the value to be around 0.95, give or take, or higher.
Seriously, when conclusions like these are treated as facts with such terribly low values, this is why those in the natural sciences are so dismissive of those in the social sciences.

 

[Calliope]

People use all sorts of things as either a motive or explanation for their violence, but violence is caused by a sense of inferiority, insecurity, or lack in the group or person who perpetrates it.

They feel they can lessen their feelings by taking something from someone else. Power, life, sex, goods, land, etc. They often resort to violence in order to do so. In order to gain support and others to help them fight for their cause, they will try to convince others that X is the enemy and they will foment fear and hatred towards the other person or group. Often religion is used to foment that fear and hatred, such as X wants to take away your religion, or has disrespected your God, or are stealing your women and children and raising them as infidels.

It’s not the religion that’s the problem, it’s that someone is using it as a tool to foment fear and hatred. Unless the faith itself has that tactic built into it, I don’t think most religions can be directly blamed for violence, but then often do engender a mindset that allows people to be rather easily manipulated.

If people have been taught that everyone is out to get their faith, that people are dissing their deity, and that dying for their faith is a ticket to paradise, that makes it easier to rile them up against a perceived (or real) enemy, because it is seen as a good thing to die in defense of their faith. Get them riled up enough and you can get them to make the leap to “it’s as good thing to kill in defense of your faith”.

But political ideations are used in exactly the same way.