Nicker on 24/1/2015 at 21:08
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
My main problem with "Dawkins" style atheism is that it is based on an astounding level of hubris in that it assumes that our current perceptions about the nature of reality are 100% correct, and that we haven't missed anything important.
Didn't you just accuse others of straw-manning? Science makes no such claim of infallibility.
That said, science is 99.9% more effective at sorting out what's correct from what is utter bullshit, than any religion will ever be.
DDL on 24/1/2015 at 21:28
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
And, as amply demonstrated by history, people have a dozen other stupid excuses lined up......meaning that you've accomplished precisely jack shit.
Hang on, even taking you at your ludicrous hyperbolic face value, I'll think you'll find that removing one reason to leave a dozen actually accomplishes an 8% reduction in stupid excuses.
I'll take that!
demagogue on 25/1/2015 at 02:09
Quote Posted by Azaran
From the little I know of the Burma situation, the local Buddhists feel threatened by Islam and are lashing out, and there's also nationalistic and ethnic variables in the mix. Whereas violence by Islamic or Christian terrorists is typically motivated by pure hatred and intolerance of others, or a desire to convert them (it's based on the exclusive and proselytizing nature of those religions).
The Burma situation is complex because even the Muslim community is getting split. There's a political, ethnic and a religious side, but it's hard not to miss that the most vitriolic propaganda is coming from the monks, they're often leading the mobs, and they use religious concepts. I get the idea the temple schools are incubating some hate propaganda. And the regime's legitimacy is built on a political Buddhism where brutal actions are not only sanctioned but required of a regime to maintain social harmony, or were traditionally.
There are a few people I've met that see an inconsistency between hating the Muslim community and Buddhism as a religion of peace, but it's very rare in my experience. The Burmese Christians tend to have that rhetoric more.
Tony_Tarantula on 25/1/2015 at 03:41
Quote Posted by demagogue
The Burma situation is complex because even the Muslim community is getting split. There's a political, ethnic and a religious side, but it's hard not to miss that the most vitriolic propaganda is coming from the monks, they're often leading the mobs, and they use religious concepts. I get the idea the temple schools are incubating some hate propaganda. And
the regime's legitimacy is built on a political Buddhism where brutal actions are not only sanctioned but required of a regime to maintain social harmony, or were traditionally. Another case in point why it's bad for both religion and state for the two to be entangled. It's the same way in Saudi Arabia: they've based the political legitimacy of their regime by distorting religious dogma, and consequently any dissent in regards to religion is also an attack on the state. That's also the same reason why Queen Elizabeth needed to kill Catholics.
Azaran on 25/1/2015 at 21:43
Quote Posted by Le MAlin 76
It's political.... The religious factor is important for national feeling nationnal in Ireland, but feeling national is nor religious, their is too cultural, linguistic, economic factors.
I'm not sure it can all be reduced to economic factors. The deranged obsession of European colonialists with converting natives and destroying their cultures, while it may have been a means of facilitating their exploitation, was motivated purely by religion. And in fact, if they had been smart, they could have better gained the native's cooperation by showing respect for their cultures. I think we can best reach a point of agreement if we posit a mix of economic and religious factors in these crimes.
A good example of this is the Evangelical\Calvinist (
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2011/may/05/evangelical-christian-environmentalism-green-dragon) hatred of the environment, which is motivated by Genesis (where mankind is given dominion by God over the planet to exploit it as they please), as well as the economic principles of western capitalism (where these religious movements arose). And this is a dangerous mix for the planet. There's a lot of disturbing examples of this historically. When Protestant missionaries converted large parts of Northeast India (whose people used to be animists with a deep reverence for nature), they followed it up by (
http://www.conservationandsociety.org/article.asp?issn=0972-4923%3Byear%3D2013%3Bvolume%3D11%3Bissue%3D2%3Bspage%3D187%3Bepage%3D197%3Baulast%3DOrmsby) destroying local forests which were considered sacred by the locals:
A resident of the town of Mawkyrwat recounted that, "after conversion [to Christianity], the old belief was not effective anymore. Therefore, in the 1960s, they destroyed all of the forest... An auction was declared. All the villagers went into the forest and chose the trees they wanted to buy."Economic exploitation and a (
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2014/07/the-breaking-of-images/) malicious desire to destroy, typical of Calvinism (and Wahhabism, its Islamic equivalent), which unlike traditional religions, has no respect or tolerance for nature, cultures, or anything for that matter. And even if they had no economic motivations, their religious mandates would still lead them to commit the same crimes, just like IS is doing in the Middle East. The evangelicals who go into the 3rd world to plant churches often have no economic motivation: their objective is to carpet bomb non-Christian societies with churches, convert locals, and destroy the local traditions
Quote Posted by demagogue
The Burma situation is complex because even the Muslim community is getting split. There's a political, ethnic and a religious side, but it's hard not to miss that the most vitriolic propaganda is coming from the monks, they're often leading the mobs, and they use religious concepts. I get the idea the temple schools are incubating some hate propaganda. And the regime's legitimacy is built on a political Buddhism where brutal actions are not only sanctioned but required of a regime to maintain social harmony, or were traditionally.
It would be interesting to check on how the whole thing started. I read the other day about Islamists infiltrating the country from Bangladesh, raping Buddhist women and sowing terror in certain areas (they're doing it in many places), the whole campaign could be a violent reaction against it. And it's innocent people who are paying the price.
Pyrian on 25/1/2015 at 21:58
Frankly, I'm simply not impressed with religion's ability to affect behavior at all. Humans are champion rationalizers. Religions primarily advocate virtuous behavior, but that seems to get routinely swept under the rug in favor of finding loopholes for asinine behavior. I'm almost always wishing that the various fanatics would actually pay attention to their own dang religion for a change.
faetal on 25/1/2015 at 22:34
I see religion as a fairly obvious neuropsychological solution to the problem of sentience. When an animal evolves the complexity we have and is able to conceptualise things like death and to ponder the (alleged) meaning of existence, I'd say it's an reflex adaptation to use our creativity to explain the unknown with stories, prior to developing methods which allow us to figure out the mechanisms which caused all of this to be.
Thing is, just as our metabolism evolved around feast or famine lifestyle and hasn't caught up with affluent nations' food abundance, leading to obesity and diabetes; the parts of the brain which allow us to achieve existential calm by assimilating mythology haven't caught up with the abundance of useful information to explain the workings of the universe and more importantly, life on earth.
Our information processing and psychology evolved to enable us to survive long enough to send our genes into the future, not to be objective. Being objective (or getting as close as you can) requires training and exercise.
demagogue on 26/1/2015 at 02:08
Quote Posted by Azaran
It would be interesting to check on how the whole thing started. I read the other day about Islamists infiltrating the country from Bangladesh, raping Buddhist women and sowing terror in certain areas (they're doing it in many places), the whole campaign could be a violent reaction against it. And it's innocent people who are paying the price.
This is the rhetoric and practically the universal opinion in Burma among all (non-Muslim) groups, except for the few that studied abroad or are open minded. It's also been universally condemned as baseless propaganda to justify the ethnic cleansing of Burma's Muslim population by pretty much every human rights group, Eastern and Western, that's looked into the issue. One of the head Buddhist monks in the country just last week called the UN special envoy to Burma a whore for suggesting Muslims might have human rights, so it's pretty transparent there's a difference of opinion.
So the issue is, there is a population of over a million Muslims living in NW Burma. They are visibly South Asian ethnically, but they identify themselves as Rohingya, a Burmese-national population that has had a permanent presence in NW Burma since at least the year 900, and there's documentation and archaeological evidence to prove their presence over centuries. Every other Burmese group identifies them as illegal "Bengali" migrants "infiltrating" the country, and they have a whole pseudoscience literature that says they're from Bangladesh and only moved into the country illegally within the last few decades as migrants, which takes a maddening amount of willful blindness to swallow, but such is the nature of big propaganda. They do not accept the term "Rohingya" and will be quick to correct it and say "Bengali".
So there has been interethnic violence between the Muslim and Buddhist (Arakan) groups, with violence on both sides. The thing human rights groups want people to keep in mind is the sense of scale. The Muslim group attacks could be a dozen, but the Buddhist groups burn and raze entire villages displacing people in the 1000s to 10,000s. Well, I invite you to look up the statistics and get the right numbers, but the difference in scale is stark and unmistakable. In addressing the violence, the police's main job is to protect the Buddhist groups in razing villages.
The Rohingya are a stateless population because neither Bangladesh nor Burma accept them as nationals. As stateless persons, they have no protections, and are herded into camps as criminals and treated like cattle. They are certainly not allowed to travel freely. The Burmese authorities also ensure that no medical aid or supplies are able to enter the camps, so there are abysmal conditions of starvation, sickness, and daily humiliation, with aid groups left to complain from outside.
There is a growing practice of desperate Rohingya doing anything they can to leave their inhuman treatment, and buying passage on small boats going down the west coast that promise to transport them to Malaysia. This is largely a criminal ring to force them into slavery, forced labor camps for the men and sexual slavery for the women, and few will ever make it to Malaysia.
A few weeks ago we talked to a Burmese Arakan nationalist, and he drew a map for us with these arrows from Bangladesh down the west coast and he was telling us, "See, they're infiltrating our country with their boats and trying to conquer it." And all I could think was, holy, fucking, shit, here are people that are desperate to do anything to leave the squalid, inhuman conditions you and your genocidal race-hate kind have thrust on them, and you have the gall to call it "them infiltration us". Any time I ask Burmese around my school here what the number one human rights problem is in Burma, they universally answer "The presence of Muslims in our country"; not their abysmal inhuman living conditions that the Burmese authorities are absolutely responsible for, but their presence in the country at all.
So yeah, it's shit propaganda. If you try to sell it to any respectable human rights group in the world anywhere, you're going to get schooled. The fact that there actually are infiltrating Islamist groups like ISIS out there, which Burmese always want to conflate with their own population, is really unfortunate in helping justify the terrible treatment Rohingya are subject to. In this case you have a really vulnerable, stateless population that has every right to stay in their villages as any other Burmese group that's been living in the country for centuries.
Edit: Right, the origins. Ultimately, as with a lot of problems in the region, you can point to the colonial-era British. As the colonial rulers, one of their methods of control was to import Indians into Burma and pit ethnic groups against each other that didn't even know they're supposed to hate each other. Then when the British left, that antagonism stayed. The other colonial legacy was a deep paranoia in Burma of outside powers trying to interfere with their concerns, and so they're going to see South Asian people in their country as part of that threat to their sovereignty. When you push them on the facts of how long they've been in the country (even under their shit propaganda models, some Muslims have been in the country for 3 generations now), they'll fall back on a position like non-Asian looking people in the country at all are a problem, no matter how long they've been here. But anyway, human rights law is clear that people have a right to a nationality, and their interpretation doesn't hold water.
Edit2: It's true rape cases are a common trigger to violence. I should say alleged rape cases, because rioting starts before any criminal case happens and are fueled more by rumor than any clear understanding of the facts. But anyway, even assuming there is credit to them, I mean rape is a crime; criminals should be tried and jailed; but you don't go razing villages of people that have nothing to do with it except they share the ethnicity because of it. I can't imagine how a population of over a million people, way more than half women and children, need to be evicted because 5 sociopathic assholes raped a Buddhist women and if found guilty deserve to rot in prison (to take the 2012 case).
faetal on 26/1/2015 at 04:50
Seems to mirror a lot the situation with Palestine.
demagogue on 26/1/2015 at 06:25
In fact they call the Rohingya the Palestinians of the East. Maybe one difference is that at least everyone admits the Palestinians are the pre-existing population on that land, and the Israelis are often panned as European colonial imports that don't belong there. The Rohingya get the worst of both worlds, stateless and vulnerable like Palestinians and still hated as European colonial imports that don't belong there.
On that note, I do think it's a useful exercise for all these kinds of situations -- Palestine, NW Burma, N. Ireland, Eritrea/Ethiopia, W. Sahara, etc -- for the people to think about other regions having similar problems with stateless populations or interethnic conflict in a totally different context. I mean it takes some of the emotion out for my Burmese students when I teach about, e.g., the Palestinian issue or Ethiopia stripping the nationality of ethnic native Eritreans, since they don't have any particular opinion about either group and can focus just on the legal problem of statelessness and vulnerability for a population. Then they can look back on their own situation a little more objectively, and see that they aren't the only state in the world having issues with ethnic minorities and nationality.
