DDL on 3/2/2015 at 15:44
I'd say blind nihilistic death-wish stuff is largely unrelated to religion per se, and is possibly not something that can be entirely avoided either (you get a species as numerous and diverse as ours, you'll get outliers).
A lot of the school shootings in the US could be essentially attributed to 'really overwrought teenage angst' combined with the wonders of freely available guns. Teenage angst isn't going anywhere soon (though guns are another can of worms).
BUT, in terms of 'willingness to die', this sort of nihilism shares a lot of parallels with the deathwish-approach of suicide attackers: it's....escapism, almost. "Stop the world, I want to get off". And one could easily become the other, because suddenly it's not just an out, it's an out with a happy ending.
I don't think that this sort of death wish could be quite so easily twisted to a corporate agenda as it could to a religious one.
Take a disaffected kid full of rage and hate and general misanthropy: chances are very good he won't turn into a crazy school shooter, but the potential might be there.
Now tell him it's all X, Y and Z's fault and if he makes them pay then he gets to go to a happy place full of awesomeness and hooters. This might push him over the edge. It exploits the human desire for hope and redemption and turns it into something bloody and horrible.
Compare that outcome with telling him it's all X, Y and Z's fault and if he makes them pay then he still dies but your stock portfolio looks a little healthier and you might get an end of year bonus. I'd argue this is less likely to push him over the edge (though it may confirm his worldview of general distributed dickishness). It's more HONEST, certainly, but it loses that appeal to hope that the religious approach had.
Now I accept that the percentage of any given religion that is dedicated to using that religion for suicide attacks is very small, but it's still non-zero, and the whole thing is just a stupid tribal-brain holdover that we really should grow out of (...so we can get back to murdering each other for honest reasons, like greed and power).
Hope and redemption should be something you look for with the one life you have, rather than things you gain by expending the one life you have driving ball bearings through children at a market.
But at this point I think I may just be waffling.
faetal on 3/2/2015 at 18:13
It's carrot versus stick. Blind nihilism usually manifests in people who can't bear to live. Religious fanatical suicide attacks in people keen to go to an afterlife.
You can sell the latter, not the former.
froghawk on 3/2/2015 at 22:07
Whoa... Tony is making a whole lot of sense in this thread, and I agree with everything he's saying. I guess we do have common ground!
Tony_Tarantula on 9/2/2015 at 17:48
Which is I refer to Apple Stores as "The Temple of Apple". That's a joke, but I actually do call them that.
I do have another question. If I asked everyone here to summarize in a single sentence why they dislike religion what would the reason be?
faetal on 9/2/2015 at 17:59
Tough one, but the one which applies equally to all that I know of:
Because it makes no logical sense.
froghawk on 9/2/2015 at 18:14
Quote Posted by DDL
I believe my country is important enough that I am actually going to kill myself, right now, right here....no.
Um... Kamikaze. Need I say more?
faetal on 9/2/2015 at 18:19
"The tradition of death instead of defeat, capture, and perceived shame was deeply entrenched in Japanese military culture. It was one of the primary traditions in the samurai life and the Bushido code: loyalty and honour until death."
So, bit more complicated than just "for my country".
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze)
froghawk on 9/2/2015 at 18:23
Certainly, but by the same token, religious suicide bombing is a bit more complicated than just being for the promise of the afterlife. Suicide bombing in any context has always been an act of outright desperation. There are many interesting books on the subject - I don't remember the titles, I'll have to go look them up. But the bottom line is that there is ALWAYS a political element behind suicide bombing, and it's never purely religiously motivated.
faetal on 9/2/2015 at 18:30
Yeah of course. It's never going to be a case of "welcome to Islam, here's you Qu'uran and here's your bomb vest". You just need that powerful factor which over-rides self-preservation. The Japanese one is very culture specific (Dema can probably elaborate better than me) in this way - until recently (and perhaps still if I'm mistaken), one of the top causes of death in Japan was suicide, more often than not linked to some perception of having brought some type of shame on oneself or family. With religion, your big mitigating factor is a wish to appease the creator of the universe and/or to gain rewards in the afterlife.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Japan)
DDL on 9/2/2015 at 19:58
Plus a point I'm trying to convey is that removing religion as a factor would undeniably help, and is something we could conceivably do (or at least work toward), whereas removing politics is a much harder ask, and arguably doesn't even make sense.
Religion is not the only tool for making people do stupid things, but it's a very popular and successful one. It is also one we could potentially discard to net benefit.
