The Cold War
Published 31 Aug 2019Our series on the history of the Cold War period continues with a documentary explaining the political background of the First Arab-Israeli War of 1948.
To learn about the military events of this conflict, go to the Kings and Generals channel
Consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thecoldwar
With Americans being urged to report on “radicalized” friends and family by the government and white supremacy being called the greatest threat, have we reached the point that being seen as racist is worse than allowing a terrorist to kill many people? The inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing shows that’s exactly the state most of the western world is in:
“Manchester Arena Bomb (22 May 2017) – Daily Mirror – 19 dead in pop concert ‘suicide bomb'” by Bradford Timeline is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
The independent inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing of May 2017, in which 22 pop fans were killed by an Islamist extremist, has published the first volume of its report. It makes for chilling reading. The inquiry has found there were numerous “missed opportunities” to confront Salman Abedi, the bomber, and potentially stop him from detonating the device in his rucksack. Most chilling of all is the reason given by one of the key security guards on patrol that evening as to why he failed to question Abedi. He was worried, he said, that asking a brown-skinned man why he was hanging around the arena might be construed as racist.
Take that in. There was a very shifty-looking young man around the foyer and mezzanine of the Manchester Arena towards the end of an Ariana Grande concert, carrying a “bulging” rucksack so large he “struggled” under the weight of it, and a security guard was reluctant to confront him lest he be accused of racism. In the words of the report, this was a significant “missed opportunity”. The “inadequacy” of the security guard’s response to the presence of a highly suspicious individual was one of the many misjudgements made on that black, fateful night, the report says. Is it possible that the fear of being thought of as racist is screwing up everyday life, and even hindering sensible action in threatening situations?
To be clear, the security guard who was cagey about questioning Abedi is not responsible for the failure to stop Abedi from detonating his device. The first volume of the inquiry’s report – which covers security at and around the arena on the night of 22 May 2017 – criticises certain individuals, including the security guard, for not doing their jobs diligently enough. But it says that it was the organisations responsible for security at the arena – the arena’s own security firm and also the British Transport Police – that were “principally” to blame for the “missed opportunities”. It also makes the reasonable point that it is impossible to know what would have happened if Abedi had been confronted. It proposes that there may still have been loss of life – if, for example, he had detonated his device while being questioned – but that it would have been less severe than the horrors that shortly unfolded.
It is disturbing to read the list of “missed opportunities”. Abedi was in the arena for more than an hour and a half before he detonated his bomb. He arrived at 20.51 and blew himself up at 22.31, as the concert attendees started to leave. In that time, this young man with a massive rucksack was seen by numerous people. He was described by some of them as “nervous” and “fidgety”. He looked out of place – his age “meant that he did not fit the demographic of a parent waiting for a child”, as the inquiry says. And yet as a result of individual and organisational failure – including, the inquiry says, insufficient training of the security guards on duty that night – the message didn’t get through that there was a fidgeting, agitated man with a bulging rucksack hanging around for 90 minutes at the exit area of a venue that was largely packed with children and teenagers.
Remarkably, some people at the arena who saw Abedi thought to themselves that he was a suicide bomber. Christopher Wild and his partner, Julie Whitley, who were picking up Whitley’s daughter, discussed the possibility that Abedi had a bomb in his rucksack. Wild actually did confront Abedi and asked him what was in his bag. Abedi nervously brushed him off. Wild reported his concerns to security guards at 22.15 – 16 minutes before the explosion – but he was “fobbed off”. Another parent said the security guards were “really quite dismissive” of Wild’s concerns. It is deeply disturbing that parents at the arena rightly suspected Abedi was a bomber and yet nothing was done to challenge or remove him.
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 7 Apr 2017Gooooood morning everybody! Today, Blue finishes the trilogy of Abrahamic religions with a video summarizing the history of the Hebrew people and the Jewish faith. There’s a lot of ground to cover, so fasten your seatbelts for a twenty-minute rundown of the facts, the theories, and the ever-so-popular misconceptions!
Look forward to next time, when Blue brings it all together to talk about Religious Wars and Religious Philosophy!
PATREON: www.patreon.com/user?u=4664797
MERCH LINKS:
Shirts – https://overlysarcasticproducts.threa…
All the other stuff – http://www.cafepress.com/OverlySarcas…Find us on Twitter @OSPYouTube!
Epimetheus
Published 8 Oct 2019Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire explained in less than 7 minutes Sikh history documentary
This video covers Sikh history from the Guru Nanak till the fall of the Sikh Empire.
This video and others like it are sponsored by my Patrons over on patreon.
https://www.patreon.com/Epimetheus1776
Why, yes. Yes I am, Barbara Kay. And you should be too:
Nobody with eyes to see can press on with the myth that this is a political conflict. The anti-Semitism that lurks behind obsessive Israel-bashing can no longer be credibly passed off as “criticism of Israel”. It’s not about Israel and never was. It’s about those maddening Jews. Wherever they are, they make trouble. What is it with their stubborn insistence on their right to live and flourish in their homeland, when they know they are not wanted there?
Never mind the historical facts surrounding Jews’ indigenous rights, or the painstaking legal journey to national sovereignty (along with other newly minted Middle Eastern countries like Iraq and Syria, both of which have appalling human rights records, but never have their right to exist questioned). Treaties and international law are too dull, nuanced and complex. They take time and effort to understand. It’s very taxing for the brain. Narrative, though, takes no time at all to absorb. Stories of good and evil are simple, unnuanced and satisfyingly emotive.
If you attend to the myth-mongering on social media, it seems your choice is stark. Are you an ally of an all-powerful white supremacist, colonialist apartheid regime led by baby-killing oppressors, the likes of whose evil the world has never seen? Or are you a decent, compassionate human being, committed to social justice and ready to lend your support to those infamous Zionist monsters’ powerless, oppressed, racialized victims, who are languishing in their open-air prisons?
It’s a tough choice for progressive Jews. Before 1967, living with oneself as a Jew was easy. Socialist Israel was little David then and the massed hostile Arab states were Goliath. Even Bernie Sanders enjoyed his time on a kibbutz in 1963. (Mind you, that particular kibbutz, Sha’ar Ha’amakim, was so far left, one of its members was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union.)
Then those upstart Jews dared to win a war against incredible odds and had the chutzpah to take back territory that had been stolen from them in the 1948 War of Independence. The pivot from victim to victor, from powerlessness to power, was the kiss of death for their support from the left.
At least, that’s how Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten opens this review of (an abridged version) of One Thousand And One Nights:
One of many different covers of various editions of this book, but almost certainly not the edition reviewed here.
One Thousand And One Nights is a book about love, wonder, magic, and morality. About genies, ape-people, and rhinoceroses who run around with elephants impaled on their horns. About how to use indexical uncertainty to hack the simulation running the universe to return the outcome you want. But most of all, it’s a book about how your wife is cheating on you with a black man.
Nights stretches from Morocco to China, across at least four centuries — and throughout that whole panoply of times and places, your wife is always cheating on you with a black man (if you’re black, don’t worry; she is cheating on you with a different black man). It’s a weird constant. Maybe it’s the author’s fetish. I realize that Nights includes folktales written over centuries by dozens of different people — from legends passed along in caravanserais, to stories getting collected and written down, to manuscripts brought to Europe, to Richard Burton writing the classic English translation, to the abridged and updated version of Burton I read. But somewhere in that process, probably multiple places, someone had a fetish about their wife cheating on them with a black man, and boy did they insert it into the story.
Our tale begins in Samarkand. One day the king, Shah Zaman, comes home unexpectedly and sees his wife cheating on him with a black man. He kills her in a rage, then falls sick with grief, and is taken to the palace of his brother, King Shahryar of Persia. While there, he sees King Shahryar’s wife cheat on him with a black man. He tells King Shahryar, who kills his wife in a rage too, then also falls sick with grief. The two grief-stricken kings decide to wander the world, expecting that maybe this will help in some way.
They come across a mighty king of the genies, and the brothers hide lest he see them and kill them. The genie falls asleep, and the genie’s wife finds them and demands they have sex with her or she’ll kill them. They have sex, and all the while, the genie’s wife is boasting about how even the king of the genies can’t prevent his wife from cheating. The two kings find this experience salutary — apparently the problem isn’t specific to them, it’s just an issue with the female sex in general. So they go back to the palace and everyone lives happily ever … no, actually, King Shahryar vows that he will bed a new woman every night, then kill her the following morning, thus ensuring nobody can ever cheat on him again.
So for however many years, King Shahryar beds a new woman every night, then kills her in the morning. After a while the kingdom begins to run dangerously low on women. The vizier frets over this, and his daughter Scheherazade hears him fretting. She develops a plan, and volunteers to be the king’s victim that night. After having sex, she tells the king a story. At the end, she says it’s too bad she’s going to die the next morning, because she knows other stories which are even better. Perhaps if the king spared her life for one night she could tell some of those too.
(I’d always heard that she leaves him at a cliff-hanger and makes him spare her to find out how it ends, which I think makes a better story, but this isn’t how the real Arabian Nights works).
Scheherazade’s stories are set in an idealized Middle East. The sultans are always wise and just, the princes are always strong and handsome, and almost a full half of viziers are non-evil. Named characters are always so beautiful and skilled and virtuous that it sometimes gets used it as a plot device — a character is separated from his family member or lover, so he wanders into a caravanserai and asks for news of someone who is excessively beautiful and skilled and virtuous. “Oh yes,” says one of the merchants, “I talked to a traveler from Cairo who said he encountered the most beautiful and skilled and virtuous person he’d ever seen in a garden there, he couldn’t shut up about them for days” — and now you know your long-lost brother must be in Cairo. In one case, a woman went searching for her long-lost son, tasted some pomegranate jam in Damascus, and immediately (and correctly!) concluded that only her son could make pomegranate jam that good. She demanded to know where the merchant had gotten the jam, and the trail led to a happy reunion.
The most common jobs in Idealized Middle East are sultan, merchant, poor-but-pious tailor, fisherman, merchant, evil vizier, sorcerer, merchant, thief, person who gets hired to assist a sorcerer because they have the exact right astrological chart to perform some otherwise-impossible ritual, and merchant. Of these, merchant is number one. Whatever else you’re doing — sailing, stealing, using your perfect astrological chart to enter a giant glowing door in the desert mysteriously invisible to everyone else — you’re probably also dealing goods on the side. The only exceptions are Moroccans (who are all sorcerers), Zoroastrians (who are all demonic cannibals), and Jews (who are all super-double merchants scamming everyone else). Also maybe the 5 – 10% of the Middle Eastern population who witches have turned into animals at any given time.
Things have changed little today in terms of the exclusive Western monopoly of military history. Six billion people on the planet are more likely to read, hear, or see accounts of the Gulf War (1990) from the American and European vantage points than from the Iraqi. The story of the Vietnam War is largely Western; even the sharpest critics of America’s involvement put little credence in the official communiqués and histories that emanate from communist Vietnam. In the so-called Dark Ages of Europe, more independent histories were still published between A.D. 500 and 1000 than during the entire reigns of the Persian or Ottoman Empire. Whether it is history under Xerxes, the sultan, the Koran, or the Politburo at Hanoi, it is not really history — at least in the Western sense of writing what can offend, embarrass and blaspheme.
Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, 2001.
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 30 Apr 2021History is full of Rulers, but most of them (especially some famous ones) can be Kind Of Terrible upon closer inspection. So let’s take a look at two kings we can actually consider to be Good — not perfect, not blameless, but a heck of a lot more virtuous than the average ruler, that’s for sure.
This topic was requested by our patron Duncan! Thank you for your patronage, and for the topic suggestion.
SOURCES & Further Reading: The Great Courses Plus lectures “Being Persian” by Robert Garland, “The Persian Era” by Jean-Pierre Isbouts, “Saladin: Chivalry and Conquest – 1187” by Eamonn Gearon, and “Saladin and the Defeat of the Crusaders” by Dorsey Armstrong.
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
TRACKLIST: “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys,” “Pippin the Hunchback” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP
PODCAST: https://overlysarcasticpodcast.transi…
DISCORD: https://discord.gg/osp
MERCH LINKS: http://rdbl.co/ospOUR WEBSITE: https://www.OverlySarcasticProductions.com
Find us on Twitter https://www.Twitter.com/OSPYouTube
Find us on Reddit https://www.Reddit.com/r/OSP/
As I said, “secularism” isn’t a real thing. I am an optimist when it comes to French Catholicism. There is a rising generation of young Catholics, and they are excellent, and numerous. More and more people are understanding that the only thing modernity offers is consumer crap from China, divorce, and joyless sex at best. The churches on Sunday are full in the big cities. Houellebecq is right; for us, the future is either the foot of the Cross, or submission to Islam. And I think we’re showing we don’t want to submit to Islam …
What people don’t understand about French Catholicism is that while 1905 was certainly a defeat, French Catholics did not simply disappear. They abandoned politics, but they did continue to have children, to bring them up into Catholic schools, etc. so there has always been an important Catholic subculture, including at the elite levels. I am optimistic about the future of Catholicism in France.
Niccolo Soldo, “The Zürich Interviews – Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Unrepentant Baguette Merchant”, Fisted by Foucault, 2020-12-02.
Scott Alexander reviews Soner Cagaptay’s recent book The New Sultan: Erdogan And The Crisis Of Modern Turkey:
If you only learn one thing from this post: it’s pronounced “air-do-wan”.
If you learn two things from this post, learn that, plus how a country which starts out as a flawed but somewhat-liberal democracy can lapse into near-dictatorship over the course of a few years.
I got The New Sultan: Erdogan And The Crisis Of Modern Turkey because, as a libertarian, I spend a lot of time worrying about the risk that my country might backslide into illiberal repression. To develop a better threat model, I wanted to see how this process has gone in other countries, what the key mistakes were, and whether their stories give any hints about how to prevent it from happening here. Recep Tayyip Erdogan transformed Turkey from a flawed democracy to a partial dictatorship over the past few decades, and I wanted to know more about how.
As an analysis of the rise of a dictator, this book fails a pretty basic desideratum: it seems less than fully convinced the dictator’s rise was bad. Again and again I found myself checking to make sure I hadn’t accidentally picked up a pro-Erdogan book. I didn’t; author Soner Cagaptay is a well-respected Turkey scholar in a US think tank who’s written other much more critical things. The fact is, Erdogan’s rise is inherently a pretty sympathetic story. If he’d died of a heart attack in 2008, we might remember him as a successful crusader against injustice, a scrappy kid who overcame poverty and discrimination to become a great and unifying leader.
I want to go into some of this in more depth, because I think this is the main reason why Erdogan’s example doesn’t generalize to other countries. What went wrong in Turkey was mostly Turkey-specific, a reckoning for Turkey’s unique flaws. Erdogan rose to power on credible promises to help people disenfranchised by the old system; by the time he turned the tables and started disenfranchising others in turn, it was too late to root him out. If there’s a general moral here, it’s that having the “good guys” oppress and censor the “bad guys” is fun while it lasts, but it’s hard to know whether you’re building up a karmic debt, or when you’re going to have to pay the piper.
Given how hard it is to convince people of that moral, let’s go through the full story in more detail.
And given that it’s impossible to discuss modern Turkey without at least briefly touching on the founder of the country, here’s an amusing apocryphal story about “The Father of the Turks”:
Medieval Turkey was dominated by the Ottoman Empire, officially an Islamic caliphate though in practice only inconsistently religious, ruled by autocratic sultans and a dizzying series of provincial governors. As time passed, they fell further and further behind Western Europe; by World War I, they were a mess. As the stress of the war caused the empire to fracture, General Mustafa Kemal seized power, reorganized the scraps of Ottoman Anatolia into modern Turkey, and was renamed ATATURK, meaning “Father of Turks”.
Ataturk was born in Ottoman-controlled Greece, and was typical of a class of military officers at the time who were well-educated and “Europeanized”. He wanted to turn backwards Turkey into an advanced Western country — and Western countries were mostly secular. He saw Islam — the religion of the old Ottoman Empire — as a roadblock, and passed various laws meant to relegate it to the margins of public life.
(my favorite Ataturk story, probably apocryphal, was that he passed a law banning women from wearing hijabs. Nobody followed it and the police wouldn’t enforce it, so he passed a second law requiring prostitutes to wear hijabs, after which other women abandoned them. As far as I can tell this is an urban legend, but it captures the spirit of the sort of measures he took to drag Turkey, kicking and screaming, into secular modernity.)
Of course it’s possible Lamb was simply replaying anti-Semitic attitudes he had absorbed somewhere. But in reading these stories I had another moment like the one in which I understood that [Edgar Rice] Burroughs [Wikipedia] was using “white” as culturist code for “civilized”. It was this: the behavior of Lamb’s Jewish merchants made adaptive sense. Maybe they were really like that!
Consider: The Jews of Lamb’s milieu lived under Christian and Islamic rulers who forbade them from carrying weapons, who despised them, who taxed and persecuted them with a heavy hand. If you were a Jew in that time and place, exhibiting courage and the warrior virtues that Lamb was so ready to recognize in a Mongol or an Afghani was likely to earn you a swift and ugly death.
Under those conditions, I’m thinking that being cowardly and avaricious and toadying would have been completely sensible; after all, what other options than flattering the authorities and getting rich enough to buy themselves out of trouble did Jews actually have?
Lamb seems to have have mined the historical sources pretty assiduously in his portrayals of other cultures and races. Rather than dismissing Lamb’s Jews as creatures of his prejudices, I think we need to at least consider the possibility that he was mostly replaying period beliefs about Jewish merchants, and that those beliefs were in fact fairly accurate. He certainly seems to have tried to do something similar with the other flavors of human being in his books.
Nowadays we tend to interpret Lamb’s Jewish merchants through assumptions that read something like this: (1) All racial labels are indications of racist thinking, and (2) all race-associated stereotypes are necessarily false, and (3) all racial labels and race-related stereotypes are malicious. But it seems to me that, at least as I read Burroughs and Lamb, all these assumptions are highly questionable. As long as you hold them, you can’t notice what “whiteness” in Burroughs really means, or account for the genuine multiculturalism of Lamb’s books.
Eric S. Raymond, “Reading racism into pulp fiction”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-01-18.
The blaze of the Enlightenment, although it might seem to have been lit in Europe, was not just for Europeans. All the world had the potential to share in its radiance. Illumination was the same wherever it manifested itself, and this meant that in Peking as in Paris, in Baghdad as in Bordeaux, there were sages more than qualified to rank alongside Voltaire and Diderot.
The Enlightenment, far from ranking as something parochial and culturally contingent, was properly a global phenomenon. These various dogmas, which the philosophes had tended to take for granted, had then been given a new and militant edge by the French Revolution. That religion was superstition; that rights were universal; that equality, individual liberty and freedom of expression were simultaneously natural and sacred: these were the convictions that had inspired in the citizens of revolutionary France their continent-shaking sense of certitude. Thrones had been toppled; abbeys demolished; the detritus of a benighted past erased. And if in Europe, then why not further afield? The Rights of Man were for everyone, after all, or they were nothing. “Any law that violates them,” as Robespierre had put it, “is fundamentally unjust and tyrannical. Indeed, it is not law at all.”
This sense of missionary purpose, which inspired in those who felt it an ambition to bring the entire world from darkness into light, outlasted the execution of Robespierre, the defeat of Napoleon, the seeming triumph of reaction across post-revolutionary Europe. In 1854, when the Ottoman Empire was facing a critical threat from Russia, France joined Britain in insisting as a condition of its entry into the Crimean War that the slave trade across the Black Sea be abolished.
Also abolished was the jizya, a tax on Jews and Christians that reached back to the very beginnings of Islam, and was directly mandated by the Qur’an. Such measures, to the Ottomans, risked immense embarrassment. The effect, after all, was to reform Islamic jurisprudence according to the standards of non-believers. It was, for Muslim traditionalists, an ominous straw in the wind. Over the course of the century and more that followed, the weathering effects of Western hegemony on the practices that Muslims believed they had inherited from Muhammad — the Sunnah — became more and more pronounced.
Tom Holland, “The age-old tension between Islam and France”, UnHerd, 2020-11-02.
Jen Gerson considers the moral smallness of Canadian government wiggling out of labelling China’s treatment of their Uyghur minority as the genocide it certainly is:
This week, the Prime Minister of an admittedly genocidal G7 state refused to condemn China for its treatment of its minority Uyghur population. A treatment that has included family separation, forced sterilization, and warehousing thousands of people in what can only be described as modern concentration camps.
Justin Trudeau failed to condemn China, noting, quite rightly, that genocide is an “extremely loaded” term. One not to be bandied about lightly. It demonstrates some moral cowardice on his part, certainly, but also a degree of pragmatism. Canada’s squeaky and lonely objection would do little good. We’re already in a vulnerable position, what with the ongoing captivity of two Canadians who remain in Chinese detention as an act of retaliation for our arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. A declaration of genocide in this case is probably better handled by a collection of nations. As long as we can live with the shame of the smallness that such an argument implies.
(Although perhaps it was unwise to pin so many of our early hopes of an early vaccine rollout on a doomed collaboration with a Chinese manufacturer with a vaccine backed by China’s Institute of Biotechnology and its Academy of Military Medical Sciences. Who could have predicted we would run into problems with such a notoriously reliable and honourable global partner that occasionally engages in hostage diplomacy? But I digress.)
The real issue with Trudeau’s grovelling little deflection on the question of Chinese genocide is that it made his own position on the subject not two years ago impossible to ignore in comparison. The final report of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls inquiry stated that the truths it uncovered in the process of its years-long investigations:
… tell the story — or, more accurately, thousands of stories — of acts of genocide against First Nations, Inuit and Métis women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people. This violence amounts to a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples … This genocide has been empowered by colonial structures, evidenced notably by the Indian Act, the Sixties Scoop, residential schools, and breaches of human and Inuit, Métis and First Nations rights, leading directly to the current increased rates of violence, death, and suicide in Indigenous populations.
Several pundits at the time noted at the time that this stretched the definition of “genocide” beyond ordinary recognition. “Genocide” is not the result of a set of compounding government failures over time: it’s a word that we reserve to describe a discreet set of acts motivated by the deliberate intent to decimate or totally exterminate an ethnic population. But after a day or so of hemming and hawing on the issue after the report was released, our prime minister noted: “The issue that we have is that people are getting wrapped up in debates over a very important and powerful term … We accept the finding that this was genocide, and we will move forward to end this ongoing national tragedy.”
There was some careful phrasing in this response. Note, Trudeau agreed that this was genocide, not that it is genocide. The prime minister dodged the implication that Canada is engaged in deliberate ethnic cleansing. But it’s worth peeling back the skin of the onion, past the obvious and easy allegation of hypocrisy, and instead ask ourselves why?
Why can we get away with calling ourselves a genocidal state, but not China?
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 22 Jan 2021So you just conquered Iberia, and you’re wondering where to go from here? It’s a more common conundrum than you might think. Consider: a big wooden floaty house that goes splish-splash in the Atlantic Ocean. Anyway, this is a video about Portuguese and Spanish (erm, Castilian) exploration in the Atlantic during the 1400s. Please note my deliberate decision to Nope on out at the turn of the 1500s.
This topic was requested by our longtime patron Antonio Juarez! Thank you Antonio for supporting our work and helping to provide entertaining educational content.
SOURCES & Further Reading: Ornament of the World by Maria Rosa Menocal; lectures from Great Courses Plus “1571: Spain, Portugal Encircle the Globe” by Donald J. Harreld, “Renaissance and Exploration: New Horizons” by Jennifer McNabb, “Portugal’s Great Leap Forward” by “Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius”
TRACKLIST: “Scheming Weasel (faster version),” “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys”, “Local Forecast – Elevator” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b…Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP
PODCAST: https://overlysarcasticpodcast.transi…
DISCORD: https://discord.gg/osp
MERCH LINKS: http://rdbl.co/osp
OUR WEBSITE: https://www.OverlySarcasticProductions.com
Find us on Twitter https://www.Twitter.com/OSPYouTube
Find us on Reddit https://www.Reddit.com/r/OSP/
The shortest summary is “No!” The less short answer is: “No, because religious moral codes are epiphenomenal.” And it is on point to add that the question reveals serious ignorance of the actual traits of most religions over most of history.
I’ll address the historical point first. The commenter’s question was framed from within the assumptions of one particular family of religions: the Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition, which are more succinctly describable as the bastard offspring of Zoroastrian dualism. In this family, “religion” bundles cosmology, theology, and morality into a single total system designed primarily to enforce norms by programming the believer with an internalized guilt machine.
Because the dominant religions of the modern West are all derived from this group, it is difficult for Westerners to understand how bizarre and exceptional these religions are in a broader context. Most religions are not total systems. Most religions do not tie morality to cosmology. In fact, most religions have very little to say about morality at all!
Consider, for example, an Altaic shaman. It’s not his job to pronounce on who should sleep with who, or to tell people that theft is wrong. It’s not even his job to tell people that they must worship Tengri or Kara-han; dealing with the gods is his specialty, thank you. His job combines aspects of psychologist and medic with a bit of divination. The closest analog of “morality”, in his culture, is a set of inherited customs and taboos which is reinforced by explanatory myths but not generated by them and not really dependent on them. The closest equivalent of religious structures about right and wrong is an elaborate set of rules about ritual purity and impurity. In the jargon of the field, his religion is an orthopraxy rather than an orthodoxy.
Over most human cultures in most human history, “religion” has been much more like Altaic shamanism than like Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Er, so why didn’t these cultures “collapse in a heap of nihilism”? The same question actually applies to modern religions outside the post-Zoroastrian family. Buddhism and Hinduism, for example, are almost completely unconcerned with “morality”. Hinduism is organized around ritual purity and impurity; Buddhism’s quest for merit is about liberation of the self from attachments, not about duties one owes to God or others.
Eric S. Raymond, “If God is dead, is anything permissible?”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-02-10.
Powered by WordPress
