Felix,
I will wait until the debate has concluded before I toss your salad.
Hey man, lemme fall on my sword before we post judgment 
Should be out soon, sorry, life getting in the way. You all know how it is.
<img src="/uploads/default/original/2X/8/89d727cf0228785190106846052e47066fca0824.gif" width="32" height="32" alt=":character-kermit:" title="Kermit the Frog"/>
I just hope there is a judge in my corner that is as blatantly and disturbingly biased toward my argument as felix is towards Xunzian’s.
Dorky
Hey I was drafted after all. I give you points for sincerity. You could have won me over with an argument like I presented above. Instead, you stuck to your true beliefs even though it meant losing my vote. I applaud you sir. =D>
Felix,
Don’t be nice and make me regret my fiestiness. 
NO EXCUSES.
OK. Here ya go: 
My conclusion is up. Good job, Dorky. It was a fun debate.
I hope we can continue the discussion after the debate is over and the judging is finished. I am wondering if I should start a new thread in the religion forums for it, though, because I’d prefer the opportunity for higher traffic and more input.
Yeah, I’d love to continue the discussion. I know Cyrene would like that too. He’s already told me I’m wrong 
I imagine most people are on his (your) side too.
I think Xunzian is the clear winner of the debate, though he overextends himself the same way Dorky did, just in the opposite direction by removing religion entirely from the list of causal factors, attempting to argue that it’s entirely immaterial . . . Even as Xun portrays it, there’s still plenty of room for religion to serve a causal role - but on a point-by point basis, he takes the trophy.
i must say, i really prefer formal debates like this one where both sides are arguing what they actually believe as opposed to the ILO-ILP style debates with arbitrary topics.
I agree the materialist stance is not without difficulties and inconsistencies. But that is generally how models operate – they work for a while but upon close enough scrutiny, they break down. However, I do think the materialist model is substantially better than the model proposed by the religion hypothesis. I think that the graph shown on page 13 of this powerpoint presentation offers a good model for the situation. Religious extremism is a factor, but you’ll note it is a derived factor as opposed to a causative agent. An indicator, if you will. Naturally, I wasn’t going to even cede that within the debate (though I came close in the closing argument) but I wanted to argue an extreme interpretation to show that religion doesn’t need to even be factored in to have a coherent model of the situation in the ME.
Dorky–
Conflating religion and nationalism and religion and land issues didn’t help your case as far as I am concerned. Once these elements are merged how can we evaluate the relative contribution of religion to the problem? The purpose of analysis is to isolate factors not mix them. How do we know that Islam is no more than a big loud toothless handless passenger on a Middle Eastern Bus driven by someone else?
Xunxian – You almost had me believing that religion is neutral in the whole middle eastern deal. The powerpoint presentation is the coup de grace in your case against the role of religion in the Middle Eastern conflict.
All–As far as continuing the discussion, I could get on board if we focus on trying to define what religion is. Unless we can do that we will never agree about religion’s part to the human condition.
Well, don’t let the ppt or the quip I made above influence your voting. That was outside of the debate.
As for defining what religion is . . . ask twelve anthropologists, get twelve answers. Ask twelve theologians, get twelve different answers. Ask twelve philosophers, get twelve answer. That leaves us with just 36 different, oftentimes mutually exclusive, definitions
Personally, I think that the ‘duck-test’ is the best method for determining what is-and-is-not a religion. It is crude, and there is bound to be some quibbling, but most people would group things like Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity, Judaism, Wicca/New-Age, Scientology, and classical paganisms of various stripes as “religions” whereas things like capitalism, communism, republicanism, nihilism, existentialism, pauperism, heroism, botulism, epicureanism, nazism, conspiracy-theory-ism, mohism, legalism, aristoteleanism, and so on as “not religion” despite the fact that elements are shared between the groups and in some cases, it seems like one group might be a better fit but for a variety of classical reasons we put it in the other area. There are some grey areas, like Voodoo, but those are the exception and not the rule.
In terms of how religion relates to other concepts, it is a pre-modern concept and is heavily rooted in all sorts of cultural narratives in a manner that can’t be extracted very easily. I think Dorky was entirely correct to point that out. I still don’t think it is causative in those cases, but it does play a role.
Take land, the tribal gods are always closely interconnected with the land. It gets a little more complicated in monotheism, since there is only one god and it occupies the position of both supreme god as well as tribal god, but that doesn’t mean that the land doesn’t get imbued with sacred relevance in some way or another. This Church, that place where so-and-so-spoke, that mountain where the truth was revealed, that rock where a new, pure civilization was founded, that hill where a moral city was built, that castle where a book was translated, and so on. And that is without going into things like saints and wise-men who occupy roles similar to local gods (indeed, a lot of saints seem to be Christianized local gods).
Likewise with politics. The concept of having the political will embodied in the people has had relatively few expressions in history. And many of those have had other religious justifications as well. Things like “God bless the USA” have many parallels in many, many countries – even supposedly secular ones. So rulers do tend to rely on religious principles to justify their actions.
In terms of defining religion’s role, the best I can do is one by way of metaphor: it is the meter of a culture. The rhyming scheme varies and the words that are spoken . . . those are completely unique. But the meter provides an enduring similarity as well as a ritual space to operate in.
I’m having serious truble judging this one…
Xun was a pro… and if I were to judge on form rather than content I would peg Xun as the winner… but I won’t judge on form… I’ll be judgeing on content. And from what I can tell the debaters were putting down their beliefs and not just fancy rhetoric, so i don’t believe i was expected to judge on form, in the first place, but rather the strength of the arguments, the reasons for why these beliefs are held (or ought to be held).
I think Dorky had good insight into the religion of islam, which I am personally very familar with, and that he would have done well to go into more detail about what a belief in islam entails. Many of the arguments he puts forward i found that I could easily have put forward myself… yet at the same time I found myself agreeing with nearly everything Xunzian was saying as well… How can this be?
I actually find myself capable of being in nearly perfect agreement with both debaters… so how to judge? it seems either I utterly missed the point, or that something was overlooked in this debate.
I think i would have liked to have the term “religion” defined more clearly… it seems to me that the “religion” that xunzian was claiming has no role, was not the “religion” that Dorky was blaming. Dorky is absolutely right when he says that islam is “more than a religion. It is a geopolitical project, a system of government, and a political ideology.”
Islam differs from nearly all other religions in that it contains not only lessons in morality, insight into the spiritual and perspective on the passing world we live in… it offers a lifestyle and a system of government through which we will obtain peace and well being… in detail. and because of this, what you will find, in most muslims, is that their religion merges with their culture, national, as well as personal indentity to such a degree that they themselves cannot distinguish them from eachother… So how could we hope to? Do we even need to?
For me this is an especially difficult debate to judge if I am to judge it on content… I would have liked to see it go on a bit longer and a tad less formal, so as to flush out more. But alas this is what I have… and I’ve got some thinking to do… I’ll re-read the arguments a few more times… and try to make a call…
but let me tell ya… there were times were I wanted to pitch in so bad… I would love to have a thread where this debate was continued and where I were allowed to contribute my own thoughts.
Hi Mad Man,
I agree completely with your analysis. I feel there were a lot of points I forgot to make (of course after the fact), and so the discussion will continue in a thread when the judging is done in the religion forums.
I’ll make it with an opening post as my fourth argument in the series.
I agree completely, and have already said as much above. What I think would be helpful is if we could lay bare out definitions of religion and the assumptions those defintions are based on. That we will agree is probably not a realistic goal as Xunxian pointed out. But if we each were to clearly define what we mean by religion I think it would be clear how our conlcusions about issues like religions role in the Middle East flow from our assumptions.
Personally I think religion is based on something like an instinct that is manifest in consciousness as an intuition of unity in diversity that evokes a sense of basic trust. So according to my view, the social manifestations of religion are based on shared intuition. Once you get to the group level you have all the ordinary dynamics of group behavior in play including need for approval, hierarchy, socal exchange, reciprocal altruism, conflict etc. So at the social level it may be impossible to conclusively sort out the relative contribution of the original “spiritual” impulse from the rest of the mix.
You want me to post a judgment now?
Sure. The formal part of the debate is over. Though I don’t think the actually topic will ever fully exhaust itself