Although I thought Dorky did a great job, his efforts fell short in comparison to Xunzian’s utter thoroughness. and even though I thought Xunzian stretched some of his arguments rather thin, I must admit that he made a much more solid case for his views at the end of the day.
I thought it was a very interresting topic and a joy to read this debate thanks to the thoughtfulness of the debaters… and by no means easy to judge… however I must declare Xunzian the winner with my vote.
Again… I would like to thank Xun and Dorky for their efforts.
Wrong. I don’t have to prove it has a causative role. The causative role could be economic or social circumstance. What’s more dangerous, a spark, or the resulting explosion once the gasoline has been ignited? I don’t care what the initial catalyst is. Maybe being poor pushes one towards fundamentalist beliefs, but it’s what those beliefs cause people to do that I’m concerned with, and I still haven’t seen an argument that links anything but belief to such specific actions.
What a dumb fucking thing to say. This might shock you, but some people have never had a religion, and still agree it’s the problem. Some peoples’ paradigm is moderate Christianity, and still agree it’s the problem. I don’t have a vendetta against religion because of my upbringing. I’m not trying to convert moderate Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, or even Muslims to atheism. Believe what you want, as long as you don’t shove it down my, or anybody else’s, throat.
Profound…thank you for a short and vague summation of my argument. That’s exactly the problem. If the Koran and Hadith were filled with nothing but peace and loving versus, and yet followers of Islam still committed atrocities, I would have no problem attributing it to social or economic factors, and absolutely nothing to do with religious belief. The fact that it has verses open to be interpreted in violent, sick, and twisted ways, IS the problem. And it’s not people misinterpreting them, they are clearly and explicitly violent.
First of all, I’m not trying to prove that religion is ultimately evil. Secondly, I’m not proving that religion is the root cause of terrorism. Stop the linear thinking and straw men. There are many possible causes of terrorism.
It is possible for morality to progress despite religious belief, which has clearly been demonstrated even with Christianity in the United States. People realized equal treatment of women was right, even if that’s not what it says in the Bible. People realized slavery is wrong, despite what it says in the Bible. But unfortunately, morality’s progress is STILL hindered by religious belief, i.e. discrimination against homosexuals. I do have faith, however, that mankind’s morality will once again overcome the “morality” religion provides.
Fundamentalist Christians would claim moderate Christians aren’t true Christians, and in some ways, they’re right. People can feel free to distort the message of the Koran to fit into a modern society. I think more distortion has to happen in Islam than in Christianity.
Easily winnable? Excuse me? Not according to the impossible standards you set. You’re basically saying that I lost the argument because you have a fundamental disagreement with my opening premise, which obviously means no argument I laid out had any relevance to your decision. It was decided before it started. Unless you’d like to clarify or change your statement.
I must have missed that argument. Maybe it’s because you never made one. I’m disappointed in you Felix. You started by putting on a cheerleading outfit with Xunzian’s name plastered across the back. You followed up by blaming my religious past for my beliefs, as well as pigeon-holing me as a clone of Sam Harris because I agree with some of his arguments. You make the asinine assumption that all of my arguments were cut and pasted from a Sam Harris book, which you either haven’t read, or didn’t understand. You haven’t laid out one counter-argument. Not one. I’ve combed over your posts in the vain hope that I was wrong, and that you might’ve exerted the slightest effort to lay out a counter-argument to anything I’d said, but alas I came up short.
Let me get this straight: You’re saying we need to isolate religion and land issues into two separate categories, without any justification for doing so, after I clearly stated they are so inextricably linked, it’s impossible. What justification do I have to say they are inextricably linked, you may ask? Oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s the hundreds of verses in the Islamic religion’s holy texts that explicitly talk about and couple land issues and religious belief. Pray, do tell how YOU would isolate religious belief from land issues, and why. As an afterthought, this isn’t a science experiment where you can isolate variables. Maybe that’s why we’ve made more progress in science than in society and politics IMO.
And for the record, this has absolutely nothing to do with which side you’re taking or your decision about who won the argument. I personally agree that Xunzian won the debate (although that has nothing to do with the truth value of his position). What I don’t appreciate is that you didn’t bother to put up any counter-argument, and you didn’t address any of my points. Instead, you decided to restate bits and pieces of my argument, mixed in with backhanded comments about Sam Harris and my religious upbringing, and said I was wrong without even an inkling as to reasons why.
Suffice it to say I’m extremely disappointed.
Now, on to Xunzian. Look for a thread coming soon in the religion forums.
I look forward to the thread This has been fun, no hard feelings I hope. I had to twist some pretty hard sophistry to keep my position afloat by the end. Speaking of which, I wouldn’t be so hard on Felix. I was actually afraid that my position was going to alienate him. He is religious, after all, so presumably he thinks that religion plays a role in history. Me saying it doesn’t was bound to go up against that grain.
My remarks have obviously become the object of your ire. I aplogize for the casual off-the-cuff character of my comments.
The contest was to decide the issue “Religion plays a causative role in the current troubles in the Middle East” My understanding of the dynamics of religion today is that persons and group take a variety of positions on a spectrum with in the major religions today. So for example within Christianity the spectrum runs from the radically fundamentalist right to the radically liberal left. On the right there have been persons who believe that murder of abortion performing physicians is justified. When they believed that some actually carried out such murders. In those cases, religion played a causative role.
The same could be said for those individuals and groups who interpret the Koran as justifying murder suicde and carry out such acts or incite others to do so. But to indict Chrisitanity or Islam because some interpret it that way and act on their interpretation is a mistake, and that is what I perceived you were attempting to do. I see the role of religion as secondary to other factors not primary. You seemed to me to be trying to make the case that it was the primary cause.
Sorry for the extreme delay in posting this judgment. I was a little confused by the way the two debaters decided to argue things.
Xunzian argued expertly that for all pragmatic purposes religion is not a cause of trouble in the middle east, because believing that it is doesn’t suggest any feasible solutions to those who would like to fix that trouble. The truth is what works, said Xunzian, and blaming foreign wars on religion isn’t working. Other paradigms, such as the financial interpretation of Petraeus, have been much more successful. However, the problem is that this point only addresses the topic using a pragmatic definition of truth, which is definitely not the only possible definition nor the most common. This approach doesn’t rule out religion as a cause, it just points out that religion is probably the least important one. Xunzian failed to disprove the topic, and in fact I think at one point he acknowledged that it was possible.
Dorkyd00d did a good job supporting his view that religion caused the middle eastern strife, but overextended. Like Xunzian, he also didn’t seem interested in the given topic, and decided to prove not only that religion is a cause of problems in the middle east, but that it is the one and only most important overarching cause. In this realm, he did poorly, as weighing importance to humans is an area much more open to Xunzian’s pragmatism than the safe realm of truth and falsehood in which Dorky should have stayed. Dorky proved his topic, but most folks would hardly notice, so much was he being pummeled on the issue of importance that he strayed into.
As far as arguing his position on the given topic, I’d give Dorkyd00d the victory. On the higher level of convincing me that he holds the correct position, topic be damned, Xunzian wins.
What this is about, as far as i can understand it, is as Carleas correctly points out, a debate over what role religion plays in the events taking place in the Middle east today.
The problem concerns with identifying aspects of groups, and how they think of other groups in that region. Are groups identified on basis of religion? Or are they, on other basis, such as where do they belong/versus where they think they belong; are other groups impeding a rightful occupation of lands, which belong to them?
Is the anger and aggression developed there a product of these disputations , the origin of which could be traced to confusion surrounding how to point to an actual cause of the troubles?
In addition, this blog has almost a seven year history, and much has changed since then. Identifying causes, referring to movements, individual outlooks on these topics may have changed, at the very least by what some wit has called the desert politics of the Middle East . There, affiliations, regional interpenetrations, make things a lot more ambiguous and difficult to pin point.
Here politics changes viewpoints of what really goes on, more profoundly, than the actual movements taking shape., at the very least, and politics will ultimately change the very movements themselves , at the most.
I hope i gave You at least a bird eyed look at what this debate is all about.
This has been fun, no hard feelings I hope. I had to twist some pretty hard sophistry to keep my position afloat by the end. Speaking of which, I wouldn’t be so hard on Felix. I was actually afraid that my position was going to alienate him. He is religious, after all, so presumably he thinks that religion plays a role in history. Me saying it doesn’t was bound to go up against that grain.