X-Message-Number: 17735
From: "Michael LaTorra" <>
Subject: Re: CryoNet #17723 - #17731
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2001 19:36:55 -0600

War and violence are human failings. Some religious and non-religious and
anti-religious people have each engaged in these activities. That being so,
I am in agreement with both Dani and Charles. But I must take particular
exception to some of what Charles wrote:

From: Charles Platt <>
. . .
Second, I think you will find, if you add up the body count, that the
total from wars in which the aggressor invoked "God's blessing" is higher
than from other conflicts; and religious conflicts are notoriously vicious
(e.g. Spanish Inquisition) since any behavior is supposedly excused by the
Creator, and the participants are encouraged to take extreme measures
because they probably believe in an afterlife.

Mike: The claim that religious wars, or religiously motivated conflicts,
have piled up a higher body count than other types of violence is a popular
misconception. For example, the Spanish Inquisition mentioned by Charles,
although cruel and ethically wrong, did not result in very many deaths. The
best historical evidence indicates that the total number of people killed
amounted to 10,000 or so over the course of many decades. That is still a
terrible number. Nevertheless, Lenin ordered the deaths of that many people
in his first few months in power. According to _The Black Book of
Communism_, written by French ex-communists who performed meticulous
research, in the 20th century as many as 100,000,000 civilians
(non-combatants) were killed by communist governments or revolutionaries.
(The biggest killers were Stalin and Mao, since they held the fates of over
one billions people between them.)

Charles: One could argue reasonably that people doing these things were
misinterpreting their holy guide books. However, if a guide book is so
easily misinterpreted, I regard it as badly written and dangerous. The US
Constitution is a model of clarity by comparison.

Mike: I agree. My hope is that what was true or useful (I draw a distinction
here) in religion can be clarified and made more useful and effective by the
efforts of scientists, philosophers and religious practitioners now and in
coming generations. This is one project for the ages that cryonicists should
benefit from, too!

Charles: The only religious group I trust (again, apart from Buddhists) is
the
Quakers. Their record is pretty much unimpeachable, because of their
refusal to interfere in other people's business. This almost puts them on
a par with the libertarians. However, the relative unpopularity of
Quakerism suggests to me that religions are more successful when they do
in fact have a record of gross interference with competing faiths.

Mike: Thanks for making two favorable mentions of Buddhism. I practice Zen
(Soto school) but am open to insights from all religions and from atheists
as well. I read skeptical literature as eagerly as I read religious texts.
Your insight about the popularity of meddlesome religions is, I think, quite
accurate. We all want to be right. Religions that promise in-group people
(members, "the saved") a glorious afterlife, have the capacity to motivate
people to perform atrocities in the course of which they lose their own
lives, while at the same time believing that they are moral heroes. (This
seems to be what's happening, although I sometimes wonder if even the most
intense zealot does not "suffer" moments of moral clarity during which he
intuits the evil nature of his own actions.) At any rate, we have all seen
what suicide bombers are capable of. People like that must be awakened from
the thrall of their bad religious ideas before it is too late. What this
means is that project for the ages I mentioned. And it will take ages to
uproot the most seductively pernicious religious-type ideas (among which I
would include violent secular faiths such as Marxism) and replace them with
benign ideas and practices that are at least as attractive as the pernicious
ones they must replace.

Regards,

Michael LaTorra


Member:
Extropy Institute: www.extropy.org
Alcor Life Extension Foundation: www.alcor.org
Society for Technical Communication: www.stc.org

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