(May 4, 2015 at 4:30 am)dahrling Wrote:(May 4, 2015 at 4:10 am)AdamLOV Wrote: The list of issues with the above would be too long to highlight here. The W.H.O.'s definition of violence is far too anthropocentric, and seems to exclude the near-genocidal violence homo sapiens has committed and is continuing to commit against other life forms (otherwise known as "defaunation"). Religious societies do not make claims that lack evidence. Rather, their criteria for what constitutes valid evidence are different from that of a laboratory. Very well, but who decides which evidence is valid? In the case of a religion, it is religious specialists. In the case of science, scientific specialists. In the case of politics, the politicians, etc, etc. If someone close to me professes their love for me, it is I who has the right to decide. It would seem there is no final arbiter of truth. That is, everything depends on which kind of evidence one accepts, i.e. which group and subgroup of specialists we revere. In itself, the fact that wealthy countries tend to be the most secular on average will not make me any wealthier automatically. The same applies to violence: the fact that, along with everything else, wealthy secular countries outsource violence to Third World regions of the globe that, incidentally, happen to be religious, says more about global injustice than the merits (or demerits) of religion in relatiob to violence, although your inclusion of secular political religion in the category of religiously-motivated violence is welcome.
So if someone professes their love for you, but hurt you, e.g parents who correct their children by using some type of violence, whose is the right to judge whether or not this is love? Can a parent hurt their child on the basis that child may not see them as being abusive? Every person who has been physiologically abused believes that their abuser holds their best interest at heart at the time. Otherwise they could simply walk away. But they can't.
It isn't a question of making you or I wealthier, it isn't about wealth. India is wealthier than most countries in the world. But Denmark, a much smaller country, has a better quality of living. Why? Their secular set of beliefs allow them to. The Indians still believe in things like castes. The Danish don't. They are mostly secular. You can say that wealthy countries wage war on poorer regions of the world, but that isn't exclusive to them in anyway. Look at ISIS. They're waging war against those same wealthy countries, but not for their wealth, but for their power and their world view.
Your line of thought, which would suggest that the well being of countries is dependent on their belief systems, is a rather Weberian one. There is nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but the role of belief systems in well being is debatable. Buddhism is an atheistic belief system, yet the economically most advanced areas of the globe are not the Buddhist ones. The United States is, for the most part, still a religious nation, yet it is one of the centers of the capitalist world system. At best, the notion of secularism=better quality of life/higher wealth is debatable.
On a side-note, ISIS, according to some media reports, is run by former officers of Saddam Hussein. This presens us with an interesting "chicken-or-egg" conundrum, because the Hussein regime was a purportedly secular one. Yet some have claimed that it was a Sunni sectarian government disguised as a secular socialist system. My question would be, via this example, how can one decide which society and/or political system is truly "secular"? It would seem that there are many purportedly secular societies that are not secular at all. And even the reverse may be true: Islamic State might be a front operation of Iraqi ex-intelligence officers/smugglers whose outlook is decidedly secular, even atheist. The reason I went into such great detail (I am not a specialist in Middle East affairs, I just happened to come across an interesting article) is to highlight the difficulties of categorization. What is secular? What is religious? That question is hard to answer.
