This already makes the comparison unfair… But issue #02 why Indonesia? Like, why that country? Is it because I talked about Islam and Indonesia is a Muslim country so it qualifies for the comparison somehow… like if that’s the criteria I would say that Saudi Arabia is more worthy to choose for that comparison, especially since Saudis are fluent in Arabic, while Indonesians have their own language…

The region of the world does not change the text of the religion, which in turn should mean that the type of terrorist attacks committed by specific religions should be similar. This is the case when we look at the links between Indonesian Islamic terror orgs and other Islamic terror orgs. The reason I chose Indonesia was a population based comparison to show off an outlier in the United states. The united states despite being significantly less religious than Indonesia, a nation of comparable population has a comparable amount of terrorist attacks. In addition, why does the language of a religious text matter in the modern era? The Bible wasn't written in English, but it certainly manages to be a part of lives of English speaking peoples.

#03 issue; the US is a Christian majority country, and if your intention was to prove that Islam doesn’t have that much influence over these attacks by picking an arbitrary Muslim country, which makes the number arbitrary… well if we’re comparing religion VS religion and not a Country VS Country, you should compare every Christian country to every Muslim country ( combined ) and even then the results wouldn’t mean anything… Christian fundamentalists commit more crimes than Muslim fundamentalists, how would that help solve religious extremism again? ... Stats you’re asking for wouldn’t address the problems (wars, violence, hate speech… etc.) that are associated with religion… Because you’re looking in the wrong place, you want to understand a religion, look no further than it’s official books, look into the history of its founders, you’ll find your answers and more.

The claim to compare terrorist acts by religion does make sense, so I looked up some data - https://www.visionofhumanity.org/maps/global-terrorism-index/ which does seem to indicate the majority of violence in terms of number of people harmed does seem to stem from Islamist terror organizations. However, these actions seem to be heavily concentrated in specific regions with specific terror groups. For instance, half of all terrorist deaths happened in one region of sub Saharan Africa - Sahel. Additionally, in the West, politically motivated attacks overtook religious attacks, which declined by 82%. There were five times more political attacks than religious attacks. This is my point fundamentally - We cannot draw a direct line between terrorist attacks and religious people, leave alone between terrorist attacks and the text of specific religions.

However, as I mentioned earlier, I will contend that groupthink caused the lack of a functional truth seeking algorithm, and the lack of a robust meta-ethical foundation does play an important factor in religious terrorism specifically. Religion by definition has a requirement of trusting claims without evidence, and is therefore strongly associated with groupthink, which also requires blind trust.

sorry for the wall of text… Happy new year

Beehaw is a leftist space, and leftists are known for their essays lol, as I have just demonstrated myself. Additionally, I think I've spoken my piece here, so I probably will not reply further, as it does take significant time to read and respond with evidence, to claims made without evidence.

I think I made a mistake in my original contention, so apologies for the following Motte and Bailey. Let me rephrase my contention,

"Religious identity is weakly correlated with terrorism."

Now, a very important point of note - If your contention is, "The content of religious texts are strongly correlated with religious terrorism specifically".

That is a separate claim, that I do not have any evidence for or against. Please note by evidence, I do not mean a specific entity doing terrorist activities in the name of religion. I mean that a particular terrorist act must be caused not by generic lines of "violence against outsiders", but rather by very specific passages asking for the specific type of violence committed by the attacker. Additionally, this must come from the attacker themselves, and not people attributing a motivation to the attacker post-hoc. One must then demonstrate that a significant number of attacks are done with such motivation, and an insignificant number of religious attacks were caused due to other reasons.

Moving forward, I will be arguing for the claim "Religious identity is weakly correlated with terrorism."

this actually doesn’t make any sense from a common sense perspective basically, people are not just sitting around and deciding on their own to commit crimes and justify it with their religious scriptures later, even just saying that makes you want to take a look at those scriptures, doesn’t this alone makes you at least suspect that the scripture has to do something with their actions, I mean you just said this ... That’s the contradiction, as a detective/doctor who wants to cure Humanity from evil you have to suspect every element of the equation, not dismiss it… Especially if that element is the core component of the equation, I’ll explain why below

I definitely believe that an epistemological algorithm unrelated to truth, which is necessarily baked into religion plays a factor. However, if your contention is that religious texts are a necessary factor for terrorist acts, you will need to provide evidence for it, not just cite "logic". The scientific literature on this paint a reasonably clear picture. For example, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tim-Krieger-2/publication/258833074_What_causes_terrorism/links/58996d2c4585158bf6f6e6a4/What-causes-terrorism.pdf - Clearly seems to indicate at best, a weak link between religious identity and terrorism. In contrast, from the same study, institutional order and economic deprivation both seem to indicate stronger effects.

For further evidence of this, we see religious crimes committed even when the explicit text of their religion says otherwise, for example, Christians committing crimes against sex workers, for their very existence. How does this makes sense in your hypothesis that the religious text is a fundamental component of religious crime?

To note, even the "stronger" links I mention here are disputed. It could be entirely possible that you are absolutely correct, and that a principal and necessary factor to committing terrorism, is motivation provided by religious texts. But the evidence is unclear as of now, which in turn means you are coming to a conclusion without the necessary evidence.

Also, I agree that it is important to determine how much each causal factor affects the possibility of a terrorist act. However, not all factors are equal. For instance, a factor that causes terrorism may be the average temperature of a region - https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP14300 indicates a statistically significant link between high temperature and crime, but there is no significant link between high temperature and terrorism indicated so far in the evidence, even though terrorism is a form of crime.

Yes… But how do they know… they’re getting it from somewhere, right? An original scripture (Quran/Bible/Torah…etc.)… which bring us to your first argument.

If your contention is that people use religious texts to determine how to act in life, I do not disagree that it is certainly a factor. This still does not indicate that religious texts are fundamental for terrorist attacks internationally.

The issue is not of who’s making the twisting, the issue is that the text as peaceful as it might be, IS STILL Twist-ABLE, which doesn’t indicate that a Divine authority with infinite wisdom wrote it in the first place, does it? God doesn’t make mistakes, right? How could he fuc* it up so bad… Like you could avoid controversial lines, bruh… annnnd avoid genocides that took place over centuries, avoid entire civilizations, minorities, cultures, tribes being wiped out off the face of the earth because they don’t share the same beliefs

Do you think I believe religion exists? Because I certainly don't. My point here is simply that the cause of religious terrorist acts is not necessarily the text as written. Additionally, as much as I wish it wasn't true, a lot of people religious and otherwise believe some crimes against humanity are ethical. Which brings me to,

Here’s the thing, in any religious society there are Categories of people, from the least conservative (progressives) to the most conservatives to the extreme fundamentalists, the great misconception people have about religion, is that people misinterpret the scripture and then become extremists, nope… like I said I used to read (explicit not vague) extreme passages that incite violence and still thought there’s nothing wrong with the text, there’s no hate speech, and that my religion was perfect… so what’s happening here?

I am rephrasing your argument here for my clarity - "Even in cases where extremist lines are explicitly part of the religious text, people will assume the text is fundamentally ethical, even if it causes negative outcomes for them or the people they care about."

This is just groupthink, right? In my case, I believed in religion because my parents, teachers, hell even popular scientists of my country believed in religion. This was the case all the way until I understood the scientific method, then epistemology, then meta-ethics. With my understanding of each of those concepts, I started following less and less of my religion until I gave it up entirely.

Groupthink ethics is fundamentally down to the lack of meta-ethical clarity - That is, if I were to determine if an action is ethical, even if said action has negative outcomes for me and the people I care about and humanity itself, the problem is that my ethics algorithm is broken. Religious twisting of ethics is one possible cause of this, but certainly not a necessary one, as evidenced by the numerous secular and irreligious cults.

The answer is people don’t actually follow the teachings of their religion to the letter, they’re just happy being conservatives, it already gives them all they need, a sense of unity, protection and that they’re part of something bigger… and then there is the serious minorities (AKA the fundamentalists) who take their stuff Seriously, and they’ll follow every single order with “blind faith” (being sarcastic)

This to me sounds like you're saying - "Religious texts and the actions that religious people take have little correlation with each other, excepting specific circumstances" - Which is exactly my point. I'll talk about your specific circumstances in a minute.

a religion can have all the ethics in the world written on its pages, but the mere fact that it has passages that incite violence (even if it was just a single page) shows it’s not worthy of following, because it was enough to make a group of people carry firearms and go on a killing spree, or drive a car through the crowds or bomb themselves, and at many points in history, it moved armies to kill other armies and erase civilizations

If the fact that a text incites violence is enough to disregard it, let us disregard all liberal law, as they incite "violence"(Death penalties). Violence has been a part of humanity's function so far, and I do not necessarily believe we can extricate ourselves from it with any ease. My anarchist heart fundamentally believes in a truly peaceful society, but even in a society based on rehabilitative justice, we need to have systems capable of handling individuals unwilling to go through the process of rehabilitation. In practice, this typically means some form of separation from some aspects of society, which make no mistake is violence, except it is justified in this case.

With this said, I again will contend religious groupthink and religious epistemology are likely causal factors to religious violence. However, as the null hypothesis specifies, until provided evidence of a correlation between statistic A and statistic B, there is no correlation between statistic A and statistic B. Thus, I ask you to provide peer-reviewed paper of a large sample size indicating a causation, or at least, a strong correlation(Which I have not yet been able to find), and I will believe your claim.

if you were planning to convert to the approach of looking of what people say and do is a very flawed approach (I just explained why, it’s the Categories of religious people, fundamentalists, conservatives, progressives… Etc) and you’re setting yourself up for great disappointment, and you’ll feel tricked when you find out the truth.

Are you not stating that religious people will do whatever feels religious, and not necessarily what is exactly written in the texts? If you are stating this, I agree, which is why I believe terrorist crime is not necessarily caused by what is in the religious texts.

It’s just so happens that ALL terrorist groups that I’m aware of, they do things by the book, the way they kill, the way they execute, they way they talk, the way they look, they didn’t invent a thing, it’s all already written in a book, and they’re just following holy orders that will get them into heaven ... And when you open that book, you’ll see that They’re copying the founder(s)'s of that religion own doings (crimes)… You say that you wish they took their beliefs Seriously, I take it you mean the good parts, in that, I’m with you… I wish that too… Personally, I want them to wake up to religion flaws because I hate seeing people being manipulated and exploited due to their ignorance… It’s actually very harmful, not to just them, but all of us.

You need to become more aware of terrorist groups - Hell, even the Taliban itself kinda disproves your point with https://www.usip.org/publications/2022/05/how-talibans-hijab-decree-defies-islam.

Here's another paper on ISIS doing something similar - https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/106120729/document_1_-libre.pdf?1696213268=&amp%3Bresponse-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DLINGUISTIC_ANALYSIS_OF_ISIS_MISCONTEXTUA.pdf&amp%3BExpires=1735843958&amp%3BSignature=SiwxMwvcrLE4%7ERaDo82GqRsi0EmR8XGBOSEGpJyoEtymqzmEk%7EERp6zt8Y68yt6sJtQ74dFrD2nAe27eyprea-NTrDFd16Eb0tpvmJdoRBDhXIKjDwF-mRlw9lp9dxxKbE1fd%7EdYMy-UMIgX6eurDRCxEIaZ11tvDq%7E73CWn5yfrgTUsWwznWNpBzhy%7Ekgkt7fRiKPoWfS0HnP35M%7EaMIli-VoZNgWq%7ErbWiFfCrmZeEsbWbw-Deo%7EOXvzME6MlbYuAxC%7EUsFAniaub7kOS01eP8skGmjFW9xETvVrEkgKXjNv8Hr%7EsZl7v46csPIGk-68HJXw9MrQb2fsMyBnvzZw__&amp%3BKey-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA

Again, I do not contend that the book is non-existent factor, I actually contend that the book is a minor factor as opposed to the goals of the organization. The goals may correlate with the book somewhat, but they will necessarily depart from the book as most religions typically tend to advocate for peace.

Additionally, if you say they do X or Y as per the book, can I get some systematic evidence, and not just vibes? If the religious text says a particular action is unethical or unnecessary, and religious fundamentalists do it anyway, is it not the case that they don't care about the religious text?

Also, ignorance is a problem, but not in the way you imply. Ignorance of knowledge is not nearly as much of a problem as ignorance of epistemology. To give you an example, there are people who are religious who "believe" in vaccines, and people who are irreligious who don't, despite the fact the vaccines are well demonstrated to be effective. The problem here is that the people who don't "believe" in vaccines do not have an accurate truth seeking algorithm. This is also the case for people who believe in religion without looking for evidence of the claims of that religion. An accurate truth seeking algorithm would ask what evidence do we have of any claim, and what counter-evidence do we have for the same claim, and make a decision on the basis of evidence. This is what is missing in all sorts of conspiracy theorists, and also, religious people. Even if a religion is 100% correct about a claim, religious people would be mistaken in believing it without looking at evidence of the claim. The case is similar for ethics as well.

I see you picked USA and Indonesia, and you compared the number of terrorist attacks in each, and your conclusion was that there’s more in the USA than in Indonesia (which seems right)... here where it falls apart: a quick search shows that the US is bigger and more populated

This was not the point of my comparison at all - The point of my comparison was simply to show that there does not exist a strong correlation between religious attitudes and terrorism. Something like 70-80% of the US is religious (Between 234440500 and 267932000 people if we take US population as 334915000) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_the_United_States.

This is as opposed to 99.95%(277,534,000) in Indonesia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Indonesia. Which means we should see a reduction in terrorism compared to Indonesia, as opposed to an increase. But the fact that the number of terrorist incidents is a toss up, indicates that the correlation between religion and terrorism is weak at best.