“When you go to war against your enemies and the LORD your God delivers them into your hands and you take captives, if you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may take her as your wife” (Deut. 21:10–11).
Genghis Khan (translated as Universal Lord) seared his way across Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa, amassing the largest contiguous empire in human history. The philosophy underlying the biggest territorial acquisition known to humankind? “Happiness lies in conquering your enemies, in driving them in front of you, in taking their property, in savoring their despair, in raping their wives and daughters.”
The idea that rape may have provided evolutionary advantages to male humans has not gone without criticism. But again one must avoid the naturalistic fallacy—that is, the idea that because rape is rooted in the evolutionary past it is good, desirable, or tolerable. Like warfare, it is none of these things, and as a morally detestable act it deserves unflinching examination.
Incensed Muslims soon began rioting, burning, and killing, and in the end, thirty Afghanis and four American soldiers lay dead.31 One protestor outside the gate of the air base told reporters, “They have burned our Holy Korans…. This means they burned our faith, our honor and our lives.”32 One month later a US Soldier wandered off base into a village in Kandahar and murdered sixteen innocent civilians in cold blood, including nine children. By comparison, the national response to this senseless mass killing was tepid at best. Mullah Khaliq Dad, a member of the council in charge of the investigation, was asked why Afghan streets were not ablaze with fires and revenge killings as they were when the Korans were burnt one month prior. Seemingly incredulous he responded, “How can you compare the dishonoring of the Holy Koran with the martyrdom of innocent civilians? The whole goal of our life is religion.”
With honor killings snuffing out the lives of women for the sake of their offended husbands, brothers, or fathers, with raging mobs willing to kill over stuffed animals, and with suicide bombers praised for returning honor to their Muslim survivors, we are left to conclude that male dignity among many Muslims is exquisitely fragile, as is the projected male dignity of Islam.
the number of books that the whole Arabic world has translated into Arabic since the ninth century equals the number of books Spain translates into Spanish in one year.
The absence of religious knowledge endures among Christians, which is not surprising considering the tradition of prohibition and censorship in Christianity, including of the Bible. The Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life conducted a large survey of 3,412 Americans and found that atheists and agnostics scored highest on a measure of religious knowledge, surpassing Jews, Mormons, Catholics, and various Protestant sects (including Evangelicals).
Christian thinkers have long been wary of knowledge. Thomas Aquinas is reported to have said, “I am a man of one book [the Bible],” seeming to imply that all others might be suspect. The great reformer Martin Luther assailed reason in a fervor: Reason is the Devil's greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil's appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom…. Throw dung in her face to make her ugly. She is and she ought to be drowned in baptism…. She would deserve, the wretch, to be banished to the filthiest place in the house, to the closets.
Another means of enforcing mental submission is by prohibiting the reading of religious texts. There is a long history of the Catholic Church prohibiting the masses from reading the Bible. For instance, Pope Innocent III wrote in 1199: The mysteries of the faith are not to be explained rashly to anyone. Usually in fact, they cannot be understood by everyone but only by those who are qualified to understand them with informed intelligence. The depth of the divine Scriptures is such that not only the illiterate and uninitiated have difficulty understanding them, but also the educated and the gifted.
humans also show submission by unquestioningly adhering to ideology and show dominance by creating or enforcing ideology.
God, it turns out, is directly described as killing two and a half million people—2,475,636 to be precise. Satan is listed as killing ten. When Wells includes estimates accounting for the probable size of towns and communities God is purported to have decimated, God killed over 24 million people (24,643,205)—and many were his own followers—while Satan killed sixty.
As with the genocide described in Deuteronomy, burning someone alive repeatedly (if only by magically reanimating their cooked skin), forcing one's victim to drink scalding water, and ignoring pleas for mercy and forgiveness are all behaviors that if perpetrated on in-group members would be considered the morally incomprehensible and macabre acts of a psychopath, someone with unspeakable disregard for in-group rules. But in the eyes of many religious followers, the very concept of morality is synonymous with adherence to religious edicts and practices, including those as vicious as the above.
According to scripture there is no being more potent than God. He therefore could never be harmed, and any alliance gestures that humans may make to him are inconsequential. Nevertheless, to secure his alliance humans will go to great extremes to demonstrate and enforce their association with God, often in a manner that generates grave human suffering—both among the enemy and among those who would refuse allegiance to him.
The research also finds that subjects with lower self-esteem tend to infrahumanize more when mortality fears are activated than those with higher self-esteem.
Furthering Bush's purported alliance with God, Lieutenant General William Boykin, a man central to the war against terror, asked while addressing Christian groups, “Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. He's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this.”
