This Is A Primer On The Evolutionary Relationship Between War And Religion (How Religion Was Used As An Instrument To Wage War). Skim Through It Because It'll Give You An Idea Of What's To Come Below.
http://www.tmz.com/2015/06/19/nbas-brandon-jennings-religious-players-are-more-successful/
Why Do You Think Teams That Employ Religion Tend To Do Better Than Teams That Don't? Because Religious Belief Provides Group Cohesion, Continuity*, And A Common Cause (Something For The Players To Rally Around And Gain Purpose And Meaning From) As Well As Confidence And Courage.
*Continuity In The Sense That You Might Lose Players And Coaches, But The Team's Religious Culture Will Remain!
http://www.tmz.com/2015/06/19/nbas-brandon-jennings-religious-players-are-more-successful/
Why Do You Think Teams That Employ Religion Tend To Do Better Than Teams That Don't? Because Religious Belief Provides Group Cohesion, Continuity*, And A Common Cause (Something For The Players To Rally Around And Gain Purpose And Meaning From) As Well As Confidence And Courage.
*Continuity In The Sense That You Might Lose Players And Coaches, But The Team's Religious Culture Will Remain!
SHROUDED IN MYSTERY
Five million years earlier human social structure was very different and probably resembled that of chimpanzees today. In chimpanzee societies everyone knows their precise rank. There is a male hierarchy and below it a female hierarchy. The alpha male rules the male hierarchy and gets most of the mating opportunities, a common arrangement in primate societies. Probably because of chimpanzees' unusual intelligence, the alpha male can rarely rule alone and has to share power by building coalitions with a few close allies who get cut in on the mating system.
Chimps, unlike humans, seem to have changed rather little in the last 5 million years, perhaps because they have always occupied the same forest and woodland habitat, whereas humans had to learn how to survive on the ground and in a range of different environments. Hence the joint ancestor of chimps and people was probably quite chimplike. If so, it would probably have had a chimplike social structure based on dominance by the alpha male.
Fast-forward from the joint ancestor to the first human hunter gatherers, and the social structure has changed completely. To judge by the living hunter gatherer societies studied by anthropologists, the social order would have been fiercely egalitarian. Hunter gatherers have no headmen or chiefs, and no one is willing to give or take orders. Men like power and will seize it if they can. But if they can't rule, their next preference is that no one rule over them.
The egalitarianism of hunter gatherers is not a passive preference but a system that is aggressively maintained because it is under constant challenge. From time to time strong individuals emerge and try to dominate a group. But their efforts invariably provoke a coalition against them. Others in the group will mock them or ignore their orders. If they persist, they will be shunned or even evicted from the group. If they are too intimidating, they will be killed. To avoid blood feuds, the group that has decided to eliminate a domineering leader will often assign one of his own relatives to kill him.
A perennial threat to the egalitarianism of the hunter gatherer band was a successful hunter who might try to dominate the band through his success. So hunter gatherers imposed a rule that all meat must be distributed. Bragging and stinginess are the two social errors that bring instant disapproval. The !Kung decree that an animal belongs to the owner of the arrow that brought it down, who is usually not the hunter. The owner then distributes the meat while the hunter makes light of his achievement.
Primitive farmers too will take steps to kill those who disrupt social harmony. Behavior judged as disruptive can consist of merely causing envy through success or just being hard to get along with. Among the Tsembaga, slash-and-burn farmers of central New Guinea, a man whose pigs and gardens do conspicuously better than those of his neighbors may be betrayed to the enemy so that through sorcery they will be able to kill him in the next battle.
Making too many enemies in one's own village is a bad idea if one is a Tsembaga. "Widespread antagonism toward a member of the group is likely to lead to general agreement that he is a witch," writes the anthropologist Roy Rappaport, "and when such agreement exists, betrayal to the enemy is unnecessary; a man's own clan brothers may kill him." Inquiring about the personalities of the people killed recently for witchcraft, Rappaport learned that the victims were "likely to be bad-tempered, argumentative, and assertive."
The egalitarian approach "appears to be universal for foragers who live in small bands that remain nomadic, suggesting considerable antiquity for political egalitarianism," writes the anthropologists Christopher Boehm, who has studied the transition from hierarchy to a society of social equals.
A critical question in human evolution is how the hierarchy typical of ape societies was transformed into its opposite, the egalitarianism of hunter gatherers. Human brain size started to expand dramatically after the split with chimps. One consequence of this increased cognitive capacity was the invention of weapons such as wooded spears. Weapons are great equalizers, and would have had the effect of flattening out the male hierarchy of a still apelike society, Boehm suggests. Another leveler would have been the cognitive ability of he weak to form coalitions against tyrannical leaders.
But as egalitarianism slowly evolved in the human lineage, it would have exposed a critical weakness in the social structure: with the power of the alpha males eclipsed, how was order to be kept? If no one were willing to to defer to anyone else, who would determine the interests of the group? Who would take the personal risk of punishing deviant and anti-social behavior?
The threat of freeloading and anarchy would have become increasingly serious as human cognitive abilities increased. Individuals would have figured out new and better ways to take advantage of the group's protection without contributing anything in return. Nothing is more corrosive to a group's cohesion than free riders. If they go unpunished, the advantage of social living quickly diminishes; others will contribute less, and the group will disintegrate or crumble under challenge from neighbors. Free riders would have gained new power with the advent of language, a perfect instrument with which to deceive, prevaricate and manipulate. Those who were not pulling their full weight had a new means of cloaking their selfishness.
Just as the emerging human societies were being undermined by the freeloaders within, they had to confront a pressing external threat, that of warfare. Like the ability to freeload, warfare became more sophisticated and deadly as cognitive capacity increased. People may not like warfare, but the point needs no belaboring that they are very proficient at it. The skill is an ancient one that reaches far back in the primate lineage, a fact that has come to light from close study of chimpanzees. Though at first thought to be peaceful, chimpanzees in fact occupy territories that are patrolled and defended by bands of males. Through raids and ambushes, they try to pick off the males of a neighboring group one by one until they are able to annex the group's territory and females.
Early humans seem to have inherited the same instinct for territorial defense and warfare. As with chimpanzees, the aggressiveness of hunter gatherer societies was not at first recognized by anthropologists, partly because colonial administrators had suppressed warfare and partly because the style of primitive warfare differs greatly from that of modern societies. It was conducted not with campaigning armies but through ambushes and raids, in which aggressors would seek to kill a few of the enemy at minimum risk to themselves.
Anthropologists at first dismissed these skirmishes as hardly serious, until they recorded causes of male death over many years. They then realized that if you go to war every week, even low casualty rates start to mount. In some tribes up to 30 percent of male deaths occurred in warfare.
War seems to have been the natural state of hunter gatherer societies. "Peaceful pre-state societies were very rare; warfare between them was very frequent, and most adult men in such groups saw combat repeatedly in a lifetime," writes the anthropologist Lawrence H. Keeley in his survey of primitive warfare. He estimates that a typical tribal society lost about 0.5 percent of its population in combat each year, far more than the toll suffered by most modern states - war deaths in the twentieth century would have amounted to 2 billion people had the tribal death rate persisted.
Pre-state societies fought often. About 75 percent went to war at least once every 2 years, until they were pacified, whereas the modern nation state goes to war about once a generation. Adding to the carnage, primitive peoples were not in the habit of taking prisoners, unless to torture them as Iroquois did, or to fatten them for eating later, as was the practice among certain tribes in Colombia. Otherwise, captured warriors were killed on the spot. "In fact, primitive warfare was much more deadly than that conducted between civilized states because of the greater frequency of combat and the more merciless way it was conducted," Keeley concludes.
Thomas Hobbes's description of primitive warfare was all too accurate. "It is manifest," he wrote in 1651, "that during the time that men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war. The war is every man against every other man." Some anthropologists and archaeologists have long been reluctant to accept this conclusion. Instead, perhaps with a desire to portray modern warfare as unusually wicked, they have suggested that war is an aberration. or that it started only after the beginning of agriculture some 10,000 years ago.
Jonathan Isaac
You can't win a war with a suicide bomber
ACTUALLY, YOU CANN, NIGGER!
Most suicide bombers are Muslim
- According to the Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions, a comprehensive history of this troubling yet topical phenomenon, while suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, when religion is involved, it is always Muslim. Why is this? Why is Islam the only religion that motivates its followers to commit suicide missions?The surprising answer from the evolutionary psychological perspective is that Muslim suicide bombing may have nothing to do with Islam or the Koran (except for two lines in it). It may have nothing to do with the religion, politics, the culture, the race, the ethnicity, the language, or the region. As with everything else from this perspective, it may have a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex.What distinguishes Islam from other major religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By allowing some men to monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of available women. If 50 percent of men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don't get any wives at all.So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates. By doing so, they have little to lose and much to gain compared with men who already have wives. Across all societies, polygyny makes men violent, increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even after controlling for such obvious factors as economic development, economic inequality, population density, the level of democracy, and political factors in the region.However, polygyny itself is not a sufficient cause of suicide bombing. Societies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are much more polygynous than the Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa. And they do have very high levels of violence. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from a long history of continuous civil wars—but not suicide bombings.The other key ingredient is the promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in Islam. The prospect of exclusive access to virgins may not be so appealing to anyone who has even one mate on earth, which strict monogamy virtually guarantees. However, the prospect is quite appealing to anyone who faces the bleak reality on earth of being a complete reproductive loser.It is the combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven that motivates many young Muslim men to commit suicide bombings. Consistent with this explanation, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but other (nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. And nearly all suicide bombers are single.
![The Evolution of the Islamic Religion: The story more often written in blood than ink (The Evolution Series Book 5) by [Richard Castagner]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51bfG8ke4KL._SY346_.jpg)
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But the people of the Upper Paleolithic were hardly pacifists. They would not have been in Europe in the first place had they not wrested it from the grip of the fearsome Neanderthals and driven them to extinction. The style of primitive warfare - raids and minor skirmishes - would not leave a strong fingerprint in the archaeological record, and the absence of much evidence of warfare at this time cannot be taken as evidence of absence.
Nor is it at all likely, as Kelly contends, that "war is not primordial but has a definite origin in the relatively recent past." The existence of territorial warfare among chimps, and its practice by people today, suggests that both species inherited the behavior from their common ancestors who lived some 5 million years ago. The frequency of warfare may wax and wane and peaceful societies can always be found, such as the Icelanders of today, who have no army, or Sweden, which last went to war in 1815. But given that both peoples are descendants of the hyperaggressive Vikings, no one is likely to accuse them of having pacifism in their genes. Human societies are remarkably well adapted to warfare, but exercise that capacity depending on circumstance and calculation of their own interests.
Modern humans have lived as hunters and gatherers for most of their existence, and the warlike nature of most contemporary hunter gatherer societies can reasonably be assumed to have prevailed throughout the distant past as well. "We need to recognize and accept the idea of a non-peaceful past for the entire time of human existence," writes the archaeologist Steven LeBlanc. "To understand much of today's war, we must see it as a common and almost universal human behavior that has been with us as we went from ape to human."
Morality, altruism, loyalty and duty are considered high virtues, but policies of aggression and extermination reflect the darkest aspects of human nature. It is not a comfortable thought that both should have been shaped by the same selective pressure, the need for a degree of social cohesion sufficient to withstand the demands of intergroup warfare. Still, as Lawrence Keeley notes, "Warfare is ultimately not a denial of the human capacity for social cooperation, but merely the most destructive expression of it." Human nature, as has often been remarked, is a mixture of contrarieties, with capacities for great good and great evil being interwoven. It is not so surprising that both should be branches of a tree that itself is rooted in deeply ambiguous moral territory, the struggle to survive in a dog-eat-dog world.
Early human societies transitioning away from male dominance thus faced two social problems of the utmost severity - the threat of free riders from within and the threat of hostile neighbors from without. How were the new societies to be fortified against these threats? One solution would have been to build on the premoral systems that had evolved in primate societies: from these emerged the innate moral dispositions of early humans. "There appears to be a universal short list of values that all cultures share: negative ones that proscribe killing, seriously deceptive lying, or theft within the group, and positive ones that call for altruism and cooperation for the benefit of the whole community," writes Boehm
But moral restraint by itself is not sufficient to deter freeloading or to energize a group to prepare for warfare. Knowing what's right and doing it are two different things. Freeloaders may figure the chances of getting caught are acceptably low. A man may desire deeply to defend his community, but what rational motive could make him sacrifice his life to do so?
A solution gradually emerged to counter the two acute threats of freeloading and warfare: religion.
Religious behavior addressed these two leading challenges to social order in the evolving human lineage. It both enforced the moral instincts and motivated people to pay any costs in defense of their community. Religion secured a new level of social cohesion by implanting in people's minds a stern overseer of their actions. The Nuer, for instance, believe that "if a man wishes to be in the right with God he must be in the right with men, that is, he must subordinate his interests as an individual to the moral order of society," writes Evan-Pritchard. It was belief in these supernatural supervisors that enabled egalitarian societies to emerge from the dictatorship of the alpha male that primate societies had endured for so long.
Ants, the other evolutionary masters of social living, are distinctive for the high degree of cooperation between members of the same colony. But with ants, just as with people, sociality toward the in-group is combined with relentless hostility toward other ant colonies. Ants are territorial and will fight pitched battles at their borders with neighboring groups. Some species have developed special soldier castes. Victory may lead to the opponents' extinction, their queen being killed, their workers and larvae eaten or enslaved, and their territory and other property annexed. "The greatest enemies of ants are other ants, just as the greatest enemies of men are other men," observed the Swiss myrmecologist Auguste Forel.
It is striking that, with both ants and people, evolution should have made cooperation and warfare two sides of the same coin. Social cohesion is critical to both the ant and human systems. With ants, cohesion is secured by the shared chemical signals that regulate their behavior and by the high degree of relatedness among members of a colony. Neither of these factors is compatible with human physiology. This is why ants don't need religion but people do.
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It's easy to see how a society might manipulate its rites and ceremonies, even at an entirely unconscious level, so as to secure desired social goals, such as observing agreed moral standards, punishing cheaters, and preparing people to sacrifice their lives in the community's defense. If everyone believe that a supernatural agency would punish theft, for example, high standards of honesty would prevail. Religion emerged as an effective means for an egalitarian community to govern itself. The rituals and ceremonies established agreed rules of desirable behavior, and the supernatural agencies secured compliance with them. It was a remarkable solution to the problem of getting highly intelligent primates to put an abstract goal - the good of society - ahead of the self-interest they could all now calculate so finely.
In a state of constant warfare, such as prevailed throughout much of the hunter gatherer era, societies that used religion to best advantage would have prevailed over others. Probably through the mechanism of group selection, the essentials of religious behavior became engraved in the human genetic repertoire. These would have included a propensity to commit to the religious practices of one's society, starting around the age of puberty; a liking for group rituals and the sense of community they generated; and a tendency to believe in punitive supernatural agents.
The genes that shape religious behavior provide merely an inclination to such behaviors. Each society specifies its own religious culture, shaping its religious tradition so as to fit its political and ecological circumstances. It is now time to trace the steps by which the earliest forms of religion, brought into being by the evolutionary forces described above, were transformed over the last 50,000 years into the very different religions that are familiar today.
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Looking back at the relationship between religion and warfare, each of the three monotheisms has followed a different course. Judaism started as an expansionary creed and transformed itself into a pacific one after defeat. Christianity began as nonviolent, became an aggressive religion of empire, and was then somewhat neutralized after the rise of secular states. Islam was created as a religion of empire but has generally not yet found an easy role in a secular state.
No consistent relationship emerges between religion and warfare, other than that religion is a potent instrument that can be wielded by rulers in many ways. This is as would be expected from the evolutionary perspective that religion emerged from the unremitting strife between early human societies. Religious behavior helped energize a society for war, induced people to endure privation and prepared men to sacrifice their lives in battle. But warfare is only one aspect of religion's cohesive powers. If a group needs to live peacefully with its neighbors, or within a more powerful host community, its religious behavior can be adapted to its needs.
Religious behavior is shaped in part by genetics and in part by culture. Both components may vary over time but the cultural component of religion can be changed more quickly. Through cultural shifts in the interpretation of a religion's requirements, a society can tailor its behavior, or a country its foreign policy, to whatever strategy fits the circumstances. Religions thus possess a considerable degree of flexibility, more than might be expected from their claims to reflect the unchanging commands of divine revelation. The malleability of religious doctrine is not so surprising, given that inflexible religions would soon have led their societies to destruction.
Still, religions have a certain inertia that may persist for generations. Doctrine derived from a divine founder cannot be changed too obviously or too fast. And in some societies leaders may not see the need for change or may fear to implement it. Reasons of this kind may explain the comparative stability of Islam over the centuries, in contrast to the continual turnover of Christian sects.
When states go to war, it is usually for a variety of generally secular causes. Religion may be quickly invoked, but only because it is such a potent instrument for energizing a society and motivating troops. It is usually no more a cause of war than are weapons; both are primarily means of war. Even when the formal cause of war is expressed in terms of religion, the underlying motives are usually secular.
The Bishops' Wars between England and Scotland, for instance, began when Charles I decided in 1637 to impose a version of the Anglican prayer book on the Scottish church. The Scottish nobles and Presbyterians found common cause in rejecting the bishops appointed by the king. In the course of these events Scotland declared itself a Presbyterian nation, sealing its difference with Anglican England, and declared that the appointment of bishops by the king was contrary to divine law. This blunt challenge to royal prerogatives and the divine right of kings to rule as absolute monarchs led to the second Bishops' War, to the English parliament's Grand Remonstrance against royal abuses of power, to the outbreak of civil war in England between the king and parliament and, in 1649, to the momentous event of the king's execution.
But these events can also be considered as a struggle between England and Scotland, followed by a civil war in England, in both of which the combatants used religion to energize their followers. The driving force of both Bishops' Wars was the desire, first of Scotland and then of the English Parliament, to reduce the power of the king; both found it useful to invoke religion against him.
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One of the most surprising achievements of the secular state, though it is generally taken for granted, is the ability to induce men to sacrifice their lives in battle without any explicit religious incentive.
In primitive societies and archaic states, religious indoctrination was a principal way of getting soldiers to fight. Boys were expected to endure painful initiation rites without showing pain, so as to toughen them as warriors. Their emotional endurance too was tested through long and frightening ordeals. They would often be trained with others of their age group to encourage solidarity. Among the Nilotic peoples of East Africa like the Nuer, the age-sets of initiated young men served as military companies who were always ready to go to war, and this organization enabled the Nuer to prevail over neighbors who were less well prepared.
In a cross-cultural survey of male initiation, the sociologist Richard Sosis and colleagues tallied the presence or absence of 16 ritual practices such as genital mutilation, teeth pulling, tattooing, scarification and piercing. They found that societies that went to war most often had the most painful initiation rites. Presumably the more militaristic the society, the more searing it made the initiation of its future warriors.
The pain and fear associated with these rituals stands in interesting contrast to the positive effects of religious rites involving dance and music, which leave participants emotionally uplifted. Sosis and colleagues suggest that "through frightening and painful rites, religious symbols can acquire deep emotional significance that subsequently unites individuals who share the experience." Even though boys may not go to war until many years after their initiation, the emotional effect of initiation is enduring. Painful rituals "generate solidarity between men and serve as reliable indicators of group commitment, thus reducing the likelihood that men will defect when there is war," the researchers conclude.
Besides the bonding of initiation rites, early societies seem to have depended heavily on ritual dancing before battle to spread a feeling of cohesion. Religious war dances were used by Zulus, Swazis, and many other peoples. The Aztecs required boys to live apart from their families and train with nightly dances to firelight. On the night before the battle at the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, the Spanish were alarmed by the sound of martial music. According to a Spanish survivor, "That night more than a thousand knights got together in the temple, the great loud sounds of drums, shrill trumpets, cornet and notched bones...They danced nude...in a circle, holding their hands, in rows and keeping time to the tune of the musicians and singers."
Yielding one's life in war is, from the point of view of individual survival, an irrational act. Yet untold millions of men have done so, proving that to risk one's life in combat is a part of human nature. But this behavior cannot prevail unless the powerful biological instinct for self-preservation is overridden.
For men to become warriors, they must be imbued with several important attitudes. They must be trained to develop strong group cohesion, to lose their fear of the enemy, to believe victory is possible, to believe their valor will be rewarded, to believe right is on their side, and to sacrifice their lives if necessary.
Religion, notes the evolutionary biologist Dominic Johnson, provides an answer for all of these problems. Initiation rites inculcate group cohesion, belief in the god of one's tribe promotes confidence in victory, religion-based morality defines the warrior's side as good and the enemy's as evil, and religions may promise luxuriant rewards to those who fall in battle, or punishment for those who desert the cause.
"Religion turns out to have many properties that make it an excellent adaptation for war," Johnson remarks. "Perhaps this is an accident. Alternatively, perhaps it is so effective because it was designed for exactly this purpose."
How then do modern armies induce men to fight without the emotional goads of initiation rites, consulting oracles, war dances or the promise of paradise?
First, modern armies are imbued with military rituals. As Johnson observes, "Rituals dominate not only war itself but military organizations in their entirety: initiations, oaths of allegiance, ranks, duty training, drill, parades, indoctrination, standard operating procedures, combat tactics, memorials to the dead, and offerings to the gods prior to battle or after victory." Religion no longer has a central role in warfare but it has not been banished very far from the scene of action. Modern armies have military chaplains in attendance.
Second, people in modern societies are probably easier to discipline and mold into a cohesive fighting force than were people in early societies.
A third reason that modern societies have been able to train soldiers without depending on the old religious methods is that they have in fact borrowed and built on a central feature of religious training for war, that of music and dance.
The historian William McNeill has traced how early armies, such as that of the Spartans, practiced marching in unison to music and entered battle to the sounds of flutes, executing precise maneuvers. The importance of moving in unison was rediscovered from ancient Roman sources by Prince Maurice of Nassau, captain general of Holland from 1585 to 1652. His cousin Johann of Nassau had analyzed the motions necessary to reload a matchlock and found there were 42 postures required. Maurice trained his soldiers to move in unison through each of these actions and found, after endless practice, that a lot more lead could be delivered on the enemy through rhythmic coordination.
Training, drill and movement in unison proved very effective at making even the roughest classes into soldiers. "I don't know what effect these men will have on the enemy but, by God, they terrify me," the Duke of Wellington remarked on a draft of Irish troops sent to him during the Peninsula War in Spain in 1809.
Maurice made no secret of his methods, which were widely copied. Both in Europe and independently in China, McNeill writes, "prolonged drill created obedient, reliable and effective soldiers, with an esprit de corps that superseded previous identities and insulated them from outside attachments. Well-drilled new-model soldiers, whether Chinese or European, could therefore be counted on to obey their officers accurately and predictably, even when fighting hundreds or thousands of miles away from home.
Acceptable as these modern armies were in fighting other European states, they were not nearly as good, in terms of martial valor, as the war machines of primitive societies that trained their warriors with purely religious methods. Despite their technological superiority, European armies did not always prevail. In 1879 the British army in South Africa was defeated by Zulus not once, but three times, at the battles of Isandlwana, Myer's Drift and Hlobane. Against the British artillery and Gatling guns the Zulus possessed only spears and ox-hide shields, although they enjoyed superior numbers.
In its wars with the Indians, the U.S. Army was usually defeated when caught in the open, such as by the Seminoles in 1834, and by the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne at the battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. The southern San or bushmen of the Sneeuberg Moutains in South Africa halted the advance of the armed and mounted Boers for 30 years.
Western armies won in the end, but because they had larger populations and more effective logistics, not because their soldiers were better warriors. It is remarkable that religion prepared primitive warriors for battle so well, and maybe equally remarkable that European countries succeeded in devising a secular alternative for inducing the strangest but most necessary of all human behaviors, the willingness to sacrifice one's life in warfare.
The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures. Wade, p. 45-52, 96-97, 240-241, 245-249.
BISMILLAH ALHAMDULILLAH
MASHALLAH INSHALLAH
MASHALLAH INSHALLAH
(THE HOLE ENCHILADA PIMP)
MORE PASSAGES TO COME FROM THE FAITH INSTINCT AND FROM THIS BOOK
IN THE MEANTIME, LOOK AT THE LINKS BELOW.
Some of the puzzles of the current situation in Iraq and the Middle East may begin to make sense when you shed evolutionary psychological light on them. For example, the Iraqi insurgents have killed more than six times as many Iraqis as Americans (6,004 Iraqi police and military personnel plus 10,131 civilians vs. 2,466 American troops, as of January 29, 2007). From the evolutionary psychological perspective, the Iraqi insurgents may be unconsciously trying to eliminate as many of their male sexual rivals (fellow Iraqi men) as possible, rather than killing American troops (the infidels and occupiers). According to Yale University political scientist Stathis N. Kalyvas, this is precisely what happened in civil wars in two other Muslim nations (Algeria and Oman). While it is difficult to remember in light of the daily news reports from the occupied Iraq, insurgency has not always been a necessary response to foreign occupation throughout history. There was absolutely no insurgency against the allied occupation after World War II either in Germany or Japan.
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Many of these puzzles begin to make more sense when you look at the situation from the evolutionary psychological perspective. Maybe these devastating suicide bombings are not "terrorist" acts, as the term is usually used. Maybe they have nothing to do with Israel or the American and British troops. Maybe they're all about sex, as everything else in life is.
(Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters)
