Obviously both Christianity and Islam pale in comparison to the goat: Judaism.
Jokes aside, good article, I’m particularly annoyed by pro-Christian influencers who tout the reformation as the reason why Christianity is so much more advanced, like that wasn’t a period of more senseless sectarian violence than the Islamic World has ever seen.
I’m not sure it’s appropriate to control for GDP when assessing the relationship between religion and particular outcomes.
First, the outcomes in question (press freedom, democratic strength) might themselves influence GDP. Second, and more obviously, religion might influence GDP directly. If you control for GDP because you think it has causal effects on your outcomes of interest, then you need to have an account of why there’s no causal relationship between GDP and religion, which would render the overall correlation spurious.
Btw, I’m a libertarian who has observed that under Islam, there is a separation between the state and the law; libertarians are obviously highly interested in non-state systems of law, so I have an ideological bias in favor of Islam having a *positive* effect on GDP. But I don’t think that matches empirical reality.
You are right to point this out--shame on me; I will be more cautious of mistakes like this in future posts. I think the idea that Islam has reduced GDP is one of the best arguments against the religion. The rest of the essay tries to cast doubt on this idea, though.
Isolating for religion is very difficult, and there are so many sources on either side of the topic--this is what makes the debate so interesting!
Makes sense enough. I grew up in Spain (Catholic country but secularizing fast), and have met a variety of Muslims (Moroccan, Indian, Iranian, Pakistani and probably a few more). My general impression is that the two religions are close sisters, and quite comparable in what they do to a culture. They've both produced pretty amazing art, and a strong sense of brotherhood, yet often restricted to co-religionists. Historically they've both had open and close-minded phases, and alternated between mutual understanding and war (crusades, jihad). I'd say they're both at their best when they don't have too much political power, and when they're not the only game in town.... and at their worst when they get to exercise their unfortunate authoritarian tendencies.
Good post. Bentham didn't do this, but people like to white wash the history of Christianity and of Christian scripture. A few weeks ago a post made the rounds comparing Christianity to Islam and said the return of Christ was to be peaceful in Christianity. Not true!
While the Christians in Europe were burning Greek philosophical texts, Islamic scholars in the Middle East and North Africa were preserving them so that we could enjoy them!
Once, I recall at a seminar in university someone asserted that Muslims invented the compass. I asked her how she knew, and she said 'well they invented most things'.
That was liberal counter-intuivity bias after 9/11. At a glance, Islam looks pretty bad, so actually it must be really great. I thought liberals had got over that and went back to fetishizing black criminals, but maybe it's making a comeback.
Around ten countries officially impose the death penalty for apostasy. All are Muslim.
Around the same number officially impose death for homosexuality. Again, all are Muslim.
Virtually every major terrorist organization is Muslim.
Suicide bombing, martyrdom, honor killing rape victims, and other atrocities are almost exclusively practiced by Muslims.
No other religion is as disposed to violence and imposition as Islam.
This is not to say that only Islam is bad, because all organized religions are terrible. However, they are not all the same bad, and Islam is clearly the least compatible with 21st century liberal open societies.
Yes, I believe this. First, your claims are somewhat inaccurate. Uganda, for example, also has the death penalty for homosexuality, honour killings happen frequently in India, etc. It's also true that repression and genocide and terrible things happen across the world, in nations of varying religions.
You are correct that if we zoom in on the Middle East, there is a high prevalence of terror, anti-liberalism, and bigotry. My argument is that these problems exist for reasons other than Islam.
Did ISIS come to power because Muslims are more prone to extremism, or did ISIS come to power because of regional instability, decades of brutal dictatorship (in part funded by the US), and another many years of sanction and war? I believe that even a "good" Christian nation would likely see high rates of violence, extremism, and political instability after such events.
Your examples are largely true, but they fail to prove any causal link.
The comparison between Philippines and Indonesia is interesting. Both of them clearly have significant influence from Western (ie Christian) culture. For example, the systems of government are variants of Western democracy.
It raises the question of how much influence Christianity had on the development of Western culture. Could the liberal institutions we know (democracy/capitalism, etc) develop under Islam?
I’m not sure it even makes sense to separate the culture from the religion. Christianity evolved along with the current dominant culture and Islam didn’t.
I agree with this. I am uncertain on how institutions might have developed under Islam. I think Acemoglu & Robinson's critique on that question is quite powerful and convincing.
I believe Isolating for culture is possible and useful. Albania, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc. are all wildly different and majority Islamic; studying these nations is probably useful to see how Islam develops while interacting with different geographies, ethnicities, histories, etc.
As for how culture develops, it's hard to isolate for the other factors. However, if we look at where Islam developed, I'm not sure that the counterfactual world would have been better (probably much worse!). As the A & R paper argue, early Islam did good in unifying the region.
There are very few Christian countries left, whereas the majority population maybe Christian they're secular in governance. What are the other players in the game here? Cultural attitudes? Regime? Colonization?
Abrahamic religion of any kind is cancer. Arabs as a race are subhuman. There is no defense for islam. Only gaslighting cunts try to justify or celebrate jewish fairytales.
I think you are wrong on many levels. However, I respect you for being upfront about the racism and not trying to hide it. Kudos!
As for the subhuman claim, I am Arab. I can tell by your profile picture that you are obese. (No shame in that, I was obese once, too!) This means I can most likely best you in any physical activity. Does this make you sub-sub-human?
The most important causal factor of national prosperity is the intelligence of the population. Cousin marriage, of course, depresses intelligence, but *even after controlling for intelligence* Muslim countries do badly, because cousin marriage also makes it hard/impossible to build neutral state institutions that allow for the growth of a stable market economy.
As far as I know, cousin marriage is not a core tent of Islam or anything, it's just a part of Arab culture that got bundled up with it. Thus it's possible to imagine an alternative history in which Islam didn't have such a disastrous effect on human development, but it's not the human history that actually happened 🤷.
I think that cousin marriages are horrible, but they have been prevalent "throughout the Middle East for all recorded history." I would imagine that any religion that took Islam's place would have similar problems with this practice. I hope that as the region becomes more urban and connected through the internet, that cousin marriages will gradually die out.
While I agree this makes the Middle East worse, your premise that "The most important causal factor of national prosperity is the intelligence of the population" is dubious. Geography, history, and chance likely have much more to do prosperity. North Korea is not less developed because of low IQ, for instance.
"I would imagine that any religion that took Islam's place would have similar problems with this practice"
Well, you might imagine that, but, in reality, the Christians of the Middle East do not practice cousin marriage, and as you can see from the map of Africa, it isn't really a Middle Eastern problem per se. Comparisons of cousin marriage in Nigeria between Christians and Muslims also bear this out.
1. Roman law, medieval Europe, and the early Catholic Church all had rules against cousin marriages. It is more likely that the Church conformed to existing cultural norms. If Christianity spread in the ME, and Islam spread in Europe, it would likely be Christians with troublingly high cousin-marriage rates.
2. Extremely well documented =/= a mediocre pop science book.
1) I mean, sure, if Christianity and Islam had spread in different parts of the world, they would probably be totally different religions. However, the fact is the Church didn't just conform to cultural norms, but waged a campaign for centuries to abolish cousin marriage across Europe, whereas Islam spread and strengthened cousin marriage because a basic part of converting to Islam is acknowledging that Arab culture is the most holy, and Arab culture means cousin marriage. Maybe you can imagine some alternative history in which things shook but differently, but they didn't. I'm more interested in what happened than what didn't happen..
I don't think factoring "colonialism" is enough without accounting for:
1. How Christian countries were able to colonize Muslim countires, even though when you look at the world in the year 1000, it sure seems like Islam has a head start.
2. How only Christian Europe developed a moral framework in which you could convince people that ruling over foreign peoples against their will is bad, something that no Islamic civilization ever had a problem with before.
I'm not saying Christianity vs. Islam was a major factor in either, but I don't think you can wave them away with "colonialism" either.
Responding to 1. I am not arguing that it was Christian nations' colonialism that harmed the Middle East; rather, that a history of colonialism is probably a stronger factor influencing a nation than its religion.
on 2. This is probably not true. "Christian Europe" did many bad things (which, I do *not* attribute to Christianity!). Decolonization was not a moral victory, it happened because WW2 was expensive and upholding colonies in faraway lands with constant protest and unrest was more economically and politically costly than it was worth.
You overlook - incredibly - the fact that Islamic caliphates were the original colonial power. Centuries before European exploration and trade began.
Over 20 countries now speak Arabic, which was not their original language. Islam has always spread violently and with colonial intent - it was only the franks who stopped the Moors and, centuries later the Austrians and their allies who stopped the Ottomans.
Every Islamic country now has minimal to no rights for women, gay people and any non-Muslim group. Some are egregiously medieval. And only religion has gifted the concept of Holy War to the world… and it’s not Buddhism…
Yes. I was wondering how long it would be before BuT thE CrUSAdeS!!!
The crusades were nothing to do with Christianity or the gospels of Jesus. So, please find one - just one - reference to crusades in the Bible. I’ll wait.
But the crusades were a response to the islamic conquest of the holy lands, when Saracens harassed and murdered pilgrims. So just another Arab lie that the crusades were Christian aggression - they were a response to Arab aggression. Fucking liar.
So again, please prove me wrong unless you just have a thing for religions founded by pedophile warmongers?
https://www.sefaria.org/Bava_Metzia.59b.1?lang=bi&with=Translations
Obviously both Christianity and Islam pale in comparison to the goat: Judaism.
Jokes aside, good article, I’m particularly annoyed by pro-Christian influencers who tout the reformation as the reason why Christianity is so much more advanced, like that wasn’t a period of more senseless sectarian violence than the Islamic World has ever seen.
I’m not sure it’s appropriate to control for GDP when assessing the relationship between religion and particular outcomes.
First, the outcomes in question (press freedom, democratic strength) might themselves influence GDP. Second, and more obviously, religion might influence GDP directly. If you control for GDP because you think it has causal effects on your outcomes of interest, then you need to have an account of why there’s no causal relationship between GDP and religion, which would render the overall correlation spurious.
Btw, I’m a libertarian who has observed that under Islam, there is a separation between the state and the law; libertarians are obviously highly interested in non-state systems of law, so I have an ideological bias in favor of Islam having a *positive* effect on GDP. But I don’t think that matches empirical reality.
You are right to point this out--shame on me; I will be more cautious of mistakes like this in future posts. I think the idea that Islam has reduced GDP is one of the best arguments against the religion. The rest of the essay tries to cast doubt on this idea, though.
Isolating for religion is very difficult, and there are so many sources on either side of the topic--this is what makes the debate so interesting!
Makes sense enough. I grew up in Spain (Catholic country but secularizing fast), and have met a variety of Muslims (Moroccan, Indian, Iranian, Pakistani and probably a few more). My general impression is that the two religions are close sisters, and quite comparable in what they do to a culture. They've both produced pretty amazing art, and a strong sense of brotherhood, yet often restricted to co-religionists. Historically they've both had open and close-minded phases, and alternated between mutual understanding and war (crusades, jihad). I'd say they're both at their best when they don't have too much political power, and when they're not the only game in town.... and at their worst when they get to exercise their unfortunate authoritarian tendencies.
Good post. Bentham didn't do this, but people like to white wash the history of Christianity and of Christian scripture. A few weeks ago a post made the rounds comparing Christianity to Islam and said the return of Christ was to be peaceful in Christianity. Not true!
While the Christians in Europe were burning Greek philosophical texts, Islamic scholars in the Middle East and North Africa were preserving them so that we could enjoy them!
Pretty based article.
That’s a common misconception.
https://mankind.substack.com/p/quick-take-no-muslim-scribes-and
https://historyforatheists.com/2020/03/the-great-myths-8-the-loss-of-ancient-learning/
Once, I recall at a seminar in university someone asserted that Muslims invented the compass. I asked her how she knew, and she said 'well they invented most things'.
That was liberal counter-intuivity bias after 9/11. At a glance, Islam looks pretty bad, so actually it must be really great. I thought liberals had got over that and went back to fetishizing black criminals, but maybe it's making a comeback.
Do you really believe this?
Around ten countries officially impose the death penalty for apostasy. All are Muslim.
Around the same number officially impose death for homosexuality. Again, all are Muslim.
Virtually every major terrorist organization is Muslim.
Suicide bombing, martyrdom, honor killing rape victims, and other atrocities are almost exclusively practiced by Muslims.
No other religion is as disposed to violence and imposition as Islam.
This is not to say that only Islam is bad, because all organized religions are terrible. However, they are not all the same bad, and Islam is clearly the least compatible with 21st century liberal open societies.
Yes, I believe this. First, your claims are somewhat inaccurate. Uganda, for example, also has the death penalty for homosexuality, honour killings happen frequently in India, etc. It's also true that repression and genocide and terrible things happen across the world, in nations of varying religions.
You are correct that if we zoom in on the Middle East, there is a high prevalence of terror, anti-liberalism, and bigotry. My argument is that these problems exist for reasons other than Islam.
Did ISIS come to power because Muslims are more prone to extremism, or did ISIS come to power because of regional instability, decades of brutal dictatorship (in part funded by the US), and another many years of sanction and war? I believe that even a "good" Christian nation would likely see high rates of violence, extremism, and political instability after such events.
Your examples are largely true, but they fail to prove any causal link.
The comparison between Philippines and Indonesia is interesting. Both of them clearly have significant influence from Western (ie Christian) culture. For example, the systems of government are variants of Western democracy.
It raises the question of how much influence Christianity had on the development of Western culture. Could the liberal institutions we know (democracy/capitalism, etc) develop under Islam?
I’m not sure it even makes sense to separate the culture from the religion. Christianity evolved along with the current dominant culture and Islam didn’t.
I agree with this. I am uncertain on how institutions might have developed under Islam. I think Acemoglu & Robinson's critique on that question is quite powerful and convincing.
I believe Isolating for culture is possible and useful. Albania, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc. are all wildly different and majority Islamic; studying these nations is probably useful to see how Islam develops while interacting with different geographies, ethnicities, histories, etc.
As for how culture develops, it's hard to isolate for the other factors. However, if we look at where Islam developed, I'm not sure that the counterfactual world would have been better (probably much worse!). As the A & R paper argue, early Islam did good in unifying the region.
There are very few Christian countries left, whereas the majority population maybe Christian they're secular in governance. What are the other players in the game here? Cultural attitudes? Regime? Colonization?
Abrahamic religion of any kind is cancer. Arabs as a race are subhuman. There is no defense for islam. Only gaslighting cunts try to justify or celebrate jewish fairytales.
I think you are wrong on many levels. However, I respect you for being upfront about the racism and not trying to hide it. Kudos!
As for the subhuman claim, I am Arab. I can tell by your profile picture that you are obese. (No shame in that, I was obese once, too!) This means I can most likely best you in any physical activity. Does this make you sub-sub-human?
Here is a global map of cousin marriage. It's not super hard to see what the main factor is here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_prevalence_of_consanguinity.svg
The most important causal factor of national prosperity is the intelligence of the population. Cousin marriage, of course, depresses intelligence, but *even after controlling for intelligence* Muslim countries do badly, because cousin marriage also makes it hard/impossible to build neutral state institutions that allow for the growth of a stable market economy.
As far as I know, cousin marriage is not a core tent of Islam or anything, it's just a part of Arab culture that got bundled up with it. Thus it's possible to imagine an alternative history in which Islam didn't have such a disastrous effect on human development, but it's not the human history that actually happened 🤷.
I think that cousin marriages are horrible, but they have been prevalent "throughout the Middle East for all recorded history." I would imagine that any religion that took Islam's place would have similar problems with this practice. I hope that as the region becomes more urban and connected through the internet, that cousin marriages will gradually die out.
While I agree this makes the Middle East worse, your premise that "The most important causal factor of national prosperity is the intelligence of the population" is dubious. Geography, history, and chance likely have much more to do prosperity. North Korea is not less developed because of low IQ, for instance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage#:~:text=Throughout%20Middle%20Eastern%20history%2C%20cousin,%E2%80%9330%25%20of%20all%20marriages.
"I would imagine that any religion that took Islam's place would have similar problems with this practice"
Well, you might imagine that, but, in reality, the Christians of the Middle East do not practice cousin marriage, and as you can see from the map of Africa, it isn't really a Middle Eastern problem per se. Comparisons of cousin marriage in Nigeria between Christians and Muslims also bear this out.
The link between IQ and prosperity is extremely well documented https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hive_Mind_(book)
1. Roman law, medieval Europe, and the early Catholic Church all had rules against cousin marriages. It is more likely that the Church conformed to existing cultural norms. If Christianity spread in the ME, and Islam spread in Europe, it would likely be Christians with troublingly high cousin-marriage rates.
2. Extremely well documented =/= a mediocre pop science book.
1) I mean, sure, if Christianity and Islam had spread in different parts of the world, they would probably be totally different religions. However, the fact is the Church didn't just conform to cultural norms, but waged a campaign for centuries to abolish cousin marriage across Europe, whereas Islam spread and strengthened cousin marriage because a basic part of converting to Islam is acknowledging that Arab culture is the most holy, and Arab culture means cousin marriage. Maybe you can imagine some alternative history in which things shook but differently, but they didn't. I'm more interested in what happened than what didn't happen..
2) So I can just keep pointing you to the extensive body of research on this, or you can stop being obstinate and admit what any well informed person already knows. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016028961630318X
I don't think factoring "colonialism" is enough without accounting for:
1. How Christian countries were able to colonize Muslim countires, even though when you look at the world in the year 1000, it sure seems like Islam has a head start.
2. How only Christian Europe developed a moral framework in which you could convince people that ruling over foreign peoples against their will is bad, something that no Islamic civilization ever had a problem with before.
I'm not saying Christianity vs. Islam was a major factor in either, but I don't think you can wave them away with "colonialism" either.
This is a fair critique.
Responding to 1. I am not arguing that it was Christian nations' colonialism that harmed the Middle East; rather, that a history of colonialism is probably a stronger factor influencing a nation than its religion.
on 2. This is probably not true. "Christian Europe" did many bad things (which, I do *not* attribute to Christianity!). Decolonization was not a moral victory, it happened because WW2 was expensive and upholding colonies in faraway lands with constant protest and unrest was more economically and politically costly than it was worth.
You overlook - incredibly - the fact that Islamic caliphates were the original colonial power. Centuries before European exploration and trade began.
Over 20 countries now speak Arabic, which was not their original language. Islam has always spread violently and with colonial intent - it was only the franks who stopped the Moors and, centuries later the Austrians and their allies who stopped the Ottomans.
Every Islamic country now has minimal to no rights for women, gay people and any non-Muslim group. Some are egregiously medieval. And only religion has gifted the concept of Holy War to the world… and it’s not Buddhism…
Sorry you think Islam is the only religion that does holy war?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades
Yes. I was wondering how long it would be before BuT thE CrUSAdeS!!!
The crusades were nothing to do with Christianity or the gospels of Jesus. So, please find one - just one - reference to crusades in the Bible. I’ll wait.
But the crusades were a response to the islamic conquest of the holy lands, when Saracens harassed and murdered pilgrims. So just another Arab lie that the crusades were Christian aggression - they were a response to Arab aggression. Fucking liar.
So again, please prove me wrong unless you just have a thing for religions founded by pedophile warmongers?
shit i had not realized they didn't mention the crusades in the bible. i'll update my worldview significantly based on this earth-shattering insight.
If you didn’t already know that and you still dribbled on about it then you’re even more pig ignorant than I thought.
Keep it up for the pedophile champ.