The role of education

"Good Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions."


Jerry Falwell



How do you get a full-grown adult to believe the world was created in seven days? This claim should seem outright inane to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of science - any field of science - and the same could have been said 200 years ago. So how should we account for the opinions of 61% of Americans?  One answer seems that it should be right, in fact I've had difficulty surrendering it: Americans are religious because our schools are failing. We often see our standardized test scores compared to other countries' scores, and there are many countries that out-perform us in math, science and reading. However, if we look at precisely which countries are ahead of us, then two things are screaming to be addressed. First, the countries at the very top are generally in East Asia, where religion and education both exist in a very different context. Second, the other countries that out-do us are very small, or otherwise not very populous. 5 Million people can become well-educated much more easily than 313 million can.

Let's look at this index cited by The Guardian. It indicates that we out-perform the Swedish, the Germans, the Irish, the French, the Danish, the British, the Portuguese, the Italians, the Spanish, the Luxembourgers, Austrians ... these are the "intellectual" secular countries that laugh at us for being a bunch of yokels. Most of these countries write far more books, per-capita, than the US, but these are generally not the countries winning Nobel Prizes. So why does Darwin continue to elude us? Maybe the Bible was right all along. To be honest, I'm not fully prepared to answer this question. I will answer it with reference to what I know about primary, secondary, tertiary and graduate education in the US. I conclude by identifying many aspects of the problem. The first, which is not necessarily problematic, is that our education system is becoming more career-oriented, mainly because more people are becoming educated, while liberal arts are not becoming more useful. The second reason is that our society has remained about equally conservative over the past few decades, and will probably continue to do so, so the schools have delayed making substantive changes in their curricula. Lastly, as I have discussed in another blog post, censorship is a profound problem in our society, with obvious consequences, and schools are right in the center of it.

I attended a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Education by former Gen. Colin Powell. The talk had a cozy, informal feel, taking place in not-so-big room with not-so-many people, and Powell took on a loose, spontaneous manner that contradicted my previous impression of him. He spoke with so much charisma that I didn't want him to finish. Powell was the founder of America's Promise, an organization, albeit one of many, intended to help with some problems in primary and secondary education. He had no difficulty identifying these problems. He talked briefly about his military career, and how the quality of his new soldiers declined after conscription was abolished, because the only people willing to join the military poorly educated. About 25 years later, this is still the case, but much more so: Powell told us that 75% of American youths could not enlist in the military. According to search results, the main reason seems to be obesity. He gave some other reasons: either these youths did not finish high school, or they cannot pass basic math and (English) literary tests, or they were convicted of a felony, or they have drug problems.


Powell emphasized that he himself came from very a rough, hard-up inner-city background. He opted for a military career, and was extremely successful, meanwhile his siblings and cousins were becoming lawyers and businessmen and women ... so why did they succeed while many inner-city Americans do not? The most obvious answer is that he had a full family. He noted that most inner-city youths have only one parent, and that this parent was someone who never valued education more than most people. He also gave us an anecdote of a more extreme scenario, albeit a common one. In it he was giving an address to children who are being served by America's Promise. The children in attendance were of every age group, from kindergarten to 12th grade. Powell took questions from students in every age group, so some were childish, while others were flippant, but a ten-year-old offered a question that was very sincere and also very mature and pertinent: "what if my parents don't care if I live or die?" Powell told us his observation that all kids are enthusiastic to start kindergarten, but they and their peers learn to stigmatize school, and some reach a tipping point quickly: he said that by third grade he can see which students will succeed and which won't. How does this relate to religion? Well, the relation will seem to contradict my observation that Americans are more religious despite being more educated. But bare with me through the next paragraph.

The general state of inner-city youths in the US today is a symptom of the profound social disorder in our society. And, of course, religion is a both a cause and a result of social dysfunction. Compared to other high-income democracies, all of which are less religious than us, we have far, far, far more murders, abortions and teen pregnancy, all of which are generally signs of social dysfunction. Here are some other sources that will tell you the same thing. Don't get me wrong, I think that kids who would otherwise be hopeless should become educated by whatever means possible. So, given the conventional thinking that kids without means or parental guidance or a safe environment require tough love and tough guidance to prop them up, I would advocate it as long as it works. However, I have one caveat, which is that these environments - in schools, in churches, in after-school and out-of-school programs, in families, in orphanages, in military officer training - are not the best for fostering independent thinking. If we look at Catholic colleges across the country, we can easily see that there is much less student activity taking place on campus than at secular schools. I used to live very close to Loyola Marymount University in LA. Whereas at USC, where I attended college, was a classic "beehive," the Loyola Marymount campus would be dead after 7 PM. Meanwhile, students would be packing the bars, mostly sports bars, seven days per week. This hardly seems to be the right environment for having earnest debates about Plato. I am not condemning this type of education, though, especially since it is the right environment for training electrical engineers, and other things that "intellectual" types are less willing to do. Another downside, of course, is that the day after these students enjoyed a night of revelry, we did not enjoy walking through a sidewalk covered in trash.

Let's look at a similar example. A couple months ago I started up a conversation with my wife about trees - it was a frivolous subject to us, yet we were very serious about the accuracy and likelihood of what we said. I mentioned a tree in my hometown that was documented to have been in the same place for more than 300 years. However, I conceded to her that in China, where she comes from, there must be trees that are known to have stood for much longer. I then began making an induction, based primarily on intuition: the oldest existing trees had probably been alive since ... my wife then offered her guess: "dinosaur times?" First I ignored her. But then I considered it too much to ignore, and asked: "you mean an individual tree could have stood in place for 65 million years?" About an hour later I asked her, just to be absolutely certain: "were you joking earlier about trees going back to the age of dinosaurs?" She was fully serious.

Let's look at her education history. She attended primary school and middle school in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province. While in middle school she was selected among a handful of students in her school, to join a few dozen in her province to study in Singapore on a full scholarship. While there she studied math, English, science, computer science, among other things. She worked with scholars from China, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and some students from elsewhere. She told me about the agonizing stress involved in maintaining  the required grade point average, because no one wanted to be sent home. One student cracked under the pressure and jumped five stories from her dormitory (without achieving her goal). But my wife was fortunate enough to pull through to the end, concluding five years of her life that she absolutely loathed, albeit in the country out-performs every country in education by leaps and bounds. And any serious source will agree to this. After this she began her tertiary studies at USC, where she studied modern art, then obtained an MFA from UCLA.

So it seems she's decently educated. Personally I had the chance to get some idea what her early years were like, because I spent one year teaching English in China. Wow. There are so many things I learned that I would've never thought of otherwise. Here's one thing about Chinese society right now for young people: its a society where everyone has to succeed, especially with the one-child policy, since it means parents have only one chance to bring respect to their family. Let's note, there is only one way of making sure everyone succeeds. Parents endorse this method, so do teachers and administrators, because they all want a good name. It's cheating. By the end of the year this was a well-worn truth for me, and my foreign-born colleagues had picked up on it more quickly. Yet cheating will not satisfy all their obligations, because they are also expected to attend college, and that requires passing the College Entrance Examination, a 3-day exam that tests everything they studied since primary school, and is the only admissions criterion. In other words, they need to know everything the exam, and they need to put all their effort into studying it, starting from the age of 11 or so.

When I was in China I taught at a college during the week, and on weekends I taught at a variety of "English schools" for children and adolescents. I had some moments that were hilarious, but also unfortunate and disturbing. On Sundays I worked at the Global Kids English School in Danfeng, which seems to be a bootleg location because it isn't on the website. The curriculum seemed very carefully planned, to make sure it prepares them for the College Entrance Exam, as well as the TOEFL and its rival, the IELTS. At first I did not stick closely to my supervisor's directions, but I started to when I realized she really wanted me to. It's not my nature to teach a foreign language, because I don't like drilling. I like explaining. However, from my discourse, some of the native-born teachers seemed to think very highly of my intellectual ability. One time in December, we were holding a Christmas-themed class. One of the teachers asked a question that she thought I would know: "Where does Christmas come from?" She continued "America or England?" A few weeks prior, our supervisor had generously planned a dinner for us at a lavish buffet-style restaurant. In attendance was the entire staff: me, two teachers from Canada, two native-born teachers, our supervisor, and her husband. We foreigners kept to ourselves most of he evening, not least because the natives were busy planning a competition, at their school, for children and adolescents all across town. However, one of the natives consulted me with a question that she wasn't sure of "what is the world's longest river?"


I was not entirely sure either. I responded "I think it's the Nile."

Another foreigner filled me in: "Yeah it's the Nile."

However, she kept looking at me, and didn't bother looking at the other foreigner. She had another question: "And where is it, Britain? Germany?"


In our culture, most of us are used to hearing that "there are no stupid questions." Well, of course, that's not true. "Why did God create us" is an outrageously stupid question. In liberal arts programs at decent universities, these questions are met with a combination of pity and discrete ridicule. But many teachers, in primary and secondary schools, would say otherwise, and they would want their students to agree with them.  It seems that 16% of high school science teachers believe in creation, including 38% in Ohio and 69% in Kentucky. What has allowed these teachers to get through college and carry on a career as a science teacher ... without accepting that creation is just a story written thousands of years before science became available? My answer is this: the more remote parts of the country, in addition to certain demographic minorities, have their own subcultures which are very authority-oriented. Granted, the American "mainstream," if you will, is extremely educated, cosmopolitan, progressive, open-minded, etc, but the mainstream is in fact a small part of the population. I would estimate that it comprises about 20-30% of the population. The rest of the population includes those above the age of 50, in addition to most Southerners and "Evangelicals," blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, first-generation immigrants from just about anywhere, Mormons (despite being extremely educated), and I guess the radical sects of every religion. Granted, at a high school in Detroit, it might not seem like blacks and Hispanics value authority tremendously. However, if you visit these students' families, it will quickly become clear that the family culture is different from a waspy family like. And there is clear evidence that the values of these niche cultures translate into certain expectations about the schools. Consider this: besides South Korea, the US is the one and only high-income democracy where corporal punishment is allowed in schools. Corporal punishment is legal in private schools in 48 states, and in public schools in 19 states. In most states it is rarely used. However, according to a widely-cited estimate, it is believed to be used on 200,000 students every year in the US. And this estimate only includes very overt, blatant practices of corporal punishment. So I would guess that many of these teachers won't be argued with easily. So is this why our test scores are decent, but general understanding of the world isn't? Let's approach this question from a different angle.

One of my foreign-born colleagues in China was a middle-class professional from Canada who retired to work in China, remained there for several years, and by the time I arrived he had become the grandmaster among foreign teachers. This man, Travis, had been a political observer his entire life, meanwhile living with a Chinese women and two kids. Travis was very political, and seemed to have a quasi-Marxist slant, which I inferred from his frequent criticisms of various aspects of American society and Chinese society. He spoke of quality liberal arts programs diminishing, or becoming prohibitively expensive, and giving way to programs that trains us to become "factors of production" rather than "training [us] to think."

But conventional wisdom has it that the quality liberal arts schools are concentrated in the US, whereas European programs are assembly lines for acquiring technical skills. I think that was true at one time, but it's becoming less true. There are many efforts to determine the world's best universities - liberal arts and otherwise. Here's the first one that came up from a Google search. Now let's look at their ranking of philosophy programs, or Geography & Area Studies programs or psychology or history or politics and international studies programs. Still largely the US, and if not then other English-speaking countries, but that's changing rapidly. I found an article in the Guardian about somebody's reckoning of the top 100 universities in the world built in the past 50 years. There are not many American ones listed. Why are American universities on the want? Well, one reason is structural. Here's a graph that's been passed around on the internet, comparing the rise in college tuition, over the past 30-some years, with that of home prices: (graph). The rise in home prices was pretty damn dramatic, but here we have a problem that's gone hopelessly out of control and reached hysterical proportions. And for all the money that college students and grad students pay - whether with their parents' money, or with loans, scholarships, or tips - precisely what is it used for?

Well, let's look at my story. While studying at USC, an outrageously expensive school, I always told my peers and professors that I intended to pursue a PhD in political science, and afterwards to take what comes my way. I always received encouragement after telling people this, but I was cautioned that the PhD program would be very difficult. However, when I graduated and applied for PhD programs, I decided to network with academics in the schools where I intended to do my graduate studies, and they had some different words of caution. One of them, I won't disclose which one, told me that his program had about 20 spots for usually more than 500 applicants. Another school gave me a similar estimate. I was also told twice the I should probably obtain a masters degree first. And lastly, I was told that doctoral political science programs were typically seven years long a few decades ago, but now are almost always five years. Even more ironic, in my opinion, is that my professors never told me things would be grim with just a liberal arts degree. My inference: they don't want the word to get out.

So it seems student tuition is spent, essentially, on inflation, without giving students much in return. I guess liberal arts programs are silently becoming an anachronism. So are we becoming, increasingly, a technocratic society? And if so, then is our education becoming more authoritarian, top-down and dogmatic? I would yes and no to each of these questions. Let's first look at the first of them. If you go to the website of any major university you will probably see that it began by teaching liberal arts (or theology at the older universities), then expanded into law, business, medicine, government, engineering, public health, fine arts, communications, etc. Science is a quasi-liberal art, and it joined these universities in their later days. So if the trend now is away from liberal arts, well, I think that's been the case for a long time. And I think this is for good reasons. Seriously. How many Shakespeare scholars do we need at one time? In an ideal world, we would all have the opportunity, and the motivation, to read Shakespearean plays and Socratic dialogues and the Rig Veda, and to study these works under the guidance of an expert. However, it's difficult to find money to pay for a liberal arts education, either before or after it occurs. A liberal arts education used to be a more favored option a couple generations ago, the reason being that much fewer people received a college education, which means a BA was sufficient to get above the competition. Since then college enrollment has increased enormously (although not as much as I thought), so people are choosing majors that prepare them more directly for their careers. There are still liberal arts majors, but these people expect to either get a graduate degree or become housewives. And that's another matter, which is an integral part of the same trend. Consider, for instance, that these days, there are people who get numerous masters and doctoral degrees because they never succeeded in starting a career. Two generations ago there were very few people who considered attending graduate school.

I think that by choosing these career-oriented majors, and by getting graduate degrees, young people are making our future workforce more productive and capable, and of course they are making themselves more capable intellectually. The only problem, of course, is the money involved in funding their education, but students are better prepared to profit from their education if they study anything besides liberal arts. And why are liberal arts not profitable? Well, essentially, it's because they're not useful. Anyone who has studies a social science at the graduate level knows how difficult it is to make an empirical argument. Our methods are primitive. I know that my future as a political scientist will be difficult because the social sciences give us very little to say that's worthwhile. However, that might be changing soon. The reason is the future of neuroscience. Developments in neuroscience are already transforming some aspects of our science, and they have a long, long, long way to go. I admit I've only read one book on this subject, The Neuro Revolution by Zack Lynch, but I have spoken to people who have insider knowledge and confirm Lynch's argument. One thing he discusses in his book is the future role of neuroscience in the social sciences. I was very excited by this prediction, because it meant that social scientists could finally benefit from the advantages of "real" science.

And that takes us back to the beginning. Our education system, for all its profound problems, is still competitive, and our workforce is still hyper-competitive as a result. But for the most part, our education is still very parochial in ways most of us aren't aware of. Some schools are more obviously authoritarian in nature. However, even the more typical schools are failing to modernize us in some ways. In their teaching methods, some of my teachers were the envy of the most radical hippies. The teachers also receive highly trained in teaching methods, since in "smart" states like California they often cannot stay competitive without at least a masters degree, and their training is primarily in method. However, in the content of their curriculum, many of my teachers were thoroughly retro. I should note that the school district I attended was considered extremely progressive, competitive and cosmopolitan. However, before beginning college, I never heard a teacher criticize a religious belief or doctrine (except religious violence, but they pretended this wasn't a doctrine). And I think my history classes were starved of new perspectives. Did the US triumph over the rest of the world because a few people in the 18th century said we value freedom? I think it has more to do with physical realities - geography, economics, technology, and the general guns, germs and steel. Meanwhile, history and English teachers know that they can lose their career over any word they say, since it's either racist or offensive of someone's religion or male chauvinist or it promotes alcohol ...

Personally I never felt an urge to hurl insults at the teacher during class, or to approach the teacher's supervisor and denounce him or her. However, I did make impersonal comments that were informed by my own interest in other parts of the world. Looking back, I don't blame my teachers, but I blame American culture for being insular, and I guess for emphasizing skits and posters rather than information. As I said, my school was considered extremely cosmopolitan, and the town was about 30% Asian and 20% Hispanic. However, the history curriculum was about 80% white, and 70% white American. World War I received four or five class periods in my freshman year world history class, but the teacher never mentioned Bismarck and unification of Germany and Italy, the Spanish Civil War, the reconstruction and re-ordering of Europe after WWII. In my four years of high school all I learned about Latin American history was from unassigned reading to satisfy my own curiosity (with the exception of the Mexican-American War and some give-and-take between European monarchs). Also, looking at things from the rest of the world's perspective, don't you think the Korean War was more significant than the Vietnam War? But how much time do we learn about the Korean War? The Cultural Revolution was never mentioned, and the Great Leap Forward was only discussed as a side note for a few minutes. The Mongol Empire was not mentioned once in my world history class, my 8th grade sorry-attempt-at-world cultures class, or any other social studies class prior to college. Nor were the Maurya Empire, the Gupta Empire or the Mogul Empire, the second of which invented the "0" and introduced it to the Chinese number system, and to the Middle Eastern number systems, the latter of which introduced it to Europeans in addition to the "Arabic numerals." And how many world history teachers know that the Arabs gave us the words algebra, algorithm, chemistry (via "alchemy"), and a long list of other words. Granted, it's common knowledge that other civilizations were profoundly more sophisticated than the Europeans during their "dark ages," so of course our world history teachers are aware of that, but they don't seem determined to make their students aware. In my case, the criticisms that came most easily were of my teachers' pronunciations of Pinyin spellings of Chinese proper nouns: Xi Jinping, Deng Xiaoping, Ci Xi, Guangzhou, the Qing Dynasty ... some teachers have probably learned some Pinyin, given China's ascendancy as a world power, but I think most world history teachers have not. And why is it that my high school was the only one in a vast radius that offered Chinese as a foreign language? And while we're at it, why don't we learn about the Taiping Rebellion in the 19th Century, an attempt to institute Christianity in China that was not suppressed in a timely manner, and consequently initiated a war that caused more deaths than World War I? And why don't teachers talk about Christianity and Islam being used to justify female genital mutilation, or stoning to death a 13-year-old girl for having been raped? Or how about the Jirgas settling disputes by marrying a man from the plaintiff's family to a woman from the defendant's family who is often a teenager and sometimes an infant? Or why not talk about the history of the Bible, and its historical context? Why the Old Testament is so atrocious because it was written for an expanding empire, meanwhile the New Testament was written by a beleaguered group of dissidents afraid of raising their voice, so their message is generally dovish and insubstantive, and therefore more familiar to them because it's more suited for a church service.

So, we seem to have confirmed a stereotype: Americans live in a pragmatic culture, and our education system reinforces pragmatic values. Most of us are not under-educated, but we're generally not very cosmopolitan, and not very intellectual. This has been our reputation since Tocqueville's time, and probably well before. Granted, if it's also true now, the reason might be pure coincidence. Either way, our society now seems rather utilitarian - we make money, and we invent things, but we don't sit back and reflect. And as I said in the beginning of this blog post, Europeans write far, far more books, per capita, than we do. Many also have a higher rate of passport ownership, even though most Europeans do not need a passport to enter a country in the Schengen Zone. And, for structural reasons, our monopoly on first-rate liberal arts schools is dissolving. We will inevitably become more cosmopolitan as a result of immigration, however these immigrants tend to be extremely religious. In any case, change is inevitable, so whether our society becomes more liberal or conservative, it will take a different form. Despite immigration and the rise of evangelism, young people are becoming more secular one way or another, and they are becoming more educated. And from our television we know that criticism of religion is increasingly a part of our zeitgeist. Secularization seems to have happened in Europe earlier, but I doubt it'll miss us. And lastly, the age of political correctness seems to have been tapering away for the past decade or so. So I think teachers and students are both becoming willing to give and receive insight that is not politically correct, or is politically correct but not superficially, and either way is not racist at all. Of course, it's universal etiquette that teachers don't give political opinions. But politics should not be religious, nor should people. I think this message should, over the next few decades, become carefully communicated. But very carefully, because the bible is still considered constitutional.

Religion: my own story

Essentially, many people love religion, and cherish the opportunity to speak to God. Personally, I was the same way until God began responding, and talking to me. My religious background was rather bizarre. I come from an American old-timer background, where every stripe of religion is represented, including Quaker, Shaker, Hussite, Huguenot ... so essentially fusion Protestant. When I was growing up I thought of myself as just Protestant. I loved it. I loved everything that I associated with religion: the sound of an organ, the simple elegance of church buildings, the unusual friendliness of people when they're at church, the cute little rhymes that were written up somewhere.


When I was about eleven, religion started to take on a new meaning. I started to focus on the substantive aspects of religion, and to ask myself "what is it telling me to do and think?" Fortunately, around the same point in my life, I would receive an answer. I might have been experiencing something that most people go through. When I was doing research on Mesopotamia, I would open the "M" volume of the World Book encyclopedia, and see a map of the Middle East without turning any pages. When I turned on the television, it seemed like the episode of the South Park was directed at me personally. And the fact that I was a D-student with no friends must have been a deliberate part of a grand plan. And if so, then how should I correctly fulfill my role?


I needed things to be made simple, since I knew the clock was ticking on me, and I didn't want to make any mistakes. My default assumption was that God wanted us to do anything we didn't want to do. Otherwise, why would we need religion? I knew that Catholics wake up at 6 AM every Sunday to attend mass. Muslims fast every day for a month and keep their women locked up in a cellar. Devout Jews dress up like pimps, even during the summer, and they follow so many dietary restrictions that their food is garbage. Furthermore, I knew that people across the globe were killing people in the name of religion - from Arafat to Milosevic to Eric Randolph. Who really wants to get up and kill someone? It seemed to me like most people wouldn't be willing to without a divine mandate.

I wasn't quite motivated to kill anyone, so I didn't, although I knew God might make me pay for this. But I did other things that I thought God might want. Better to be safe than sorry. For example, there was a period of about five months when I would drink a certain amount of vegetable oil, or olive oil every night; initially I would drink 1/8 cup, but eventually I would find myself drinking 8 or 9 1/8 cup measures per night. Many years later, I would ask a psychiatrist if these "requests" from God constituted psychotic delusions. She did not give me a direct answer, but she gave me the impression that they are not delusions because I did not think I was physically hearing them. They were, more accurately, abstract conceptions of what messages I might be receiving. So essentially I was in the same boat as everyone else, except that I stopped to think about it in a way that most people hadn't. But paradoxically, because I thought about it, I would arrive at another deduction: I was not allowed to think about it. So I had an obligation to maintain all my existing ideas about God and His messages, not matter how absurd they seemed. And to me, the cruelest aspect of religion was that it necessarily limited my intellect. When people talk about anything that assumes the existence of God, they can rarely do so in a way that is intellectually-sound. I was fully aware of this, but I knew I did't have a choice.

And this was the status quo until my senior year of high school, when I finally abandoned religion on the following grounds: although religion might have been my supreme, unconditional obligation, the likeliness of this hypothesis was so small, and the cruelty of religion to humanity was so great, that I should prioritize human life instead. And to me that meant abandoning religion one thousand percent. This was about eight years ago, and since then I have never looked back, in fact my conviction has continually become stronger. So what am I now? I've described myself as a cynic, an agnostic, a "passionate atheist" - the label keeps changing. But what matters is that I'm unrestrained, and therefore have the privilege of thinking. And at this point in my life, no one can tell me I'll go to Hell for it.

The absurd fantasy that is religious toleration

We've all seen the bumper sticker with the word "Coexist," spelled out with symbols of religions, genders, pagans, hippies, and Bruce Lee movies. I guess the other denominations can coexist peacefully, but not the religions, because peace is a fundamental contradiction of Western religion. Or more precisely, peace contradicts the fundamentals of Abrahamic religions, because these religions - except for the parts of the Old Testament that no one really reads - are monotheistic (so are some of their offshoots, such as Sikhism). And if there's only one true God, then other people's Gods cannot be correct. Why do you think it is that the Bible demands genocide, explicitly and unambiguously, several times:  Numbers 25: 3-5, Numbers 31: 17-18,  Deuteronomy 20: 16-18, Samuel 15:3, Isiah 13:1-19. I should note that this list only includes the genocides that God explicitly instructed His followers to commit, not the ones (as in Joshua: 6-8) that were committed with more ambiguous instructions from God, or the ones that God committed Himself, as with Sodom and Gomorrah. I also concede that these genocides took place on a much  smaller scale than in later stages of history, so some people might not consider some of these demands genocidal. However, I should note that at this time cities were often considered nations with their own ethnicity, so in that sense the destruction of "every man and woman, child, goat and ass" in a city could be considered genocide. Or, to look at this issue from a different angle, some people think they will go to heaven for killing people of other faiths. Are they right? Can people go to hell for not killing people of other faiths? I guess we can't really know, except from personal experience.

Before I discuss religious violence I want to discuss something that happens very frequently on a smaller scale, and that is desecration. For instance, does the Bible justify damaging a Quran by putting it in the toilet and flushing? Not explicitly, but it would be difficult to make a strong argument to the contrary. Here are some desecration passages which occur within too consecutive genocide passage (which I considered too passive to list above): Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Deuteronomy 7:23-26. According to these passages, it is absolutely, absolutely justified, if not obligatory, to destroy Qurans in the manner of, say, Rev. Terry Jones.

Also on a smaller scale are the murders that usually occur independently of political institutions. It's well known that all countries, with the possible exception of St Kitt and Nevis (although only by a small margin), have a higher murder the rate the more religious they are; if you don't believe me you can take it from Wikipedia or from any other source. Why are murders more common among religious people? It must be a factor that that Abrahamic religious texts are preoccupied with the subject of killing. There are many other reasons, though, that do not relate directly to my argument. For example the people who commit murders are usually very uneducated and lead lives which are so hopeless that they can benefit, in some ways, from even arbitrary guidance. It's also true that religion is used to justify these murders, although the reasons have more to do with religion generally than with the idiosyncrasies of Abrahamic religion. I concede that American gang symbols are generally not religious in nature (although some might argue that the Crips are an exception). I would guess that sincere religious discourse is very common in American gangs, that it arises in such contexts as bonding rituals and motivational discourse, and that it also occurs more directly in conjunction with killing. Plus, I doubt there are many Protestant members of the Latin King. Furthermore, besides the major gangs, there are thousands of active gangs in the US, so there must be some that explicitly profess a particular religion.

And then there are the more formal conflicts, closely associated with political institutions, that use religion as a justification. Among the conflicts that I have listed below, many - perhaps most - could have occurred independently of religion. Ok, but I'll leave it to the readers to determine which ones. And even though these wars could have been initiated without religion, they were not, and therefore they were of a different nature than secular wars. The reader might note that the most of wars I listed were extremely nasty and unnecessary, whereas many secular wars were not.

I want to emphasize that most of these conflicts were not merely the work of religious people; they were started and continued by religious institutions: religious establishments, governments, rebel forces. Since the 18th century, governments have been urged to undergo a "separation of church and state." The value of a secular government, even without a secular population, has been demonstrated time and again since then. After European countries secularized their governments, religious wars between these countries have ended altogether, without a single exception that I can think of. Religious wars continued, mostly in developing countries, either because the government was blatantly religious (as with many Middle Eastern countries even now), or because the secular government was not holding the country together, or otherwise because a few of the people were driven to violence on their own accord (as with the post-Civil War terrorist organizations in Northern Ireland). And if I haven't made my point clear enough, let's look at the first two verses of the national anthem of a country that does not formally separate church and state:

God save our gracious Queen
Long live our noble Queen
God save the Queen
Send her victorious
Happy and Glorious
Long to live over us
God save the Queen!

Oh Lord our Lord arise
Scatter Her enemies
And make them fall
Confound their politics
Frustrate their knavish tricks
On Thee our hope we fix
God save us all!

In another post, I am listing all the instances of explicitly religious violence, initiated by a force loyal to an Abrahamic faith, that I can find any account of, since the death of Christ. This list includes violence includes Jewish rebellions against Roman rule; the spread of Christianity through the Middle East and Europe; conflicts initiated by Byzantines against regions practicing other religions; the spread of Islam through the Middle East, most of Africa, and a belt line that spans across the Asian continent, replacing entire civilizations along the way; conflicts between Sunni and Shi'a; conflicts between Byzantines and Catholics; the Crusades; the utter annihilation of Buddhist civilization in Central Asia by Islamic khans of the Chagatai Khanate and the Ilkhanante; the Ghuri genocide in India; conflicts involving medieval splinter groups of Christianity; clergy-sponsored persecutions of Jews; prosecutions of witches and other undesirables; the Reconquista; conflicts between Europeans and Ottomans; conflicts between Ottomans and their other neighbors that had not endorsed Sunni Islam as a state religion; the Episcopal, Papal, Spanish, Portuguese, Mexican and Roman Inquisitions; persecutions of Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Christians in Mogul India, followed by their responses; conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in Europe in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries; in what we now call "New Spain," there was a religious genocide on a large enough scale to create an all-Catholic empire that encompasses what is now Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerta Rico, 21 American states, some bits of Alabama and Mississippi, parts of Canada, most of the Philippines, and the obscure Pacific islands that the IRS personnel can recite; the Western Hemisphere has also witnessed more passive genocide, assisted by friendly Jesuits, which created a mostly-Catholic empire comprising what we now call the Viceroyalty of Peru, the territory of which includes what is now Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, parts of Uruguay and of Paraguay, and some snippets of Brazil; there were also the religious conflicts in the English colonies in the Americas - which are a a series of catfights compared to their Spanish counterparts - and which include the Mystic Massacre and other explicitly religious Indian massacres, the destruction and Protestant remake of a French Jesuit mission in what is now Maine, the Battle of the Severn, some religiously-motivated homocides resulting from requiring Protestants to own guns while confiscating guns from Catholics, and some prosecutions of heretics, witches, and religious minorities; back in the Eastern Hemisphere there were the conflicts between Europeans and Berbers; the struggle by the Wahhabi for control of the Arabian peninsula; the conflict in China initiated by a group of revolutionaries who called themselves the Taiping, meaning "Extreme Peace," who wanted to establish a theocratic Christian republic under the leadership of Hong Xiuquan (supposedly the brother of Jesus Christ), but who instead caused a war resulting in 20-30 million deaths by most expert estimates, and at least 40 million if we include the other rebellions that occurred in China at the same time because the Taiping provided the right opportunity; Christian terrorism in the US after the Civil War; religious wars in India following British partition; religious wars in the Middle East following British and French partition; the Second Sudanese Civil War; the super-sized Islamic insurgencies in the Philippines, Tajikistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Algeria, Libya, Chad, Eritrea and Mali; the role of Pastor Ntoumi's Ninja militia in the Republic of Congo's civil war; the Anti-Sikh Riots, and terrorist attacks by Sikhs; persecutions of Hindus in Bangladesh; the decades-long struggle by the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda and its vicinity to establish a state founded on the Ten Commandments, which as of yet they have not succeeded in doing, but they have left two million people displaced, one hundred thousand dead, twenty thousand children kidnapped (most of them girls), and after 24 years of all these atrocities and no state, Obama sent a small contingent of troops to assist the Ugandan government in weakening the LRA, and Rush Limbaugh opposed this intervention on the following grounds:

So that’s a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians in Sudan, Uganda, and — (interruption) no, I’m not kidding. Jacob Tapper just reported it. Now, are we gonna help the Egyptians wipe out the Christians? Wouldn’t you say that we are? I mean the Coptic Christians are being wiped out, but it wasn’t just Obama that supported that. The conservative intelligentsia thought it was an outbreak of democracy. Now they’ve done a 180 on that, but they forgot that they supported it in the first place. Now they’re criticizing it.

Lord’s Resistance Army objectives. I have them here. “To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people.” Now, again Lord’s Resistance Army is who Obama sent troops to help nations wipe out. The objectives of the Lord’s Resistance Army, what they’re trying to accomplish with their military action in these countries is the following:

"To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people; to fight for the immediate restoration of the competitive multiparty democracy in Uganda; to see an end to gross violation of human rights and dignity of Ugandans; to ensure the restoration of peace and security in Uganda, to ensure unity, sovereignty, and economic prosperity beneficial to all Ugandans, and to bring to an end the repressive policy of deliberate marginalization of groups of people who may not agree with the LRA ideology.” Those are the objectives of the group that we are fighting, or who are being fought and we are joining in the effort to remove them from the battlefield.

Even if they were successful, I think the last thing we need in the world is a state whose founding ideology is the Ten Commandments (just look at the first two). And lastly, the past few decades have seen terrorist attacks by Islamist extremists in North America, Europe, Israel, Russian and the Caucasus region, India, Southeast Asia and elsewhere; and we have seen acts of Christian terrorism in Northern Ireland, and also elsewhere by such people as Eric Randolph, Anders Behring Brevik, Wade Michael Page and other participants in the RAHOWA (Racial Holy War), anti-abortion terrorists, the Army of God, the Lambs of Christian, the Christian Identity movements and the hundreds of other Christian hate groups in the US. Every few days these home-grown terrorists commit an attack on a Mosque or an abortion clinic or the like. It's an ongoing thing.

And if I had to list conflicts where religion was a likely factor, but not an official justification, then that would become career. Let's take some examples from the 20th century. One prime example is the slew of wars in Southeast Europe in the 1990s, which were fought between two or more political entities, governmental or non-governmental, with the most involved aggressors on both sides being predominated by one religion different from the other side. I guess the same is true of the Balkan Wars that culminated in the outbreak of World War I. The above description is also true of the Nigerian Civil War, Cypriot Civil War, the Sri Lankan Civil War, the First and Second Eritrean Civil War, the Armenia-Azerbaijan War, the East Prigorodny conflict, the Chechen Wars, the Jammu/Kashmir conflict (since the countries have different predominant religions), conflicts in Myanmar between Rohingya and Rakhine, and the series of conflicts in East Timor in recent decades. The Iran-Iraq War took place between (1) a Sunni leader, in the early stages of establishing a quasi-socialist secular state, creating tensions with the Shi'a majority and (2) a theocratic Shi'a leader backed by an Ayatollah. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was not so different in its framework. The genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire during World War I, and shortly after, was not explicitly religious, but it was committed by a theocratic Islamic regime against several ethnic minorities that were almost exclusively Christian (the Armenians, Assyrians, Pontic Greeks, and Anatolian Greeks). The Nazi government targeted religious and/or ethnic groups based on a secular ideology, although it received enormous assistance from local churches, which collected birth certificates from the community in order to locate Jews and other minorities. Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem, a fervid Catholic who gradually made Catholicism a quasi-official state religion, discriminated generously against Buddhists by denying them arms when organizing citizen militias, by outlawing public practices of their religion and by organizing large-scale persecutions of Buddhists who were following the rules. The 1979 Iranian Revolution was initiated and led by clerics who resented the monarchs' neglect for the theocratic amendments to the country's 1906 Constitution. And needless to say, the word "God" is a staple in war-related discourse; some examples include Bush's God-binges during the Global Action Movie on Terror, the addition of the phrase "one nation under God" to our flag salute during the height of the Cold War, the ironic use of the phrase "God on our side" by Bob Dylan ...

And the 20th century has also seen the reverse of religious warfare on an apocalyptic scale - with any number of mass-prosecutions of Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and other religious groups by secular totalitarian governments, not to mention the US government in Waco, TX. In all these scenarios, who, precisely, were the good and bad guys? These deaths would not have occurred if the prosecuted had abandoned their religion first. And when these people still insist on practicing their religion, well, that's just brilliant. The Tajikistan Civil War took more than one million lives from a country with fewer than seven million people at the start of the war. The Taiping Rebellion created a civil war that took 20-30 million lives from a country whose population has since grown nearly four-fold. Moreover, an uprising of the sort in China might be more problematic in the 21st century, not only because of the greater population size, but also because the government has generally become more entrenched and more involved in every aspect of society than in the 19 century, so the near-removal of the current government would cause even more destabilization. So in the 21st century, does China really need Falun Gong practitioners? Does it need foreign missionaries converting millions of their people, in blatant violation of their visas, to non-state-sponsored Christian faiths when state-sponsored Protestant and Catholic churches are available? What if the state only kills a few of these troublemakers, painfully and overtly, to scare the rest into compliance so that everyone else can live in peace? I think it's well-understood that the Falun Gong practitioners, in general, were actively looking for trouble by the time the government began cracking down on them.

The fact is, people of all religions - Christians, Muslims, Jews, Druze, Yazids, Yarsan, Zoroastrians, Manicheans, Mazdaks, Mithraics, Bahai, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Bakhtis, Meivazhi, Buddhists, Daoists, Shinto, Zulu, Peyoteros, Selknams, Wyandots, Indian Shakers, Vodouists, Rastafarians, etc, they all have one thing in common: without their religion they'd be fine. Freedom of speech is a prerequisite for effective democracy; freedom of religion is not. As I am arguing in an unfinished blog post, I think the Abrahamic religions are inexorably an obstacle to freedom of speech. Given that, though, when a reliably democratic government is in place, freedom of religion can usually be created without too many problems. However, unfortunately, many countries are still very autocratic. And how should an autocratic government interpret the overt practice of a religion that is expressly forbidden? Yes, that's the only right answer.