religion, islam, negative-effectsIs religion to blame for honor killing, or would it occur even if there wasn’t religion?
Background: Most places that have honor killing are either majority-Muslim or used to be Muslim controlled, but I don’t know if that indicates causation or not. I’m not aware of any religious texts explicitly condoning honor killing.
Edit: There’s some responses saying that you’d need ESP to know whether honor killing would occur without religion. I’ll try to make it less difficult: an answer saying “I don’t know whether religion causes honor killing, but there’s no convincing evidence to support the claim” would be on-topic.
So long as cultures believe they have the authority given to them by their god(s) and their earth bound religious leaders to commit such acts of inhumanity, then yes. Religion is to blame and belief systems should be challenged. We are after all living in the 21st Century.
It’s to blame for making modesty such a huge ‘moral’ issue to conservative minded people, if not how they express their disagreement (by stoning little girls).
Since you are referring to the religiously motivated killing of someone for violating the tenet of religion, yes, religion causes religious killing. However that is a truncation of the whole picture.
If you are actually interested in the phenomena underlying honor killing, as well as capital and corporal punishment and pre-emptive war, you might actually reconstruct your question around "scapegoating" instead.
A medical definition of scapegoating is: "Process in which the mechanisms of projection or displacement are utilised in focusing feelings of aggression, hostility, frustration, etc., upon another individual or group; the amount of blame being unwarranted." Scapegoating is a tactic often employed to characterize an entire group of individuals according to the unethical or immoral conduct of a small number of individuals belonging to that group, also known as guilt by association. wikipedia
There are very early examples of this behavior in many societies around the world from early on. Further,
In psychopathology, projection is an especially commonly used defense mechanism in people with the following personality disorders: antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder, psychopathy wikipedia and wikipedia
To refer to Occam's razor, if we can all assume that psychology and its myriad pathologies are wholly capable of producing the social defense mechanism of scape-goating, does that mean religion is causatative or just correlated? I prefer the simpler answer as it means that perhaps we should be concerned by forms of honor killing, including those not involving religion.
Certainly not.
Look at any primitive culture with a warrior tradition, be it the pygmies of Africa, the tribesmen of New Guinea, or the warrior tribes of the American Southwest. In all of these case any many more, the role of using inter-tribal or inter-clan honor or grudge killing as a method of reinforcing social norms is incredibly well documented, from the mytho-poetic studies of Campbell to mainstream social anthropologists.
Take the case of the Yanomamo tribes. While they do not have a 'western' sexual code of honor, up to 60% of the deaths in a village are from warfare, and the vast majority of the reasons given for inter-tribal warfare are based on sexual theft or abduction. Yanomamo It's not at all complicated to see sexual based warfare elaborated into a complex sexual taboo such as we see in other places.
Honor killing, sexual based warfare, etc are only unique in that they cross all cultures.
While religion is a horrible price to pay for ignorance and brain dysfunction, it can't be blamed for all human ills.
I think this is a really interesting question, though it might end up being closed due to causing argumentation (I hope not).
I think the way to answer this question is to talk about whether the Koran/Qur’an enables/fosters honor killing as an approach to dealing with the behavior in question. Additionally, one might want to consider the Haddith and other Islamic religious texts.
Here is something I found from the Koran:
[4.15] And as for those who are guilty of an indecency from among your women, call to witnesses against them four (witnesses) from among you; then if they bear witness confine them to the houses until death takes them away or Allah opens some way for them.
Most of the injunctions to actually kill people seem to come from the Hadith, however. There are a lot of these, most involving pre-marital sex.
Given that there are explicit declarations to kill people who commit adultery in the religion, it is therefore the religion’s fault that honor killings persist today in places like Europe and the developed Islamic nations in which they are found.
In Israel, ultra religious (Jewish) families will excommunicate family member for various misdeeds. While this isn’t active killing, as far as the family and friends are concerned the person is dead. They are no longer part of the family, they cannot get a job in the community and without the more liberal-minded non-ultra religious, they would in-fact be dead.
I may be wrong but I consider that honour is ascribed to a person as a measure of observation of tradition / faith. It is a metric used to evaluate if an individually is worthy to take part in a society. Fail and the punishment in this instance is fatal.
Remember that some western societies who don’t practice capital punishment only gave it up recently. Some states in the USA still do but the qualification for that punishment is not directly tied to religious defiance. Does that prove honour killing is nothing to do with religion? No! Does it prove that it can be separate? I like to think so.
Blaming religion is akin to blaming video games or movies. Yes, religion has the power to change behavior but I don’t think it extends to killing another human.
I often wonder about supposed “laws” that make something like that okay. Is it really lawful to kill another human in some countries for no other reason than honor? Or is it more that the state doesn’t want to get involved or doesn’t have the resources to stop that sort of thing?
Primarily talking in context of India, where I belong, and where in the last few decades the world has seen the most brutal and barbaric cases of Honor killings. Condition has worsened this much that love has changed its entire meaning over here, Now people fearfully ask for religion and caste even before doing friendship. Going to roots, caste system was introduced long ago in the name of religion with intentions of gripping most of the powers (say money,land even knowledge) in few hands. It came down centuries and haunting whole society even today. People do obey in such illogical discriminations and force their younger generations to follow it. Even education has failed at a great extent to evoke people’s logical thinking. When it comes to the Question of religion, they choose religion first and human-life thereafter. The so called enlightening-books and the so called Ulema, Pandits (traders of religion) remains always true even if their conscious is against them. Such blind-faith is the only reason behind such brutal acts. I would say human would have been in much better condition if there had not been any religion.
I think it’s interesting that Atheists seem to always blame religion first. there was a widely noted study done in 2005 about this. the book is worth reading (it’s in my queue but i haven’t read it yet):
http://www.amazon.com/Dying-Win-Strategic-Suicide-Terrorism/dp/0812973380/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1293122592&sr=8-1
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