Historical Book Recomendation Thread

[LightSpectra]

When half the world's population are Abrahamists, I don't think that monotheism is going away any time soon.

If by "Abrahamist" you mean "worshiper of the one God of Abraham" (i.e. Judaism, Nicene Christianity, Islam, Baha'i, and other faiths), then half the world is probably not Abrahamist. This is a problem that's actually quite severe in political dialectic, and I've considered making a thread on this in the Tavern a couple times, but it's a daunting work.

We have to distinguish between one's credo (what they believe in their innermost thoughts), their confession (what they publicly say their faith is), and their ethnicity (which is based on one's identity in a community and almost completely disregards credo). Why is this important? Well, we have the following cases: (1) people that are labeled as monotheists because they were entered into their particular faith as children, but as adults apostatized (e.g. a man baptized in a Lutheran parish, who is counted as a tenant because of his baptismal certificate but is a confessed atheist); (2) people who self-identify as a certain faith because they live in a community where it is dangerous not to homogenize, but nevertheless have nontheistic credo (e.g. a secular atheist in Iran who attends a Shi'a mosque on Fridays for his own safety); and (3) one who identifies with an ethnic group that is nominally of a certain faith but whose credo differs (e.g. an Israeli Jewish woman that confesses to be an Orthodox Jew for reasons that are political, nationalistic and communal, but whose actual confession is a complex mish-mash of Judaism, Buddhism and deism).

Once you filter out those three exceptions from the counted number of "Abrahamists" in the world, the number could dip into well below a billion, possibly under half a billion.

 

[Cutlass]

If by "Abrahamist" you mean "worshiper of the one God of Abraham" (i.e. Judaism, Nicene Christianity, Islam, Baha'i, and other faiths), then half the world is probably not Abrahamist. This is a problem that's actually quite severe in political dialectic, and I've considered making a thread on this in the Tavern a couple times, but it's a daunting work.

We have to distinguish between one's credo (what they believe in their innermost thoughts), their confession (what they publicly say their faith is), and their ethnicity (which is based on one's identity in a community and almost completely disregards credo). Why is this important? Well, we have the following cases: (1) people that are labeled as monotheists because they were entered into their particular faith as children, but as adults apostatized (e.g. a man baptized in a Lutheran parish, who is counted as a tenant because of his baptismal certificate but is a confessed atheist); (2) people who self-identify as a certain faith because they live in a community where it is dangerous not to homogenize, but nevertheless have nontheistic credo (e.g. a secular atheist in Iran who attends a Shi'a mosque on Fridays for his own safety); and (3) one who identifies with an ethnic group that is nominally of a certain faith but whose credo differs (e.g. an Israeli Jewish woman that confesses to be an Orthodox Jew for reasons that are political, nationalistic and communal, but whose actual confession is a complex mish-mash of Judaism, Buddhism and deism).

Once you filter out those three exceptions from the counted number of "Abrahamists" in the world, the number could dip into well below a billion, possibly under half a billion.

You think that 2 to 3 billion people are faking believing in god?

 

[LightSpectra]

You think that 2 to 3 billion people are faking believing in god?

That's not an accurate simplification of anything I said.

 

[Cutlass]

That's not an accurate simplification of anything I said.

Then I have no idea what you are trying to say. There are over 1.5billion Muslims, 2.2billion Christians. And you somehow don't think more than half a billion of them are real. So that's some 3billion people who you claim that their faith isn't real. Why?

 

[LightSpectra]

Then I have no idea what you are trying to say. There are over 1.5billion Muslims, 2.2billion Christians. And you somehow don't think more than half a billion of them are real. So that's some 3billion people who you claim that their faith isn't real. Why?

Are you capable of reading posts without turning carefully worded sentences into these wild general statements?

I'm saying that nobody really knows how many Abrahamic monotheists there are in the world. Somebody can be counted as Christian/Muslim/Jewish/etc. in a survey, either from erroneous polling data or because they self-identified as such for ethnic/safety reasons.

 

[_random_]

So does anybody know any good biographies of Ho Chi Minh?

 

[Cutlass]

Are you capable of reading posts without turning carefully worded sentences into these wild general statements?

I'm saying that nobody really knows how many Abrahamic monotheists there are in the world. Somebody can be counted as Christian/Muslim/Jewish/etc. in a survey, either from erroneous polling data or because they self-identified as such for ethnic/safety reasons.

Once you filter out those three exceptions from the counted number of "Abrahamists" in the world, the number could dip into well below a billion, possibly under half a billion.

This is you. This is you dismissing some 3 billion people from the ranks of "Abrahamists". And for no actual reason. While those exceptions no doubt exist, it is you that is assuming it applies to 2/3 or more of them. Which is an utterly ridiculous number.

 

[Plotinus]

Cutlass, LS's point is, in part, that people identify with particular religions for cultural reasons, without making any claims about their beliefs. E.g. David Cameron claims to be a "cultural Christian", which basically means that he likes evensong. He's not making any claim about whether he actually believes in God or anything like that. If in fact he doesn't, he's not "faking" belief in God even though he identifies as a Christian, because to him, identifying as a Christian isn't a claim to belief.

There's nothing controversial about the point that reckoning religious adherents is very difficult because there are many different ways of defining them. In the UK, when people are asked on censuses to identify their religion, most claim to be Christian. Yet when surveyed about actual beliefs and behaviour, relatively few people claim to believe Christian doctrines or go to church. So is a high proportion of the UK population Christian, or a low proportion? It depends entirely on what your definition of "Christian" is, and there's no right answer to that, at least not from a sociological point of view (theologians might disagree).

The relevance here is that the claim was that most of the world is monotheist, and I would agree with LS that one should be circumspect about this. It may well be true that more than half the world's population can be counted as members of religions that are monotheist - by some criterion of "being a member of a religion". It doesn't follow that all those people are themselves actually monotheists. This is partly because, as LS says, some people might claim to be or act as monotheists when in fact they're not, but I think it's actually more because, as I just said, many people will claim religious identity without making belief claims at all. Judaism is an obvious example - there are lots of people who identify as Jewish whilst being outspoken agnostics or atheists, and they don't see this as inconsistent because they think of Jewishness as a cultural thing rather than to do with what one actually believes.

 

[LightSpectra]

Thank you Plotinus.

This is you. This is you dismissing some 3 billion people from the ranks of "Abrahamists". And for no actual reason. While those exceptions no doubt exist, it is you that is assuming it applies to 2/3 or more of them. Which is an utterly ridiculous number.

I said the number could dip below 500m, which was part of my message that "nobody really knows how many Abrahamic monotheists there are in the world."

Why are you so focused on making a strawman out of my posts rather than actually paying mind to some of the things I've brought up?

 

[Cutlass]

I don't see any strawman at all. Now I can see Plotinus' point that it's very difficult to get hard numbers. But not getting hard numbers and making a claim that the majority are not what they claim to be is miles apart.

 

[_random_]

I don't see any strawman at all. Now I can see Plotinus' point that it's very difficult to get hard numbers. But not getting hard numbers and making a claim that the majority are not what they claim to be is miles apart.

I think he was using an arbitrary number to demonstrate his point that the actual number is well off of any official counts, not making any real claim as such.

 

[LightSpectra]

I don't see any strawman at all.

making a claim that the majority are not what they claim to be is miles apart.

lawl

"I never made a strawman of your argument, especially not when I attributed something to you that you didn't actually say"

 

[TheLastOne36]

Anyone have anything (Book, or otherwise) good on the Anschluss and the Munich Agreement?

I've recently been learning in depth about Polish inter-war politics and I am discovering that (unsurprisingly) a lot of it is tied and reactionary to German policies and actions in central europe, so I feel it is in my best interest to learn about the Anschluss and Munich Agreement as well.

edit: Anything on the Klaipeda/Memel Convention and eventual German Ultimatum to Lithuania is in my scope of interest as well.

 

[Traitorfish]

You think that 2 to 3 billion people are faking believing in god?

Small point of order, "believing in god" and "monotheism" are not the same thing. The earliest forms of Abrahamism were pretty inarguably henotheist, and there's a case for saying that most lay-Abrahamism has continued in something like that vein until quite recently. You'll find huge stretches of Asia, Africa and South America, and even certain parts of North America and Europe, where those identifying as "Christian" and "Muslim" still invest a fairly considerable amount of energy into their perceived relations with various non-Abrahamic divinities. Does this mean that they are "lying"? No, it simply means that "Christian" and "Muslim" are more theologically plastic identities than how we're accustomed to thinking of them.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Is Dara Ó Briain lying when he says he's a Catholic?

 

[Flying Pig]

'Lying' and 'wrong' are different things. In fact, you've just raised a very complicated philosophical question.

There's also a third category called "using words differently", which I think is pretty pertinent to the Ó Briain example.

That's the second half of what makes the question interesting.

 

[Traitorfish]

There's also a third category called "using words differently", which I think is pretty pertinent to the Ó Briain example.

 

[Phrossack]

Is Michael Axworthy's The Sword of Persia: Nader Shah, From Tribal Warrior to Conquering Tyrant any good? I've been meaning to read up on him.

 

[ParkCungHee]

There's also a third category called "using words differently", which I think is pretty pertinent to the Ó Briain example.

Or for the Anglicans, Sir Humphrey.

 

[Phrossack]

Are there any good English-language books on early Chinese history (say, Shang to end of Han dynasty)? There's a whole world of Chinese history out there, and I don't know where to start.