Quote:
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Originally Posted by Ourcrazymodern?
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Yakk
Yes.
The priest is a shaman. Most shamans insist that it is very important to//
It is also important that the shaman is the person who should interprit the belief system. Not many religions encourage individuals to interprit the scripture by themselves without serious guildance -- those that do tend to end up becoming quite fragmentary, and tend to disappear in a whirl of chaos after a short lifespan.
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Yakk, is this what's wrong with suicide bombers? |
What do you mean by "wrong"?
Suicide bombers are a quite effective low-intensity-war weapon.
They have a decent kill ratio, and are pretty cheap to produce. You just need people who feel as if their lives on this earth are hopeless, and have alot of hatred for your target, and some explosives.
Hatred is always easy, and hopelessness just requires enough poverty.
So, if while fighting a low-intensity-war, having shamans encourage people to engage in suicide bombing is a pretty good idea.
On the other hand, religious strains such as this do get in the way of domestic tranquility. Eventually some set of shamans will get pissed off at how society is run, and the nation will have internal suicide bombing attacks.
If being a stable, productive nation is your goal, having shamans encouraging suicide bombings and other forms of zealotry isn't ideal.
But if that isn't your goal, and instead your goal is to attack nations with far more resources than you can hope to muster, the suicide-bomb tactic is pretty decent.
None of this really is good for the individuals involved. But I'm talking about the survival of elites and shamans, not the pleebs. The welfare of pleebs only matters insofar as it helps the elites/shamans (giving pleebs enough wealth to be content helps keep crime and revolution down -- so once your elites get rich enough, letting the pleebs have some resources is a pretty decent strategy), as far as the welfare of the elites/shamans is concerned.
There are advantages to religions that aren't centrally controlled. They exibit natural selection -- those more capable of convincing pleebs and shamans to follow them grow, others shrink, and others borrow from the successful ones. Nice groups of pleebs get snatched up by small cults. Overall, this should increase the religious infection rate amoung the populance.
This is backed up by patterns -- American Christianity is very decentrialized, and Americans have amoung the highest religious infection rates of first world nations.
In most other nations, as people become better educated and wealthier, shamans get less effective at maintaining or growing the infection.