Posted by Benjamin on: 04.09.2008 /
by Benjamin Ady
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. (Matthew 10:34, King James Version)The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name. (Exodus 15:3, King James Version)
I recently learned of a really fascinating study about how God-sanctioned and/or Biblical violence affects aggression.
Last year psychologists at the U of Michigan, Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, and Brigham Young University did a study in which they gave a violent Old Testament passage (Judges 19-21) to a number of people to read. Some believed in God; some didn’t.
Half the participants in each study were told that the passage came from the Bible. The rest were told it came from an ancient scroll discovered at an archaeological dig. Furthermore, half the participants read a passage that had an extra verse in which God clearly sanctions the violence in the passage.
After reading the passage, the researchers measured aggression levels. They did this with a test they told participants was a separate reaction time study. The participants were put into pairs and told to push a button as fast as possible over 25 trials. Whichever person in each pair pushed the button last would receive a blast of noise through headphones. On each trial, each participant was allowed to choose the noise level their partner would receive: from 65 decibels (level 1) through 105 decibels (level 10) (about the noise level of a fire alarm). This task has been shown to be a good measure for aggression.
At BYU 99% of students believe in God and the Bible. In the BYU study, the researchers found those participants who thought the passage was from the Bible, as well as participants who read that the violence was God-sanctioned, became more aggressive than other participants (i.e. chose louder noise for their partner in the second task).
In the study in Amsterdam, participants who read that the violence was sanctioned by God also chose louder noise blasts for their partners in the second task. This was true for both students who believed in God as well as students who did not believe in God. Furthermore, overall, participants who believed in God and the Bible were more aggressive than those who did not.
The authors concluded
We found compelling evidence that exposure to a scriptural depiction of violence or to violence authorized by deity can cause readers to behave more aggressively
This study is a rather fascinating specific extension of a very large body of research that shows that viewing violent television or playing violent video games increases aggression in all age groups.
You can read an uncorrected proof of the study here, or read the published version in Psychological Science, March 2007 edition, if you have access.
Or you can read a more thorough summary of the study here
Your reactions/thoughts?
Comment by: Helen
1 04/9/08 5:26 AM | Comment Link |Benjamin wrote:
I wish it had shown that participants who believed in God and the Bible were less aggressive.
Comment by: Jason Horton
2 04/9/08 6:24 AM | Comment Link |I think it shows that exposure to an authority figure advocating certain behaviour enables the participants to act accordingly. I’d like to see the same test done but with different text condemning violence. I would guess that such a study would show believers to be more peaceful.
What I mean is that it is the authority figure and not the supernatural that influences people. This would be consistent with Milgram’s Study of Obedience. Of course this would only have an effect on people who put authority in a god and should have little effect on an atheist.
Comment by: no offense
3 04/9/08 6:34 AM | Comment Link |no offense,
but that isn’t what the study stated…
It stated that people who believed in God and the Bible were more aggressive than those who did not, when they were given certain stimulus!
…a distinction that, if left aside, totally obliterates the findings of the study.
This study shows the correlation between what individuals are made to believe the Bible teaches and the corresponding actions of those individual, not the aggression levels of those who believe in the Bible in comparison with those who do not.
It is quite possible that if the experiment had made the individuals in question believe that the Bible offers injunctions against violence that those who believe in God would have been less aggressive than their non-theistic counterparts.
Comment by: Helen
4 04/9/08 6:42 AM | Comment Link |Thanks for your comments, Jason and no offense. Sorry if I took that quote out of context. I’d like to see a study of the effects of people reading a text condemning violence also.
No offense, since this passage is in the Bible, what should Christians do about it? Avoid teaching it? What do you suggest?
Comment by: April Terry
5 04/9/08 11:39 AM | Comment Link |My first question is who are the 1% at BYU who DON’T believe in God and the Bible?!?! Having grown up in Utah, I can’t imagine how that could possibly be… :-)
I’ve always felt that those Biblical verses were talking about a war in a spiritual sense not in a physical sense. Perhaps no offense is right that if people had been presented with the possibility that it could be an intended meaning of a conflict of philosophies rather than physical engagement, it might have a different result.
Comment by: Stephan
6 04/9/08 11:56 AM | Comment Link |Even if you rule out this passage, there are plenty of times in the Old Testament that God orders people to do things that are sick by today’s standards. I am currently listening to a Bible-in-a-year podcast, and there are too many passages to mention. One passage in Numbers says a man who was picking heads of grain on the sabbath should be stoned to death. There is no doubt that God commanded physical violence - it was not just spiritual warfare.
To say I don’t understand is a complete and utter understatement. It’s part of the cognitive dissonance I am trying to process. I still believe in God, and I think I always will, but I don’t know that I will ever totally understand these parts of the OT. If my kids ask questions about these passages I’m not even sure what I will tell them. My guess is that I will be honest and tell them I don’t understand, but I believe anyway.
Regarding the study, I think it says more about people’s response to authority that it does about belief or unbelief in God (as Jason suggest).
Comment by: benjamin ady
7 04/9/08 12:42 PM | Comment Link |Jason, no offense,
I would also be interested in a study using a passage condemning violence. That would be really interesting.
I think the authors of the study are making a reasonable argument that exposure to violent *story* increases aggression, and that this is more true if we see the story as an in-group story, rather than an out-group story. Does that make sense?
So of course we must qualify it by asking what brand of Christianity we consider our in-group. The Christian in-group in which I grew up glorified violence. The Christian in-group of which Martin Luther King Jr. was a leader denounced violence.
April
Have you read the passage in judges? It seems to me that it’s clearly describing a real, historical story where astounding levels of violence occurred.
By the way, if anyone wants to see the Milgram obedience experiment to which Jason referred, you can watch it here
Comment by: April Terry
8 04/9/08 1:10 PM | Comment Link |Comment by: Helen
9 04/9/08 1:26 PM | Comment Link |Stephan I appreciate your honesty. I understand where you’re coming from because when I had faith in God, those passages didn’t stop me believing either. I expect I would have had a hard time defending them but no-one ever challenged me on them when I believed them so I don’t know :)
Comment by: Jason Horton
10 04/9/08 2:13 PM | Comment Link |Stephan, I don’t have an issue with putting violent OT scripture into context. It was a completely different world, much more primitive and harsh in its society. Of course, I believe that the OT and the NT were written by men but that is hardly unique to atheists. For your own cognitive dissonance it might help to assume a stance of biblical inspiration rather than dictation. On the other hand it might make things worse. :)
@Benjamin, thank you for the link. I’d read about the experiments but I’ve never seen a recording. The idea behind them is fascinating.
Comment by: benjamin ady
11 04/9/08 3:17 PM | Comment Link |I’ve heard this sort of thing before, and I’ve never understood it. Levels of violence in the 20th century surely stagger the imagination more than in any previous 5 centuries combined?
Comment by: Jason Horton
12 04/9/08 3:29 PM | Comment Link |Really? I’d say that the level of efficient technology was higher now and that killing can seem cleaner if you don’t have to get up close and personal with a big stick. A bomb can kill hundreds or thousands from miles away, cities hold millions in a small area and communication enable attacks to be concerted efforts of much higher levels of coordination.
Of course, I’ve never killed anyone so it’s just a theory.
Comment by: benjamin ady
13 04/9/08 5:20 PM | Comment Link |Jason,
I guess we’re talking all around the question here. I understand you to be saying that while we are killing each other in vaster numbers, the killings are (perhaps necessarily) relatively cleaner in the sense that the blood of the killers and the killed are only very rarely, if at all, mingled together in the physical world?
Doesn’t that make us that much *more* brutal?
“More primitive” certainly applies in a chronological sense, by definition of “primitive”. But “more harsh”? I guess more harsh for the perpetrators. I don’t see how more harsh for the victims.
I mean to say it seems to me that the simple gross level of suffering in the world, in terms of number of people suffering times their average quantity/quality of suffering, has *got* to be higher now than in any previous century.
If by violence we means simply killing or injuring people on purpose for aggressive reasons, then we are enormously more violent as as a race than we have ever been, aren’t we?
Certainly our *capacity* for violence has increased on a logarithmic scale. Imagine 9 Nimitz class aircraft carriers plying the world’s oceans in any other century in history.
Actually, that’s an imagination which was played around with in the movie the final countdown
Comment by: Stephan
14 04/9/08 6:57 PM | Comment Link |Yeah, that’s a road I’ve looked down but haven’t traveled too far yet. I believe in the “inspiration but not dictation” thing, but there are specific passages where it says God commanded the violence. I don’t like the idea of God commanding violence, but I also don’t like the idea that some things in the Bible are blatant fabrications. Like I said, it’s something I’m working out.
I understand that the level of violence in that historical era was higher than now. It was a “kill or be killed” society, so you can’t hold their standards of morality up against ours. And I know that the laws God gave to Israel were a step up from what was going on in other cultures at that time. But the level of barbarism is still something that makes me uncomfortable.
It keeps life interesting, though. Think of how boring it would be if I had it all figured out!
Comment by: David H
15 04/9/08 7:16 PM | Comment Link |I’ve thought about some of these same things. I read some stuff at one point that suggested God wanted to eradicate the Canaanites because their DNA had become too corrupted through inter-marrying with fallen angels (Nephalim). So all of that violence was just a form of eugenics. I am very disturbed to recount I found that acceptable at the time.
I don’t know what to tell my kids about these things from the OT. Telling them to ignore them seems false and cowardly. But it also seems nearly impossible to reconcile a God that commanded genocide with the one represented by Jesus who said: “Do good to those that harm you.”
I tell my children (and others) that I can’t reconcile those two personages of God, so I focus on the one illustrated by Jesus. I think being a “Christian” allows for (and possible requires) such a narrow focus. Maybe I have put on blinders or christ-colored glasses. I can live with them at the moment.
While Jesus did say he came to bring a sword, the rest of the passage indicates it was a metaphorical weapon. Moreover, the context of the passage talks more about the results of following Jesus:
The cross, which Jesus admonishes his followers to take up daily in this passage, may provide the most apt image of what he meant by saying: “I did not come to bring peace, but the sword.” Jesus was not the wielder, he was the recipient.
This was a confounding message for the followers of Jesus. Which is made clear by the writer of Matthew in the chapter that came after. That tells of John the Baptist, the man who proclaimed Jesus as the one for whom they had all waited, who is now in prison and expecting death.
Comment by: benjamin ady
16 04/9/08 7:20 PM | Comment Link |Again–I really want to understand what you guys are talking about.
I’m not a historian by the remotest possible meaning of that term. But … Is it true that older history (I’m thinking “Biblical times” here) has stories to offer that are are … “Harsher, more primitive, higher levels of violence”, than, say, the firebombing and then nuclear bombing of Japan, the bombinb of Laos during the 1950’s to 1970’s, the Holocaust, multiple brutal 20th century dictators/warlords we could name–for instance Charles Taylor in Liberia, who circulated videos of him and his generals eating his main general election opponent. Ruwanda, Darfur, Yugoslavia, Columbia …
Obviously this is to some level a subjective question: “Was back then *worse*, in terms of violence, brutality, etc., than now is?”.
So can you talk about what you mean when you say that, on the subjective side?
And then if we *can* talk about some objective stuff, can you talk about that as well? Are we talking about number of people dying? Percentages of overall human population on the planet dying? Difference between lifestyles of the haves and the have nots? Number of people who are/were owned as slaves? Straight up numbers of rapes and other violent crimes? Those same numbers as percentages of people on the planet?
I’m not trying to be over the top here. As I’ve said, I’ve heard this before, and I’ve never understood it, and I’m trying to be genuinely curious: What do you *mean* when you talk about “Back then” being so much worse than “now”?
Comment by: David H
17 04/9/08 9:52 PM | Comment Link |I don’t know that I would call it worse, but what distrubs me (and maybe Stephan as well) is the barbarism from stories such as Numbers 30. There the Israelites are sent out against the army of Midian. They win and kill every man. But when they get back to camp with the plunder and captives Moses is angry.
So, God wants every man, woman and male child put to death. But the women who are too young to have ever had sex, you can keep them. Harsh.
Then in Deuteronomy 20, Moses is instructing the Israelites how they will deal with the people living in the promised land.
Entire tribes, kill them every man and woman and child. In some instances they were told to even destroy plunder and livestock. There was quite a bit of trouble when they didn’t. The logic was correct, they didn’t kill them and they corrupted Jewish society. But I don’t think the UN would have to debate the term for what God was ordering: Genocide.
There have been many who advocated programs of eradication against various types of people and for different reasons. Many offered themselves as a type of salvation to the people who followed them. But not a single one said that they were following the dictates of pure love. Not a single one had a son who came along and said here is what dear old dad really meant: Love your neighbor as yourself.
What was advocated may have only involved the death of thousands (rather than the millions guys like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were known for). And the dictates to kill them all were largely ignored by the Israelites. But it is just hard to wrap my head and heart around a God who can ask his people to erase entire groups of people then, only a short time later, send them a piece of himself who says (by word and deed) love is all you need.
Comment by: Jason Horton
18 04/10/08 2:41 AM | Comment Link |Benjamin said:
Yes this is what I meant. Human beings are essentially the same now as they were 20,000 years ago (physically, mentally, and emotionally) but we like to see ourselves as more civilized because we use better tools in our killing and can defend ourselves better. We feel more secure because of our superior weaponry and tactics. Imagine a world where you didn’t have that security or the numbers to absorb an assault, where a threat to your way of life may very well have been a threat to your life as well. You’d necessarily treat your enemies harshly and stamp out any internal discord as severely as you could. You wouldn’t have the luxury of open prisons, anger management classes or community action programs that we have today.
Stephan said:
I don’t believe in a physical or spiritual god but the concept of God could well be extended to include the church or the religious hierarchy. “God” ordering the death of prisoners of war could refer to the orders of the church. If you’re going to view the bible as an historic document (which you most certainly should even if you don’t believe that it was written at the time and depicts events from a second hand perspective, as I do) then the idea of “God as church” is the only viable explanation.
If you accept the theistic explanation in the NT, having a church taking the name of God to destroy would certainly account for a spiritual arrival of Jesus as a correcting mechanism in a divine plan. I tend to discard this along with other supernatural matters as unprovable but it might help you.