Religions phases of maturity - from Xianity to Islam - atrocities time projection theory: Opinions pls.

Doubt you're going to like our response, the idea of human cultures, religions, languages, etc. having/fitting evolutionary models is not really something that is seen as borne out by ethnographic/anthropological evidence. What you're arguing for is considered an extremely outdated and teleological model of culture that assumes that there is just one big object called Christianity and one called Islam. That there is no functional difference in your model between Pentecostalism, Mormonism, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodox Christianities is just one of its many flaws. You seem to assume that Christianity can do something, as if it is an actor with thoughts and actions, when in reality Christianity is the collected and conventional practices and thoughts of hundreds of thousands of different distinct and not-so-distinct, neighboring, fluid communities each with their own naturalized feeling that their Christianity is close to what the "core" is. Of course, there is no core reality to Christianity, it is merely this process of naturalization that makes us feel like we can know what some abstract set of ideas "is".

I'm not going to go into a full-blown discussion of all of the problems/concerns that I have with this approach, but (a) anthropology is not a predictive science, (b) religions/cultures don't "civilize" over time, they merely change, and change occurs in complex ways that cross borders, move unevenly within and among social groups (this includes changes in the types of culturally accepted forms of violence within those groups) and (c) you assume a lot about the lack of Christian theology/ideology motivated violence, and a lot about calling Da'ish basically a synechdoche of the entire billion plus Islamic community, you do realize that Da'ish's political and religious theology is explicitly and undeniably modern, right? And that Da'ish is, in spite of its current military standing, numerically in the vast minority of Islamic practice?

This approach sounds more like a discussion that we might have had in cultural anthropology from the 1940s, like Robert Lowie or Leslie White. Or be published during our 19th century Victorian era of unilineal evolutionary writers like ol' E.B. Tylor.

There are a number of Middle Eastern Studies scholars (like Bernard Lewis) who might agree with you, but their work is often seen as explicitly and dangerously ethnocentric, culturally deterministic, and reifying of 'cultures' into complete homogenous and ontologically distinct entities.

/r/Anthropology Thread