Are the Arabs violent because they’re religious or religious so they’re LESS violent?

For the last few decades, American liberals have waged a culture war against a tight knit culture that prizes loyalty, social conservatism, engages in honor killings and is deeply religious. The result of that decades-long culture war against Red State culture is this:

It is time liberal America admitted that its strategy in the culture war isn’t winning. A heavy reliance on statistics, snide jokes and openly criticizing another culture are the things liberals do without thinking about how they will be perceived by a culture that is very different from theirs. Now, they are using the same failed strategy with a culture that is incredibly similar. Both Southern Culture and Arab Culture are cultures of honor. As Obama so foolishly put it, they both cling to guns and religion.

Obama is an educated man but like all people he is blinded by his own culture. If he had even the slightest awareness of how honor cultures worked, he would know that you are very careful in how you talk about them precisely because almost anything can be taken as an insult. As the old saying goes, “insult a Northerner, he takes you to court. Insult a Southerner, he kills you.” There’s a reason why the South is famous for its charm and courtesy. It’s a way of saving your own life. Recently, Sam Harris appeared on Bill Maher’s Real Time to talk about winning The War of Ideas with the Arab world. Far from charming the Arab people, he painted a picture of the Arab world with statistics that many Arabs doubtless would find insulting.

Crucially, Sam Harris and Bill Maher are driving a common liberal narrative that religion in honor cultures causes violence. However, the most basic tenet of science is that correlation is not causation. Just because religion and violence in the Arab world (and the American South) are correlated that does not mean that one causes the other. If there is causation though, I’d say it goes the other way around. Honor cultures are religious as a response to their tendency to violence.

The genius of religion is that it overcomes tribalism. It universalizes certain key principles and thereby achieves a greater unity. So, who clings to religion most? Peoples who are deeply fractious and have a tendency to resolve their differences through extra-judicial killings. Namely…

Even the most cursory understanding of the history of these two peoples will reveal that. The Southern culture is the culture of the Scots-Irish. The Arab people were bedouins who were constantly trading and raiding. Mohammed’s great achievement was unifying the warring tribes under a single God. This greater unity among the Arab people then created a powerful coalition that allowed them to surge out of their homeland and conquer much of the world. Anyone who decries the violence of the Southerners and the Arabs should try looking at the behavior of their people before Christianity and Islam. They were even more violent.

And yet, while the problems of America’s South and the Arab world are obvious to liberals like Clinton, Obama, Harris and Maher, the problems of liberal Western culture are equally obvious to the people of America’s South and the Arab world. Liberals have no loyalty to their own group.

To liberals, this is seen as a virtue because they are a culture of dignity. While honor cultures celebrate loyalty no matter how much you hate the cause. Cultures of dignity like the liberal culture celebrate standing up against the group even if you screw everybody over in the process. Liberals do this all the time. SJWs fighting for 70 gender pronouns on college campuses, Bernie Bros, Lena Dunham saying she wished she had an abortion, Bill Maher and Sam Harris speaking out about violence in Islam. Virtue signaling in liberal culture is about standing apart from the group. It’s why the 60’s were such a big deal for liberals. They actually managed to work together for once. They might want to try it again. In the meantime, all liberals might want to watch the Sicilian Scene from True Romance.

You’re more than welcome to mock an honor culture with some facts you read in a book. I just wouldn’t recommend it.