Abstract
Relying on religion as the basis of one’s morality is problematic. Although religion can motivate positive behaviors and cooperation, it also motivates and exacerbates violence in particular contexts, arguably by being shaped by preexisting mechanisms in evolved human psychology. First, we provide a brief overview of human sexual selection from an evolutionary psychological perspective. Second, we discuss how and why an evolutionary perspective and, in particular, the concepts of intersexual and intrasexual competition may be useful in understanding religiously motivated violence. Third, we present an overview of the research addressing several types of religiously motivated violence, such as mate guarding and controlling behaviors, wife beating and uxoricide, honor killing, child abuse and filicide, male and female genital mutilation, suicide, group violence and war, and terrorism (including suicide terrorism). We highlight the potential advantages that religiously motivated violence may have provided ancestrally within a sexual selection theoretical framework, and we conclude with suggestions for future research.
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Notes
- 1.
All biblical quotations are from the King James Version.
- 2.
All quotes from the Quran are taken from the Hilali-Khan translation, available online from http://muttaqun.com/files/PDF/The_Holy_Quran_English_Arabic.pdf.
- 3.
Stoning to death of a couple in Afghanistan—http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJkYJ3cbxh0.
- 4.
Afghan woman executed for adultery—http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ed0TZN2Egk.
- 5.
The hadith is a record of traditions or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. This collective body of Islamic traditions is revered and received as a major source of religious law and moral guidance, second only to the Quran (Hadith. 2013. In Britanica.com. Retrieved September 1, 2013, from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/251132/Hadith).
- 6.
A fatwa is a formal legal opinion given by an Islamic legal authority (mufti) in answer to an inquiry by a private individual or judge (Fatwa. 2013. In Britanica.com. Retrieved September 1, 2013, from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/202671/fatwa).
- 7.
Al-Tabarani, quoted in Al-Albani, Muhammad N., Silsilat Al-Ahadeeth Al-Sahihah, A1 Maktab Al-Islami, Beirut, Lebanon, 1983, vol. 2, Hadeeth no. 722, pp. 356–357. See also Keller, N. H. M. trans.(1997). Reliance of the Traveller A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred law by Ibn Naqib Misri. e4.3.
- 8.
- 9.
We did not find a single case of an honor killing that was not committed by a religious adherent and for a nonreligious reason.
- 10.
Used in classification of the hadiths, it is the highest level of authenticity given to a narration (Sahih. 2013. In Wikiislam.net. Retrieved September 1, 2013, from http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Sahih).
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This chapter is based on Sela, Shackelford, and Liddle (2015).
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Sela, Y., Shackelford, T.K., Liddle, J.R. (2016). A Moral Guide to Depravity: Religiously Motivated Violence and Sexual Selection. In: Shackelford, T., Hansen, R. (eds) The Evolution of Morality. Evolutionary Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19671-8_10
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