Violence... The story so far

Updated 28 April 2010

The bad news is that the polarization really has grown multiples worse over the last six years and is now in extreme territory.

The good news is that we seem to have a president who is trying to reverse this dire trend. This page extends an early study of Monotheism and Violence.

Like our earlier study, monotheism correlates strongly with the number of search-engine returns when the larger religions are paired with terms of violence, e.g. "Islam and war." Judaism continues to lead all religions in terms of violence frequency of word-pairings on the Internet. The big three monotheisms far outdistance all other religions combined. That situation is worse now than it was in 2003, and surely reflects hostilities in Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan.

Since we first researched the correlation between Monotheism and Violence, both the world and our means of measuring it have changed. Iraq has some of the trappings of the Vietnam quagmire to add to those in Afghanistan. These wars and the attending "War On Terror," have dominated the news. Our earlier search of the the Internet used Google, Altavista and Teoma. Since those days, Google has achieved a virtual monopoly. Only Yahoo still has a double-digit share of the business. No other engine has even five percent of the traffic. Of the small engines only number four AOL returned the information we need, so we used AOL for primarily verification. Each engine returned similar, but hardly identical results.

The most striking feature is not so much their detail differences, but on what all three agreed upon. It is not new news, but the fact is the cold numbers quantify just how dangerous our world has become. As in our first survey of this area, religion is raising its ugly head.

Before we go on to that, some comments on the protocol are in order. Only Google is common to both this and our earlier studies. And it is an engine far different from what it was six years ago. In looking at our raw data, if was self-evident that the engines used very different algorithms for acquiring data. In our 2003 study, we simply pooled the total returns from all three engines. Since Google is now so dominant, we had to ask, how can we get the best data out of the tools we do have? It boiled down to what constitutes the best sample? To be representative, samples must be random, valid and large enough so that their standard error is as small as possible. Neither condition is met very well. Each engine only returns a sample. On the assumption that large returns are more representative than small ones, we used the maximum returns regardless of origin. The most serious technical defect is that coverage is not uniform for all nations or people. There are other defects also, like bias in the search algorithms, and bias in the origianal reporting as well. That the two engines differed significantly in detail attests to that. Nevertheless, these results, while not meeting all scientific criteria, are still the best we have on thiese questions. The fact that many other anecdotal reports agree in general adds some amount of power, but not certainty, to our findings. The fact that they are "explainable" by recent history also adds some measure of power.

Since news, and Internet reporting of it, are dynamic things, we took a look at day-to-day variations and found most returns were sufficiently repeatable day on day to be useful. Since we are generating a snapshot, we elected to proceed, basically using only Google and Yahoo data. There was overlap which led to each engine contributing some of the largest numbers. Since larger samples are likely to be the more representative of the phrases posed, we reported the trends using a largest-return composite of the leading engines. In all other respects, the protocol used this time is the same used in 2003.

Table 1 Compares the three monotheisms. Note the bottom line which compares frequency of reported events with atheism.

	GOOGLE	YAHOO	GOOGLE	YAHOO	GOOGLE	YAHOO
Search Word	Christianity	Christianity	Islam	Islam	Judaism	Judaism
Genocide	70	101	1,090	109	6490	106
Murder	5100	72	119	405	1	7
Terror	7550	39	44,300	27,100	2	8
Terrorism	62	321	82,400	253,000	2280	104
Violence	58600	4,030	21,300	116,000	1680	249
War	209000	27,600	172,000	13,600	8690	361
Sub Total	280382	32163	321209	410214	19143	835
Adherents Mil.	2100	2100	1,500	1,500	14	14
Event/million	134	15	214	273	1370	60
Multiples of atheism	75.99	11.03	122	197	778	43

Table 2 Summarizes the current survey to emphasize the huge ascendance of the religious issue as it impacts the information online. While Table 2 does not reach scientific validity, it correlates well with increased violence in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. And the increased violence is a direct result of the challenge issued in 2002: "You are either with us or against us." The most notable feature is that Christianity jumped some 12 multiples in reported violent word pairings. This may be a direct result of the Bush Administration over-playing its hand on the torture front as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Religion	Google	Yahoo	Nov '03	May '09	'09/'03: Multiples
Judaism	778	43	114	681	6.0
Islam	122	197	80.0	195	2.4
Christianity	76	11	6.38	76.0	11.9
Buddhism	0.95	5.5	5.56	3.78	-1.5
Sikhism	0.54	0.47	2.69	0.54	-5.0
Atheism	1.0	1.0	1.00	1.00	1.0
Hinduism	0.2	0.7	0.38	0.53	1.4
Confucianism	0.4	0.1	0.33	0.06	-5.5

Table 3 summarizes yet another aspect. Atheism and the Eastern Religions set the "Internet standard" for non-violence. The monotheisms as a collective group are over 30 multiples more violent than the avowed atheists. Yet most people we know believe that religion and morality go together. There is something very wrong in this paradise called earth when otherwise very good and decent people can be so easily led astray. Of course that feature is nothing more than a confluence of aggressive and hierarchical genes on the one hand (the carnivores) and parenting and altruistic genes (the herbivores) on the other. Our herding instincts aid both sides in this struggle.

	Monotheism	Eastern	Atheism
Genocide	6591	13	676
Murder	5512	17	74
Terror	51858	466	15
Terrorism	255601	152	160
Violence	176280	1414	985
War	389690	1822	100
Sub Total	886622	3884	2010
Adherents: Mil.	3614	1693	1000
2010 Events/million	245	2.29	2.01
2010 Rank	122	1.14	1.00
2003 Rank	35.6	1.6	1.00

Of course, herding is one of the most protective of our instincts--except when we choose up sides behind charismatic Sociopaths, Psychopaths, or Narcissists as the case may be.