religion

Following up on my recent post, "Muslim Terrorists are Rare... and Stupid," I just read a good article in the September Smithsonian. The "Struggle Within Islam" explores how most Muslims react to the actions of the minority that commit acts of horrible terror.

“Today, Al Qaeda is as significant to the Islamic world as the Ku Klux Klan is to the Americans—not much at all,” Ghada Shahbender, an Egyptian poet and activist, told me recently. “They’re violent, ugly, operate underground and are unacceptable to the majority of Muslims. They exist, but they’re freaks.

“Do I look at the Ku Klux Klan and draw conclusions about America from their behavior? Of course not,” she went on. “The KKK hasn’t been a story for many years for Americans. Al Qaeda is still a story, but it is headed in the same direction as the Klan.”

Fantastic article in Foreign Policy - "Why is it so hard to find a Suicide Bomber These Days?"

I have been making this point in arguments for years. To those who argue that all Muslims support terrorists or want to kill us (due to our freedom, no doubt), I have asked why there are so few terrorist attacks then. With over a billion Muslims, one would think we would see more than the occasional attempt (often blundered).

The reality is that just as most Christians really don't want to lift a finger to do anything Jesus actually encouraged them to do, most Muslims don't believe the scary passages in the Qu'ran that give license to kill the infidels. Everyone reads what they want to read and ignores the inconvenient parts (though for many, the inconvenient parts are the ones encouraging peace, love, and hippy stuff).

At any rate, Kurzman's article is first rate and fun to read. A sample where he offers five answers to the question posed by the title:

The first and most obvious answer is that most Muslims oppose terrorist violence. According to surveys by Gallup and the Pew Global Attitudes Project, support for attacks on civilians is a minority position in almost every Muslim community. (By way of comparison, a 2006 survey found that 24 percent of Americans consider attacks on civilians to be justified.) But even if only 10 percent of the world's billion Muslims supported terrorism, we would still expect to see far more terrorist activity than we do.

Once again, I am blown away by Leon Wieseltier on the back page of The New Republic. I hadn't read TNR in awhile because they charge so much for the subscription I had let it lapse - but they brought me back with a short term deal.

Good timing - Rick Perry seems to want to turn the US into some form of supposedly Christian Nation - not in the sense of taking care of our neighbors (one of many positive Christian values rarely embraced by those most loudly proclaiming their Christianity) but in the sense of parading faith and using it to beat on anyone who doesn't share it.

Wieseltier has a stunning repudiation of Rick Perry's public pronouncements but it is buried behind a pay wall. Pity. A couple of powerful snippets:

There is a man half-running for president in the United States who has adopted Joel’s plan. He is Rick Perry, the suave and shallow governor of Texas. He has issued “a call to prayer for a nation in crisis,” which he calls The Response. He proposes to fill a stadium in Houston—Reliant Stadium, it is charmingly called—with contrite Americans, and thereby change the course of our country.

...

"There is hope for America,” Perry preaches. “It lies in heaven, and we will find it on our knees.” He likes the sentence so much that he gives it twice. I dislike it hugely. This country was not built by people on their knees. It was built by people on their feet, with their hands as they were guided by their minds. They acted as if hope for America lay in themselves. There was nothing insolent about this. They were not godless people, except for some in our recent history; but their religion was compatible with, or even inclined them to, the modern concept of historical agency. The United States of America is a monument to that concept. It represents a revolution in human affairs not least because of its faith in the power of human action.

Bill O' Reilly believes in God because he doesn't know how things work. Hilarious.

Funny 20 minute presentation that explores some of the ways in which it is impossible to take the Bible literally. Everyone picks and chooses what they feel is important.

If you had to guess what side the famously polygamous (though the Church officially frowns upon it now, it seems) Mormons were on in the fight to "save" marriage, what side would you guess? If you guessed that they are pouring hateful dollar after hateful dollar into campaigns to deny this human right to gay and lesbian couples, then give yourself a gold star!

An issue of Mother Jones earlier this year offers fascinating insights into the campaigns Mormons have secretly funded across the country to "protect" marriage. Aside from being yet another perversion of Jesus' message, this outrage should result in the loss of their tax exempt status. The idea that they don't have to pay taxes why focusing so intently on government policy is unjustifiable.

Would Jesus spend $3 million on a thirty second spot to preach to millions? Well, I'm no expert but I don't think it jives with the Gospel of Matthew at least.

Nonetheless, Tim Tebow is putting on the ad, and if you are a facebook friend of mine, you know that I have noted several interesting takes on it (it is just too easy to paste on Twitter/Facebook, so I do it more often than I post here). But I think this article from NPR's "Only a Game" show nails the subject.

I'm looking forward to my Mom posting in the comments on this issue - she is apparently now a fan of Mike and Mike on ESPN so I'm sure she has been thinking about it!

Update:Slate has a great take on this by Will Saletan:

Being dead is just the first problem with dying in pregnancy. Another problem is that the fetus you were trying to save dies with you. A third problem is that your existing kids lose their mother. A fourth problem is that if you had aborted the pregnancy, you might have gotten pregnant again and brought a new baby into the world, but now you can't. And now the Tebows have exposed a fifth problem: You can't make a TV ad.

Foreign Policy magazine has a special end of year issue chronicling the top 2009 global thinkers - someof whom did not necessarily have "good" ideas (says me). Nonetheless, I was intrigued by a short feature on Sayyid Imam al-Sharif:

How the prison writings of Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, one of al Qaeda's founders now labeled a turn coat, are doing more to expose the terrorist group's hypocrisy than anyone else.

This dude is now in prison in Egypt - after first writing books justifying al-Qaeda's butcherous activities, he suddenly decided it might not be in the best interests of God to kill everyone with which they disagree:

He claims he came to realize that the haphazard use of violence by Islamist groups causes more harm than good with respect to Islamic law, an idea he had been pondering since he left terrorism in the early 1990s.

So long as al-Qaeda keeps killing other Muslims, I think we can expect support for them to continue plummeting amongst those who used to support them as a check against the power of the West.

Foreign Policy magazine has a regular feature where an expert on a subject refutes common wisdom on a given subject - it is called "Think Again." In the Nov/Dec 2009 issue, Karen Armstrong discusses religion in "Think Again: God." Well worth reading - I find her to be one of the most insightful people on matters of faith and religion.

Her points really hit home for me in the discussion of whether God breeds violence and intolerance. She writes:

But "religious" wars, no matter how modern the tools, always begin as political ones. This happened in Europe during the 17th century, and it has happened today in the Middle East, where the Palestinian national movement has evolved from a leftist-secular to an increasingly Islamically articulated nationalism.

This is my view as well - religion does not cause people to become intolerant. Rather, when times are tough (when the economy falters or diseases break out), people become intolerant of each other. This happens irregardless of religion but often expresses itself via the religion because it is a convenient dividing line. In the case that religion is not a convenient dividing line, ethnicity, skin color, or cultural differences (damn long haired, hippies, for example) become the dividing line between warring parties.

Belief in God provides a justification for intolerance, but mostly does not cause the intolerance itself. As someone who continues to believe human behavior is more shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary selection than by logic and recent developments in human history (changes to how we organize society since the industrial revolution, for instance), I believe it was an evolutionary advantage for people to become intolerant when resources were scarce.

There are times when all Muslims feel united - as when they watch the a Palestinian home being bulldozed by the Israelis because a member of the family was suspected (or proven) to be a terrorist. Then there are times when the Sunnis and Shia are united amongst themselves in hatred of the other. Then there are times when a city composed of Shia and Sunnis are united in their fear and hatred of the political leader - Saddam Hussein, for instance.

Thinking back over our own history, religion often fails to explain how groups will react to each other. During the Jim Crow era, black Christians were prohibited from worshiping in the same church as the whites. Religious dogma provided justifications for that. Now, religious dogma tends not to be used to justify racial discrimination.

Belief in God and religious teachings are used both to encourage and discourage intolerance and hatred, which is to say that religion is a tool that some use to further their political ends. Humans will continue to search for meaning and some will hijack that search in order to further their own power -- not always cynically, but often. In the absence of religion, people will still war over perceived cultural or ethnic differences.

What I find fascinating is that there seem to be as many religions as their are people. How many Christians are there in the world? Depends on who you count as "Christian." Different people have different criteria for whether one is a true Christian and I suspect that if pressed, most people could find ways of disqualifying everyone outside of their church and 3/4 of those in it as not being true Christians. Everything is a continuum and context defines where we locate ourselves along the continuum and how far we can see in both directions.

Well worth a watch - a modern day Christian goes back in time to talk with Jesus and his followers.