Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Calm in Iraqi Cities After Cleric Calls for Truce - New York Times, March 31, 2008

BAGHDAD — Iraqis returned to the streets of Baghdad after a curfew was lifted, and the southern port city of Basra appeared quiet on Monday, a day after the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr called for his followers to stop fighting and in turn demanded concessions from Iraq’s government.

Mr. Sadr’s statement on Sunday afternoon was released at the end of six days in which his Mahdi Army militia had held off an American-supported Iraqi assault on Basra.No serious clashes were reported in Basra on Monday morning. In Baghdad, which had been virtually brought to a standstill by protests and violence over the past week, life appeared to return to normal with the streets filling with traffic. A succession of mortar shells rocked the Green Zone. But in most neighborhoods, people went back to work and shopped for supplies that they were unable to buy during the curfew.

The strict curfew imposed by the government on Thursday was lifted at 6 a.m., but remained in effect for vehicles in the Mahdi Army stronghold of Sadr City, where fighting between militiamen and Iraqi and American forces had continued through the day on Sunday, and in some other Shiite neighborhoods of the capital.

The substance of Mr. Sadr’s statement was hammered out in elaborate negotiations over the preceding days with senior Iraqi officials, some of whom traveled to Iran to meet with Mr. Sadr, according to several officials involved in the discussions.

The negotiations with Mr. Sadr were seen as a serious blow for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who had vowed that he would see the Basra campaign through to a military victory. He has been harshly criticized even within his own coalition for the stalled assault.

The science of religion | Where angels no longer fear to tread | Economist.com, March 19, 2008

BY THE standards of European scientific collaboration, €2m $3.1m is not a huge sum. But it might be the start of something that will challenge human perceptions of reality at least as much as the billions being spent by the European particle-physics laboratory CERN at Geneva. The first task of CERNs new machine, the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to open later this year, will be to search for the Higgs boson—an object that has been dubbed, with a certain amount of hyperbole, the God particle. The €2m, by contrast, will be spent on the search for God Himself—or, rather, for the biological reasons why so many people believe in God, gods and religion in general.“Explaining Religion”, as the project is known, is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its nose into the God business.

Religion cries out for a biological explanation. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon—arguably one of the species markers of Homo sapiens—but a puzzling one. It has none of the obvious benefits of that other marker of humanity, language. Nevertheless, it consumes huge amounts of resources. Moreover, unlike language, it is the subject of violent disagreements. Science has, however, made significant progress in understanding the biology of language, from where it is processed in the brain to exactly how it communicates meaning. Time, therefore, to put religion under the microscope as well.

UDA stands down military wing, Guardian, November 11, 2007

The loyalist Ulster Defence Association has announced that all active service units of its Ulster Freedom Fighters military wing will be stood down from midnight.

In an Armistice Day statement from the UDA leadership, read out at memorials to their dead colleagues, they said all weaponry would be put beyond use and all military intelligence destroyed.

They said they were making the momentous move because the military war was over and the struggle to maintain the Union was on a new and more complex battlefield.

The UDA sent out a general order to all members not to be involved in crime or criminality, and it said those who had joined its ranks for such purposes had to be rooted out.

The statement said: “The Ulster Defence Association is committed to achieving a society where violence and weaponry are ghosts of the past.”