Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

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.

Heavy fighting in southern Iraqi oil hub | World | Reuters, March 25, 2008

BASRA, Iraq Reuters - Heavy fighting erupted on Tuesday in the southern oil city of Basra where Iraqi security forces launched a major operation at dawn against powerful militias, military officials and witnesses said.

A Reuters witness in the city reported seeing black smoke over northern districts and hearing explosions and machinegun fire. A hospital source said “tens of wounded” were arriving at hospitals with some too busy to accept more casualties.

Television pictures showed Iraqi troops running through empty streets and helicopters flying overhead.

“There are clashes in the streets. Bullets are coming from everywhere and we can hear the sound of rocket explosions. This has been going on since dawn,” resident Jamil told Reuters by telephone as he cowered in his home.

Military officials said “many outlaws” had been killed.

Two powerful factions of Iraqs Shiite majority, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and the Mehdi Army militia of Moqtada al-Sadr, are fighting for power in Basra along with a smaller Shiite party, Fadhila.

Basra is Iraq’s second city and gateway to the Gulf. Its oil fields are the source of most government revenues.

Eric Foner, A Massacre and a Travesty - washingtonpost.com, March 23, 2008

Unbeknownst to most Americans, our nation’s history includes home-grown terrorism as well as attacks from abroad. Scholars estimate that during Reconstruction, the turbulent period that followed the Civil War, upwards of 3,000 persons were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups. That’s roughly the same number of Americans who have died at the hands of Osama bin Laden.

In the last generation, no part of the American past has undergone a more complete scholarly reinterpretation than Reconstruction. Once portrayed as a tragic era of rampant misgovernment presided over by unscrupulous carpetbaggers and ignorant former slaves, Reconstruction is today seen as a noble, if flawed, experiment in interracial democracy, an effort to provide free blacks with land, education and political rights. The tragedy is not that Reconstruction was attempted, but that it failed.

Media Matters - Buchanan on Obama’s race speech: “We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?”

In a March 21 syndicated column headlined “A Brief for Whitey,” conservative commentator and MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan asserted, “America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.” Buchanan was discussing Sen. Barack Obama’s March 18 speech addressing race and controversial comments by his former pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright. He continued, “Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.” Buchanan then asserted that “no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans.” Later in the column, Buchanan added: “We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?”

Bin Laden in Palestinian call, BBC, March 21, 2008

“The nearest jihad battlefield to support our people in Palestine is the battlefield of Iraq,” the speaker said.

The message, aired on al-Jazeera TV, comes a day after the al-Qaeda leader threatened the EU over the reprint of a cartoon deemed offensive to Muslims.

The messages coincide with the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq.

BBC defence and security correspondent Rob Watson says they follow a familiar pattern, with Bin Laden touching on an issue he knows resonates with many Muslims

‘Fire and iron’

In the second message in two days, the speaker dismissed attempts at reconciliation in the Middle East.

“Palestine cannot be retaken by negotiations and dialogue, but with fire and iron,” he said.

Tibetan exiles prayed as they took part in a candlelight vigil in Dharamsala, India. The Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, said he was willing to meet Chinese leaders, including President Hu Jintao, as Chinese authorities acknowledged that the unrest in Tibet had spread to other provinces.

Photo: Gurinder Osan/Associated Press

Pictures of the Day, March 20 - The New York Times, Slide Show, Slide 2 of 16

Laurie Copans, Ex-Israeli generals denounce checkpoints, AP, USATODAY.com, Feb. 13, 2008

JERUSALEM — A group of retired Israeli generals has launched a campaign urging the army to remove West Bank roadblocks, warning on Wednesday that the travel restrictions sow Palestinian hatred of Israel and stymie the peace process.

The 12 top former commanders say the hundreds of checkpoints dotting the West Bank are excessive and other military means can be used to prevent suicide bombings in Israel.

The Palestinians have long demanded that Israel remove the roadblocks as a way to build faith in recently renewed peace talks.

The generals have written a letter to Defense Minister Ehud Barak in an effort to persuade him to gradually remove the checkpoints, which severely restrict movement of the some 2 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and have crippled their economy. Israel maintains the checkpoints are vital for its security.

“You have to understand that there is damage in having the Palestinian people with its back to the wall, not seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, unable to improve their economy, unable to move from place to place,” Ilan Paz, a signatory of the letter and a former head of the army’s administration of Palestinian civilian affairs, told Israel Radio. “This creates a reality that creates terror, and we have to remember that.”

Understanding Checkpoints, Israel Policy Forum, March 19, 2008

One of the most onerous aspects of the situation in the West Bank is the system of checkpoints which block Palestinians from getting to work, school, hospital or even to visit friends a few miles (sometimes a few blocks) away without being stopped and delayed, often for hours. This is well-known here in the United States, especially because the Bush administration has made clear that it wants many of the checkpoints removed. Less understood is that very few checkpoints separate Israel from the Palestinian areas. The overwhelming majority of them are internal barriers which serve not to protect Israel from terrorists but simply to ease life for settlers and which, in the process, make Palestinian lives miserable. In fact, no one suggests taking down any checkpoint or border crossing that separates Israel from the West Bank or Gaza. The entire controversy is over the internal checkpoints and their harmful effects on Palestinians trying to go about their lives.

Terrible as the situation is, some people find humor in it, so ridiculous is the rationale for aspects of the checkpoint system.

Like this for instance: A “Hummous Hut” employee is stopped by a soldier who misunderstands “hummous” for “Hamas.” A woman driving with her dog is stopped at a checkpoint and explains that, while she does not have papers to enter Jerusalem, her dog does. These light-hearted vignettes—from the 2005 Oscar-winning short film A West Bank Story and Suad Amiry’s book Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, respectively—use humor to explain the physical barriers scattered throughout the West Bank in simple, human terms.

For Israelis, the reason for instituting roadblocks and checkpoints since the beginning of the second intifada in which over a thousand Israelis were killed is also simple and human—to stop suicide bombers from entering Israel. “The method of roadblocks has proven itself,” Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak told a group of soldiers on January 29th. “There is no way to effectively fight terrorism without actual daily control of the area,” he said.

However, according to a group of twelve retired Israeli generals, some of whom were involved in setting up West Bank barriers, the system of over 560 roadblocks and checkpoints, which increased by 50 percent in two and a half years, needlessly harms Palestinians and ineffectively protects Israelis. (According to the Israeli human rights group, B’tselem, as of November 2007 there were 99 permanent checkpoints, 36 of which were on Israel’s border and 63 within the West Bank. The remaining 486 barriers [as of November 2007] are roadblocks, such as dirt mounds, concrete blocks, fences, trenches, and gates.)

At a Van Leer Institute conference on February 13th, these experts, informally called the “checkpoint team,” presented a position paper, which they also sent Barak. In it they assert that, while some barriers stop terror, others damage the Palestinian economy, breed resentment, and, in turn, create more terror. According to Shlomo Brom, one of the group’s members and former chief of the army’s planning committee, quoted in Laurie Copans’ February 13th Associated Press article, “The feeling of humiliation and the hate the roadblocks create increase the tendency of Palestinians to join militant groups. . . .”

New Bin Laden tape threatens EU, BBC, March 20, 2008

In a new audio message purportedly from Osama Bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader threatens the EU over the re-printing of a cartoon offensive to Muslims.

The voice on it says the cartoon, re-published recently in all major Danish newspapers, was part of a crusade involving Pope Benedict XVI.

The drawing, first published in 2005, depicts the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban.

The voice on the audio has not yet been verified as belonging to Bin Laden.

The message comes on the fifth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq.

But the BBC’s Jonathan Beale in Washington says that the message was probably released to not to mark that anniversary, but rather the anniversary of the birth of Prophet Muhammad, which Sunni Muslims mark on Thursday.

It appeared on a Islamist website that has carried al-Qaeda messages in the past.

Over the audio is a graphic with a still image of Bin Laden holding an AK-47 and bearing the logo of al-Sahab, the media wing of al-Qaeda. There is a written translation of the message in English.

‘Crowd pleaser’

John Pike, director of the defence think tank GlobalSecurity.org, said bin Laden had chosen to talk about the cartoon in an effort to remain relevant and provide direction to followers.

“His judgement is that it’s a consistent crowd-pleaser, and that if he has any hope of getting people stirred up, this is probably a good way to try to do it.”

Last month, Denmark’s leading newspapers reprinted one of 12 cartoons that first angered many Muslims when they were originally published in September 2005.

Anger in the Muslim world peaked in 2006 as newspapers in other countries published the cartoons.

McClatchy Washington Bureau, 03/17/2008, Cheney cites phenomenal Iraqi security progress as bombing kills 40

BAGHDAD — Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday made a surprise visit to Baghdad, where he pledged that U.S. forces would “not quit before the job is done” and said that a massive troop buildup had achieved “phenomenal” improvements in security.

At sunset Monday, however, a female suicide bomber killed at least 40 people and injured more than 50 when she blew herself up in a crowded pedestrian area near a Shiite Muslim shrine in the southern holy city of Karbala, according to government and hospital officials. Among the victims were several Iranian pilgrims whod come to worship at the Imam Hussein shrine, one of Islams most sacred sites.

And the U.S. military announced the deaths of two soldiers who were killed Monday when their Humvee struck a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, bringing the number of American troop deaths to at least 3,990 since the war began.

Cheney told a news conference in Baghdad that the invasion of Iraq five years ago this week was a “difficult, challenging, but nonetheless successful endeavor.” However, he said that obstacles remain and that the decision on whether to begin reducing forces depends on political reconciliation and the ability to preserve the hard-won security gains of the past year.

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 2

Daniel Dennett, The Evaporation of the Powerful Mystique of Religion

I’m so optimistic that I expect to live to see the evaporation of the powerful mystique of religion. I think that in about twenty-five years almost all religions will have evolved into very different phenomena, so much so that in most quarters religion will no longer command the awe it does today. Of course many people–perhaps a majority of people in the world–will still cling to their religion with the sort of passion that can fuel violence and other intolerant and reprehensible behavior. But the rest of the world will see this behavior for what it is, and learn to work around it until it subsides, as it surely will. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we will need every morsel of this reasonable attitude to deal with such complex global problems as climate change, fresh water, and economic inequality in an effective way. It will be touch and go, and in my pessimistic moods I think Sir Martin Rees may be right: some disaffected religious (or political) group may unleash a biological or nuclear catastrophe that forecloses all our good efforts. But I do think we have the resources and the knowledge to forestall such calamities if we are vigilant.

Recall that only fifty years ago smoking was a high status activity and it was considered rude to ask somebody to stop smoking in one’s presence. Today we’ve learned that we shouldn’t make the mistake of trying to prohibit smoking altogether, and so we still have plenty of cigarettes and smokers, but we have certainly contained the noxious aspects within quite acceptable boundaries. Smoking is no longer cool, and the day will come when religion is, first, a take-it-or-leave-it choice, and later: no longer cool–except in its socially valuable forms, where it will be one type of allegiance among many. Will those descendant institutions still be religions? Or will religions have thereby morphed themselves into extinction? It all depends on what you think the key or defining elements of religion are. Are dinosaurs extinct, or do their lineages live on as birds?

Tajik Muslims praying, Alexei Vladykin, AP

John Gray, The atheist delusion, guardian.co.uk, March 15, 2008

‘Opposition to religion occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally,’ wrote Martin Amis recently. Over the past few years, leading writers and thinkers have published bestselling tracts against God. John Gray on why the ’secular fundamentalists’ have got it all wrong

Saturday March 15, 2008
The Guardian

An atmosphere of moral panic surrounds religion. Viewed not so long ago as a relic of superstition whose role in society was steadily declining, it is now demonised as the cause of many of the world’s worst evils. As a result, there has been a sudden explosion in the literature of proselytising atheism. A few years ago, it was difficult to persuade commercial publishers even to think of bringing out books on religion. Today, tracts against religion can be enormous money-spinners, with Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great selling in the hundreds of thousands. For the first time in generations, scientists and philosophers, high-profile novelists and journalists are debating whether religion has a future. The intellectual traffic is not all one-way. There have been counterblasts for believers, such as The Dawkins Delusion? by the British theologian Alister McGrath and The Secular Age by the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor. On the whole, however, the anti-God squad has dominated the sales charts, and it is worth asking why.

The abrupt shift in the perception of religion is only partly explained by terrorism. The 9/11 hijackers saw themselves as martyrs in a religious tradition, and western opinion has accepted their self-image. And there are some who view the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as a danger comparable with the worst that were faced by liberal societies in the 20th century.

For Dawkins and Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Martin Amis, Michel Onfray, Philip Pullman and others, religion in general is a poison that has fuelled violence and oppression throughout history, right up to the present day. The urgency with which they produce their anti-religious polemics suggests that a change has occurred as significant as the rise of terrorism: the tide of secularisation has turned. These writers come from a generation schooled to think of religion as a throwback to an earlier stage of human development, which is bound to dwindle away as knowledge continues to increase. In the 19th century, when the scientific and industrial revolutions were changing society very quickly, this may not have been an unreasonable assumption. Dawkins, Hitchens and the rest may still believe that, over the long run, the advance of science will drive religion to the margins of human life, but this is now an article of faith rather than a theory based on evidence.

Chinese Police Clash With Tibet Protesters - New York Times, March 14, 2008

BEIJING — Violent protests erupted Friday in a busy market area of Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, as Buddhist monks and other ethnic Tibetans clashed with Chinese security forces. Witnesses say the protesters burned shops, cars, military vehicles and at least one tourist bus.

Cars were overturned cars and shops burning in Barkhor Square in front of the Jokhang Temple in central Lhasa, Tibet, on Friday.

Tibetans throwing stones at army vehicles as a car burns on a street in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, after violent protests broke out on Friday.

The chaotic scene marked the most violent demonstrations since protests by Buddhist monks began in Lhasa on Monday, the anniversary of a failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule in 1959. The protests have been the largest in Tibet since the late 1980s, when Chinese security forces repeatedly used lethal force to restore order in the region.

The developments prompted the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, to issue a statement, saying he was concerned about the situation and appealing to the Chinese leadership to “stop using force and address the long-simmering resentment of the Tibetan people”.

By Friday night, Chinese authorities had placed much of the central part of the city under a curfew, including neighborhoods around different Buddhist monasteries, according to two Lhasa residents reached by telephone. Military police were blocking roads in some ethnic Tibetan neighborhoods, several Lhasa residents said.

Shtrasler, Herzl is turning in his grave, Haaretz, March 14, 2008

Shas once understood that it was undesirable to impose its worldview on the majority, that it was preferable to use friendly persuasion. Today Shas wants to change the country’s image. Yishai has become an expert at extortion, and Olmert is willing to pay. He is buying Shas with money and benefits, as well as laws and regulations that are changing the country’s character.

About two months ago Olmert agreed to reestablish the Religious Affairs Ministry for Shas. A few days ago he transferred NIS 450 million to Shas, a political gift to fund the yeshiva students, and recently he gave Rafael Pinhasi, one of the Shas strongmen (a former MK, with a criminal conviction) the position of chair of the Tel Aviv cemeteries council. More power, more money and more appointments.

Recently there was a dangerous proposal made in cooperation with Social Affairs Minister Isaac Herzog of Labor - which almost passed in the cabinet - to expand the powers of the rabbinical courts, according to a demand by Shas. Recently a Shas draft bill to restrict surfing the Internet passed its first reading, and the Shas minister of communications, Big Brother Ariel Atias, will be the chief censor. Just like Saudi Arabia.

Shas is currently promoting a draft bill that will restrict the right to an abortion, and an arrangement to censor billboards so that “immodest models” will not be seen on them.

Olmert also agreed to establish a team of ministers headed by Yishai to examine an increase in child allowances, and recently the government decided to establish a state conversion authority. By demand of Shas, the government allowed it to appoint its own dayanim (rabbinical court judges) to the conversion courts.

We are gradually and systematically losing the modern Western country in which we were educated. Olmert is selling the principles of humanism, tolerance, freedom and civil rights to Yishai in a liquidation sale.

Sharlet, Teenage Holy War, The Revealer, April 12, 2007

This is how you enlist in the Army of God: First come the fireworks and the prayers, and then 4,000 kids scream, “We won’t be silent anymore!” Then the kids drop to their knees, still but for the weeping and regrets of fifteen-year-olds. The lights in the Cleveland arena fade to blue, and a man on the stage whispers to them about sin and love and the Father-God. They rise, heartened; the crowd, en masse, swears off “harlots and adultery”; the twenty-one-year-old MC twitches taut a chain across the ass of her skintight red jeans and summons the followers to show off their best dance moves for God. “Gimme what you got!” she shouts. They dance — hip-hop, tap, toe and pelvic thrusting. Then they’re ready. They’re about to accept “the mark of a warrior,” explains Ron Luce, commander in chief of BattleCry, the most furious youth crusade since young sinners in the hands of an angry God flogged themselves with shame in eighteenth-century New England. Nearly three centuries later, these 4,000 teens are about to become “branded by God.” It’s like getting your head shaved when you join the Marines, Luce says, only the kids get to keep their hair. His assistants roll out a cowhide draped over a sawhorse, and Luce presses red-hot iron into the dead flesh, projecting a close-up of sizzling cow skin on giant movie screens above the stage.

“When you enlist in the military, there’s a code of honor,” Luce preaches, “same as being a follower of Christ.” His Christian code requires a “wartime mentality”: a “survival orientation” and a readiness to face “real enemies.” The queers and communists, feminists and Muslims, to be sure, but also the entire American cultural apparatus of marketing and merchandising, the “techno-terrorists” of mass media, doing to the morality of a generation what Osama bin Laden did to the Twin Towers. “Just as the events of September 11th, 2001, permanently changed our perspective on the world,” Luce writes, “so we ought to be awakened to the alarming influence of today’s culture terrorists. They are wealthy, they are smart, and they are real.”

Luce is forty-five, his brown hair floppy, his lips pouty. On the screens above the stage, his green eyes blink furiously. “The devil hates us,” he exhorts, “and we gotta be ready to fight and not be these passive little lukewarm, namby-pamby, kum-ba-yah, thumb-sucking babies that call themselves Christians. Jesus? He got mad!” Luce considers most evangelicals too soft, too ready to pass off as piety their preference for a bland suburban lifestyle. He hates what he sees as the weakness of “accepting” Christ, of “trusting” the Lord. “I want an attacking church!” he shouts, his normally smooth tones raw and desperate and alarming. He isn’t just looking for followers — he wants “stalkers” who’ll bring a criminal passion to their pursuit of godliness.