Terrorism and faith

Interesting post from Gender Geek:
I was down in London at a meeting yesterday, and as I walked from Whitehall to Paddington, past the bomb-squad, SO-19 officers standing outside the MoD with machine guns, and closed-off tube stations staffed with cheerful community police officers, I had a little think about fundamentalism, life, and death.

My thinking was informed by Sam Harris's The End of Faith, which I've been reading this week. His central argument is that the world cannot afford to tolerate religion anymore, that the essential characteristic of the religious is a belief in the literal inerrancy of their holy texts, that Muslim discourse is a "tissue of myths, conspiracy theories, and exhortations to recapture the glories of the seventh century", that secular rationalism should be imposed via a world government, and that torture is acceptable(!).

Although some reviewers have liked Harris's call to atheist arms, I found it extremely muddled, and the overall thrust of his argument was weakened by the number of factual errors and baseless assertions he made in respect of both Christianity and Islam. Nevertheless, the book contains some salutary warnings about unreciprocated pluralist attitudes of liberals towards religion.

Christian fundamentalists in the UK, and particularly in the US, have adopted the rhetoric of a 'culture of life'. This is actually at odds with the internal logic of their theology, and with their holy book. Isaiah warns about the "day of the Lord" coming, and says that:

Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes;
their houses will be looted and their wives ravished.

I'm normally vehemently opposed to proof-texting but I find the idea of God-sponsored rape and murder oddly intriguing. Bertrand Russell had similar, although much more nicely articulated, concerns:

The Spandiards in Mexico and Peru used to baptize Indian infants and then immediately dash their brains out: by this means they secured these infants went to Heaven. No orthodox Christian can find any logical reason for condemning their action, although all nowadays do so. In countless ways the doctrine of personal immortality in its Christian form has had disastrous effects upon morals.

The reality is that an eternal perspective encourages a culture of death. As the rhetoric and actions of fundamentalists suggest, once an individual is convinced that they are going to live forever, and that they have a unique insight into absolute truth, then they are dangerous as almighty hell. They may not just load up their backpacks with explosives and cavort about the London transport system, but will also attempt to establish a theocracy (Christian fundamentalists in the US), attempt to prevent cultural expressions that challenge their faith (Sikh and Christian fundamentalists in the UK), and let little girls burn rather than allow them to appear unveiled (Religious police in Saudi Arabia).

Fundamentalists, invariably, attempt to control women's bodies. After all, what difference does it make if women are in pain from genital mutilation, controlled by doctrines that prioritise an unborn foetus over a real live woman, or infantilised by the dogma of wifely submission, as long as eternal hellfire is avoided? Human suffering, which happens in the blink of an eye compared with heaven-time, is made almost completely irrelevant.

So what do we do? Polly Toynbee writing in today's Guardian, suggests that a very practical policy step that the UK government can take to mitigate the risks of fundamentalism:

All the state can do is hold on to secular values. It can encourage the moderate but it must not appease religion. The constitutional absurdity of an established church once seemed an irrelevance, but now it obliges similar privileges to all other faiths. There is still time - it may take a nonreligious leader - to stop this madness and separate the state and its schools from all religion. It won't stop the bombing now but at least it would not encourage continued school segregation for generations to come.

A third of all state schools in the UK are religious. If the UK allows, as is its current intention, increasingly radicalised faith communities to segregate their young people and to flavour their education with their own brand of fire and brimstone, then the message of the culture of death can only gain in currency.