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From Mensagenda - December
2006
Idea Dog
by Brooks Peterson
Keep the "Faith."
Hold the Onions, Too.
Ten years ago I wrote in an Idea Dog article that I like the
metaphor of a pendulum that swings not just back and forth in a straight line
but all around in a circle. The pendulum is swinging in an interesting way
lately and, to put it in context, here’s where I see it as having swung from:
The only thing I knew for sure about the events I saw
unfolding on the day of 9/11/2001 was that the U.S., sadly, was likely to bomb
the tar out of somebody in retaliation. No matter whom the U.S. would
eventually bomb, I dreaded the inevitable backlash it would cause. Dare I say,
in these jingoistic times, that I don’t like war?
And, unfortunately, backlash there’s been. The U.S.-UK
invasion of Iraq has raised anti-Western sentiment to a fever pitch. It has
stirred the general nest of Muslim jihadists, some of whom loaded themselves up
with explosives and, in full accordance with the dictates of their religion,
tragically killed 52 innocent London commuters on 7/7/2005.
I figured on 9/11/2001 that the kind of questions nobody
would ask were, "How could someone hate the U.S. enough to fly a jumbo jet
into a New York skyscraper?" or "What worldview causes someone to do
that?" For a long time it seemed nobody did ask these kinds of questions.
But important questions like these are now increasingly asked
and answered honestly. The answers necessarily involve a critical look at
religious "faith" and that’s the part of the pendulum swing that I
am relieved to see happening.
Certainly Muslims aren’t the only ones to kill in a god’s
name. Far from it. Sam Harris points out in Letter to a Christian Nation
(2006) that religion is behind the wars and violence in
"...Palestine (Jews vs. Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians vs.
Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians vs. Bosnian and Albanian Muslims),
Northern Ireland (Protestants vs. Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims vs. Hindus),
Sudan (Muslims vs. Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims vs. Christians),
Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims vs. Christians), Ivory Coast (Muslims vs.
Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists vs. Tamil Hindus), Philippines
(Muslims vs. Christians), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians vs. Catholic and
Orthodox Armenians)."
Sadly, that’s a lot of religious "faith" causing
a lot of death. And where religions fall short of causing all-out genocide, they
often retard medical, scientific, and social advances. Religion is at the root
of more evil than most religious people are prepared to admit, naturally.
Madalyn Murray O’Hair famously said several decades ago, "Religion has
caused more misery to all men in every state of human history than any other
single idea." In 2006 the pendulum is swinging around to the point where
increasing numbers of highly respected thinkers are making the same basic
observation and offering gobs of modern examples of the medieval backwardness of
religion, occuring both inside and outside the U.S.
Two excellent voices in this vein are Sam Harris with his
2004 bestseller The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason
and Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion (2006).
If a single good speck emerges from the 9/11 aftermath, perhaps it will be
that more of us will face the obvious fact that horrific things are done in the
name of "faith." Swing, pendulum, swing!
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