Posted on 11/24/2001 4:22:58 PM PST by Pokey78
Fundamentalism keeps erupting from the world’s religions because belief and intolerance have always gone hand in hand
Tokyo rush hour: March 20, 1995. Five devotees of the Japanese guru Shoko Asahara squeeze aboard four trains at different ends of the subway system. They are headed for Kasumigaseki station, hub of the capital’s government district.
Asahara is the leader of a religious movement known as Aum Shinrikyo (“religious teaching of supreme truth”). Based on Japanese Buddhism, the creed anticipates the deep-shelter survival of a pure religious remnant after a mass destruction of the wicked — the materialistic, secular populations of the world.
The men carry plastic sacs of the lethal nerve agent sarin secreted inside their rolled newspapers. As the trains trundle into Kasumigaseki station, each man places his newspaper on the floor and punctures the sac with a sharp pointed umbrella before slipping through the crowds. Commuters inhale the vapours and fall down frothing at the mouth, writhing in agony. Twelve die and 5,500 are injured, many of them permanently.
The Tokyo sarin attack shocked people the world over, not simply because the perpetrators used poisoned gas nor even because they had aimed eventually to kill 20,000 rather than a dozen, but because Buddhism is known for its ideal of non-violence — “ahimsa”.
Since the end of the cold war, religious-inspired terrorism has replaced East-West antagonism to become a principal threat to the future of the planet. The barbarism of the attacks in America on September 11 raised further profound questions about the dark face of religion. When people commit barbarous acts in the name of God, it explodes the view that religion makes for a better world.
Understanding and controlling the mechanisms whereby a beneficent faith becomes dangerous is an urgent task. How does civil society identify, constrain and eliminate religion’s malevolent forces? Some atheist commentators, such as Professor Richard Dawkins, are convinced that belief in the afterlife was the essential dynamic that made September 11 possible. Should religions that promise future worlds be outlawed, quarantined like a dangerous plague? We did not need the suicide attacks on New York and Washington to remind us that all mainstream religions have a potential for violence. Radical religious societies of the East and Near East spawned the terms “zealot”, “assassin” and “thug”. Christians invented the Inquisition; Islam the jihad or holy war. The Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — counsel peace and love, but their texts are spiked with vengeance, chastisement and eternal punishment, only latterly interpreted as “metaphorical”.
Christ told his disciples: “My peace I give unto you.” But he also declared that he had brought “not peace but the sword”.
Islam, which means “peace”, commands the faithful to “slay not the life that God has made sacred”; yet Ayatollah Khomeini counselled that he knew of no command “more binding to the Muslim than to sacrifice life and property to defend and bolster Islam”.
Buddhism, for all its irenic teachings, advocated in Thailand and Sri Lanka the military overthrow of unjust rulers. In 1959 a Buddhist monk murdered Sri Lanka’s prime minister, S W Bandaraniake, on “moral” grounds.
Sikhism, founded in the 16th century, has a long history of young men killing and embracing martyrdom in sacred wars. In earlier times, Indian warriors prayed to the gods to help them in their struggles against religious enemies. More recently, nationalists have urged paramilitary organisations to defend Hindu religion and culture. In 1992 followers of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh group stormed a mosque in Ayodhya, prompting riots between Muslims and Hindus throughout India that resulted in thousands of deaths.
Religionists have defended down the ages their right to use force when faced with internal or external threats to faith. Yet the world’s mainstream religions could never have survived had they not, by the same token, espoused peace and gentleness, satisfying the spiritual and moral needs of vast numbers of people.
Christianity in the West suffered internal fragmentation at the Reformation, attended by wars of religion, burnings at the stake, hangings, drawings and quarterings. The churches found their social and political hegemony under renewed challenge in the post-enlightenment world of science, rationalism and secular politics.
Protestant Christianity nevertheless contributed to the formation of pluralist ideals, creating a climate of tolerance for differences in belief and rejection of belief. Catholicism was reluctant to follow suit until the second Vatican council of the 1960s.
All the religions of the world have found confirmation for pluralism within their scriptures and philosophies, and most have found western democracy more or less hospitable to religious freedom.
Religion has not sat comfortably with secular modernity, however, and the last two decades of the 20th century saw a remarkable rise in fundamentalist movements and a consequent increase in religion-inspired tension and violence.
One international think tank — RAND-St Andrews Chronology of International Terrorism — claims that religious groups accounted for half of the world’s 60 terrorist groups listed in the late 1990s, more than double the proportion at the beginning of the decade.
Mainstream religions have grown markedly antagonistic towards western secularism, which has been linked in the religious mind with globalisation and moral relativism. Pope John Paul II has repeatedly blamed secularism for the decline of faith, the breakdown of families and the mass apostasy of the young. His words have been echoed by monks, imams and gurus the world over.
There is more than a grain of truth in the charge. But sociologists of religion insist that young people in the West have not so much abandoned religion as relocated their sense of the sacred in caring for the environment, the poor, the homeless. Young people have retained spiritual instincts but have ceased, according to many surveys, to receive religion and moral guidance from top down.
Most religious leaders are neither impressed, nor assuaged, by these arguments. Rejected authority lies at the angry heart of fundamentalism, prompting calls for a return to “basics” and tensions with the moderate mainstream.
The mentality that sparked the Tokyo sarin attack was typical of the sectarianism that marks the formation of many religious terrorists — from Christian abortion clinic bombers to Zionist assassins, from Sikh separatists to Osama Bin Laden’s suicide pilots.
Fundamentalism cannot square the circle of religious pluralism. Fundamentalists start by denying rival truth claims, and invariably end by denying their antagonists’ right to exist. Peacemakers are in league with the devil.
Dr Ian Paisley, inveighing against Margaret Thatcher (after her government’s peace initiatives in Northern Ireland), once prayed publicly: “O God, in wrath take vengeance upon this wicked, treacherous, lying woman. Grant that we may see a demonstration of Thy power.”
Fundamentalists tamper with mainstream theology to justify and provide “evidence” for their diagnoses. Fundamentalist theologies are typically a witch’s brew of private revelation, assorted appropriations of borrowed beliefs, guru worship and preoccupation with current and historical pretexts.
Osama Bin Laden focuses on the presence of American troops — including “improperly” dressed women — on Saudi territory, the land of the Muslim holy places. Last March Joseph Kibweteere, a Catholic priest in Uganda, burnt alive 300 members of his Restoration of the Ten Commandments sect to fulfil an alleged message from the Virgin Mary. Asahara’s teachings combined Japanese Buddhism with a lethal cocktail of millennial readings culled from the Book of Revelation, the Old Testament and the predictions of Nostradamus.
Charismatics, whether they prosper by personal magnetism, psychosis, or deceit, act as crucial catalysts in the formation of fundamentalism. Paranormal communications — hotlines to God — come in useful; although gurus are seldom all they seem. Asahara employed rites involving “trembling carpets” (operated remotely by electric vibrators) and ritual drinks laced with LSD to boost a sense of his mystique. Bin Laden’s heroic claims to have fought in the Afghan front lines against the Soviet invaders (with concocted videos to prove it) turn out to be gross exaggerations aimed at enhancing his heroic charisma.
Millennial expectations are endemic to fundamentalism. And life is cheap when the end is nigh. Messianic sects create self-fulfilling prophecies to confirm their predictions, calling for radical choices, including martyrdom and atrocities. In 1999, 14 devotees of the American sect Concerned Christians, were arrested in Jerusalem whence they came to instigate acts of terror to prompt Armageddon timed for the advent of 2000.
Messianic Zionism teaches that the Jewish Messiah will come only after the temple has been rebuilt on its original site in Jerusalem. Some Zionists believe that the salvation of the entire world depends on this event. The conviction is a permanent provocation, for both sides of the Jewish-Muslim divide, since the site of the old temple lies beneath the Muslim Dome of the Rock.
Meanwhile, there are Israelis who see the mere presence of Muslims on the West Bank as an unholy trespass hindering inheritance of their divinely ordained promised land. As Yitzhak Rabin took his peace process policies forward in the early 1990s, involving the surrender of land settled by Israelis, messianic Zionists saw this as the ultimate betrayal and plotted his assassination. Rabin was murdered on November 4, 1995, by the student Yigal Amir, who said he had “acted on orders from God”.
Equally potent are fundamentalist calls for theocracy: the establishment of a religious society or state in which secularism is banished and God-given laws, beliefs and values are imposed without exceptions. Such aims are a reverse image of democratic pluralism — the view that individuals and groups of individuals within a society should be allowed to choose their own sets of values, beliefs, and indeed freedom not to believe.
In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, regarded by Muslim radicals as one who wears the label of Islam but who “waters down Islamic law”, has been combating fundamentalist terrorism for two decades. His predecessor, Anwar Sadat, was assassinated in 1981 by fundamentalist terrorists who accused him of being a secularist.
Even within western modernity, dreams of theocracy have died hard. General Franco’s Spain was a marriage of ultra-conservative Catholicism and fascist governance enthusiastically celebrated by the papacy: chanting Spanish pilgrims in the 1950s would call out in St Peter’s Square: “Spain for the Pope.” And Pius XII would call back: “And the Pope for Spain.”
Dominion theology, espoused by the Christian right in America, calls for the forced imposition of “Christian principles” on America’s secular society. Ian Paisley has alluded to visions of a theocratic state in Northern Ireland to defeat the threat to Christian principles by “satanic deception”. When asked by Protestant critics whether he had considered moderating his remarks, he declared that they were “emissaries from hell . . . sent by Beelzebub, commissioned by Satan to tell the man of God to compromise”.
Some Zionists subscribe to a theology of “catastrophic Messianism”, the notion that the secular Jewish state of Israel is merely a precursor to a promised triumphant recreation of the biblical state of Israel. This kingdom will be established with the victorious military advent of the Messiah.
The power of promised lands has assumed grim proportions where it involves the guarantee of entry to paradise via ultimate acts of personal sacrifice such as the suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv by young adherents of the Palestinian Hamas movement.
To what extent are such suicides religious in nature, and how can religion possibly justify such tactics? In 1998, Abdul Aziz Rantisi, a founder of the Hamas movement, rejected the term “suicide bombing” since it implied an impulsive act by a deranged person. The proper phrase was “self-chosen martyrdom”, and he added that “all Muslims seek to be martyrs”.
There can be no doubt of the religious or pseudo-religious dimension of the September 11 attacks. Mohammed Atta, who flew American Airlines flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center, wrote a series of instructions for his last day on earth. In the section headed “When you enter the plane”, he had written: “Oh God. Open all doors to me. Oh God who answers prayers and answers those who ask you for your help, I am asking you for forgiveness. I am asking you to lighten the way. I am asking you to lift the burden I feel.”
In studying terrorism as a form of “sacrificial rite”, scholars have focused on the idea of acts of immolation that exalt the religious leadership, ennoble the suicide “martyrs”, and honour the God in whose name they act: God is great! The commercial and military symbolism of September 11 was obvious for all to see. But religious people were not slow in pondering the imagery from other perspectives. A Benedictine monk writing in The Tablet professed to see in the billowing smoke the suffering face of Christ. Others have reported seeing an image of Satan, and some the face of Bin Laden.
Plumbing the grim history of holocaust symbolism, a far more chilling comparison emerges — connecting the suicide pilots and their victims with acts of human sacrifice: the terrorists had hoped to kill 200,000. The scope of the carnage and its pseudo-religious connotations, reinforced by the images of smoking altars, suggest a degenerate form of sacrificial atavism with the power to transform our view of the world.
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that “performative” ritual — religious rites such as baptism and marriage — confirm and shape our attitudes towards each other and the world. Religious rituals hallow and give special meaning to family, community, life’s major events, celebrations and tragedies. In the same way, performative rites of pseudo-religious savagery make us receptive to a world picture of paranoia, despair and psychopathic hatred — sick inversions of the religious virtues of faith, hope and charity. Whether we are about to witness a contagious spread of homicidal neo-paganism under the guise of an embattled religious righteousness depends on the response of religionists and non-religionists to the rising tide of fundamentalism. The challenge for moderate mainstream religionists is whether they will emulate the fundamentalists in demonising secular societies for their manifest drawbacks, or whether they will recognise that pluralist modernity offers the best hope of promoting religious and cultural coexistence in a dangerous and contracting world. As the Christian theologian and writer Edmund Hill comments: “If we see only the negative aspects of secularism . . . then we are going to keep our religion out of politics and out of our economics and our law and everything else of that kind. In fact, we are going to let the world get even more secular in a negative sense.” At a time of widespread disillusionment with secular humanism and enlightenment ideals, Christian political scientists are correct in asking how long democracy can survive in the West while religion and its basis for universal respect (the notion that all without exception are children of God) are in steep decline. By the same token, while religion is sidelined and banished to the realms of private opinion, the challenge for secular institutions is whether they will accord respect to mainstream religion, allowing it public space.
Professor Mark Juergensmeyer, a sociologist, has argued that “the cure for religious violence may ultimately lie in a renewed appreciation for religion itself”. His recommendation is ironic in the light of September 11, when Christians are being murdered at prayer by Muslim extremists in Pakistan, and while Catholic priests and nuns stand accused of inciting mass murder in Rwanda. Juergensmeyer’s call for “appreciation” can succeed only if religionists and non-religionists alike prove capable of distinguishing authentic religion from the distorted perversions of fundamentalist pseudo-religion. The key to that discernment is the litmus test of pluralism. Decent mainstream religionists accept what the fundamentalists deny: that pluralism is a virtue and not a sin.
The problem for civil society, as much as for the world’s religions, is to understand the confused and ambiguous margins that separate authentic pluralism (respect for difference on the path to truth) from moral relativism (the view that all beliefs and values are equally meaningless). While the two are conflated, moderate religionists will remain sceptical of secularism, and fundamentalism will flourish and win converts.
© John Cornwell 2001
John Cornwell’s new book Breaking Faith: the Pope, the People and the Fate of Catholicism, is published by Viking on Thursday at £16.99. Copies can be ordered for £13.59, plus £1.95 p&p, from The Sunday Times Books Direct on 0870 165 8585
This statement makes no sense. Moral relativism is a view that all beliefs and values are equally meaningful - and therefore true for the holder of the values. Pluralism is the belief that no single system or view of reality can be relied upon. Of course, both moral relativism and pluralism defy logic.
Bolshevik Revolution - Bloody/Secular
Soviet Union - Bloody/Secular
Fascism - Bloody/Secular
Nazism - Bloody/Secular
Pol Pot - Bloody/Secular
Idi Amin - Bloody/Secular
Abortion - Bloody/Secular
Atheist mass murderers are a world apart. No one else is even in their league.
When are these bozos gonna get off this "Islam means peace crapolla?
Islam means submission
...or is it the other way around?
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