"Orthogonal" still works... ;)
Posted on 10/25/2002 12:14:19 AM PDT by jennyp
The Recent Nightclub Bombings in Bali Illustrate Just What the "War on Terror" Is Really About
On the night of Saturday, October 12--the second anniversary of the suicide bombing of the USS Cole, a year, month, and day after the destruction of the World Trade Center, and mere days after terrorist attacks in Yemen, Kuwait, and the Philippines--two car bombs detonated outside neighboring nightclubs on the island of Bali, triggering a third explosive planted inside, and killing nearly 200 people (the majority of whom were Australian tourists), injuring several others, and redirecting the focus of the war against terror to Indonesia.
Also on the night of Saturday, October 12, the following bands and DJs were playing and spinning at several of Seattle's rock and dance clubs from Re-bar to Rock Bottom: FCS North, Sing-Sing, DJ Greasy, Michiko, Super Furry Animals, Bill Frisell Quintet, the Vells, the Capillaries, the Swains, DJ Che, Redneck Girlfriend, Grunge, Violent Femmes, the Bangs, Better Than Ezra, the Briefs, Tami Hart, the Spitfires, Tullycraft, B-Mello, Cobra High, Randy Schlager, Bobby O, Venus Hum, MC Queen Lucky, Evan Blackstone, and the RC5, among many, many others.
This short list, taken semi-randomly from the pages of The Stranger's music calendar, is designed to illustrate a point that is both facile and essential to reckoning the effects of the Bali bombings. Many of you were at these shows, dancing, smoking, drinking, talking, flirting, kissing, groping, and presumably enjoying yourselves, much like the 180-plus tourists and revelers killed at the Sari Club and Paddy's Irish Pub in Bali. Though no group has come forward to claim responsibility for the bombings, they were almost certainly the work of Muslim radicals launching the latest volley in the war against apostasy.
Whether the attacks turn out to have been the work of al Qaeda or one of the like-purposed, loosely connected, multicellular organizations that function in the region--groups like the Jemaah Islamiyah (an umbrella network that seeks a single Islamic state comprising Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore), the Indonesian Mujahedeen Council (led by the nefarious Abu Bakar Bashir), Laskar Jihad (which waged holy war on Christians in the Spice Islands before mysteriously disbanding two weeks ago), or the Islam Defenders Front (which makes frequent "sweeps" of bars and nightclubs, attacking non-Muslims, and violently guarding against "prostitution and other bad things")--will ultimately prove to be of little consequence. What matters is that the forces of Islamic fascism have struck again, in a characteristically cowardly, murderous, and yes, blasphemous fashion that must register as an affront to every living human with even a passing interest in freedom.
The facile part: It could have happened here, at any club in Seattle. It's a ludicrous thought, of course--at least as ludicrous as the thought of shutting the Space Needle down on New Year's Eve because some crazy terrorist was arrested at the Canadian border--but that doesn't make it any less true. That doesn't mean we should be looking over our shoulders and under our chairs every time we go to a show. It simply means that it could happen anywhere, because anywhere is exactly where rabid Islamists can find evidence of blasphemy against their precious, imaginary god.
Which brings us to the essential part: The Bali bombings were not an attack against Bali; they were an attack against humankind. In all the jawflap about the whys and wherefores of the multiple conflicts currently dotting our collective radar screen--the war against terror, the war on Iraq, the coming holy war, et al.--it seems worth restating (at the risk of sounding pious) that the war against basic human liberty, waged not by us but on us, is at the heart of the matter. Discourse has justifiably, necessarily turned to complexities of strategy, diplomacy, and consequences. The moral truth, however, remains agonizingly basic. We are still dealing with a small but indefatigable contingent of radicalized, militant absolutists who believe that every living being is accountable to the stricture of Shari'a, under penalty of death. As Salman Rushdie wrote, in an oft-cited Washington Post editorial, the fundamentalist faction is against, "to offer a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex." If these were fictional villains, you'd call them hyperbolic, not believable. But they aren't fictional. Their code would be laughable if it weren't so aggressively despicable.
As headlines about Bali cross-fade into news of North Korean nukes, and there are further debates about the finer points of Iraqi de- and restabilization, it's crucial to remember that there is, in fact, a very real enemy, with a very real will, and the very real power of delusional self-righteousness. How to remember? Consider the scene of the attacks (as reported by various Australian and European news sources):
It's a typical hot, sweaty, drunken, lascivious Saturday night. People, primarily young Aussie tourists from Melbourne, Geelong, Perth, and Adelaide, are crammed into the clubs, mixing it up, spilling out into the street. Rock band noises mix with techno music and innumerable voices as latecomers clamor to squeeze inside. Just after 11:00 p.m., a car bomb explodes outside of Paddy's, followed a few seconds later by a second blast that smashes the façade of the Sari Club and leaves a hole in the street a meter deep and 10 meters across. The second bomb is strong enough to damage buildings miles away. All at once, everything's on fire. People are incinerated. Cars go up in flames. Televisions explode. Ceilings collapse, trapping those still inside. Screams. Blistered, charred flesh. Disembodied limbs. Mangled bodies. Victims covered in blood. Inferno.
Now transpose this horrible, fiery mass murder from the seedy, alien lushness of Bali to, say, Pioneer Square, where clubs and bars are lined up in the same teeming proximity as the Sari and Paddy's in the "raunchy" Jalan Legian district, the busiest strip of nightlife in Kuta Beach. Imagine a car blowing up outside the Central Saloon and another, across the street at the New Orleans. Again, it seems too simple an equation, but the fact remains that the victims were not targeted at random, or for merely political purposes. They were doing exactly what any of us might be doing on any night of the week: exercising a liberty so deeply offensive to religious believers as to constitute blasphemy. And the punishment for blasphemy is death.
There is an ongoing lie in the official governmental position on the war against terror, which bends over backwards to assure us that, in the words of our president, "we don't view this as a war of religion in any way, shape, or form." Clearly, in every sense, this is a war of religion, whether it's declared as such or not. And if it isn't, then it certainly should be. Not a war of one religion against another, but of reason against religion--against any belief system that takes its mandate from an invisible spiritual entity and endows its followers with the right to murder or subjugate anyone who fails to come to the same conclusion. This is the war our enemies are fighting. To pretend we're fighting any other--or worse, that this war is somehow not worth fighting, on all fronts--is to dishonor the innocent dead.
One of the characteristics of true religion.
Nonsense. They still do it in Africa and they never heard of Jesus. Some people just need burning.
Some practice, like Ghandi, practice passive resistance. Others accept whatever degree of force is necessary for self defence. The common ground is that self defence should be creative and proactive -- that is one should never wait until attacked to defuse conflict.
Personally, I do not believe that violence is caused by ideas and ideologies. I believe that people with violent and aggressive temperaments gravitate to ideologies that support violence. They can, of course, grab control of nations and lead the nation into war.
In my opinion, the greatest weapon the West has against radical Islam is ridicule. Certainly we need guns and bombs to defeat people who are using guns and bombs against us. But in the long run we must make these people into objects of ridicule.
The primary "reason" for the witch burnings in Europe was economic -- the judges who condemned the witches inherited their property. In those countries and regions where this practice was not allowed, witchcraft was mysteriously rare.
Most of the people killed as witches were landholders accused of things so preposterous that Weekly World News wouldn't print it. It was all about greed.
To the point of this article, the Word teaches us to love God with all of our heart, mind, soul, strength and understanding and to love one another, including our enemies. The Word cannot be reconciled to other teachings, in particular, Islamic fundamentalism.
Likewise, non-believers might say that my description illustrates why Christianity cannot be reconciled to "reason." But that fails (as you have observed) because in my illustration based on personal experience - the Word goes beyond the ability to explain it. It is a divine revelation available to all who believe and are willing to listen by the spirit instead of by the mind.
Very well said, general_re. I really like your observation about faith and reason being "orthogonal to one another."
But there are, of course, limits to reason - reason cannot guide us in an exploration of the fundamentally non-material, which the spiritual is, practically by definition. Reason can neither confirm nor deny the basic existence of God, for example - for that, we have no choice but to believe or disbelieve as an act of pure faith. And people who claim that reason must lead in one direction or another are simply claiming the imprimatur of reason without really understanding those limits.
By the same token, faith skates past its own limitations when it tries to make pronouncements about how the material world actually is. Faith alone has proven, inductively, to be less useful for understanding the material world than reason has - we can try to rationally explore the causes and the nature of lightning, and thus try to expand our knowledge of the universe around us, and perhaps mitigate its effects, or we can see lightning as an expression of God's will, and take it as simply an article of faith. But settling for lightning as an aspect of God's mysterious will does nothing to advance the human condition, to make our lives better or more prosperous - understanding lightning is, for practical reasons, best left to explorations via reason and rationality.
That's all about how discussions of how the world is - when we move into the hypothetical, and begin discussing how the world should be - i.e., what we wish to make of it - then I think it is entirely appropriate to discuss it in terms of both faith and reason. Faith can give us some basic principles that we may take as axiomatic - freedom is better than slavery, life is better than death, material wealth is better than poverty, et cetera - and we may the exercise the gift of reason to explore how best to realize those principles. It requires a belief in a rather more perverse God than I am prepared to accept to think that God would give us the gift of reason, and then demand that we abandon it entirely in favor of faith.
Or maybe the legend of Prometheus has some grain of truth to it - maybe reason is really a curse, and not a blessing. I tend to think not, but who knows? ;)
I have a slightly different slant on it (so to speak). My personal analogy is to regard one as carpentry and the other as plumbing (don't try reading anything into the selection of trades, I just picked two I could spell). When you do carpentry, you need a carpenter's tools. Similarly for plumbing. The two trades are not in conflict. They do different things, and they use different tools. Together, they can get a house built.
People openly advertised themselves as witches. They sold their services whether it was wart removal or evil eye removal. My wife's aunt talks about witches in the Appalachian hills long before Wicca. They were tolerated until something bad happened and they became the scapegoat.
The communist terror groups certainly were.
"Orthogonal" still works... ;)
Reason is defined by Ayn Rand as “the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses.”
The Philosophy of Objectivism: A Brief Summary.
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