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.
I'm sorry but I am unable to make any sense of your remarks here, other than Middle Ages Popes were not Israelites, and that they they burned people at the stake. But what is the EVOLUTIONARY, PHYSICAL basis of complaint about these actions?
The shepherds of the Levant did not gas 6,000,000 jews, after listening to stories all their lives from the gospels about how jews were not saved, and therefore outcasts from the family of God, if they adhered to their father's religeous convictions.
I also heard and read these stories since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, and I was taught according to Holy Writ to love and repect Jews as the original vine into which Gentiles had been grafted and the human ancestory of the Messiah, not murder them and dispose of their their corpses in ovens. BUt again, what basis does impersonal physical, evolutionary force provide for condemnation of gassing 6,000,000 of God's people?
If you're trying to make the case that these people were murdered by Christians, because of Christianity, then your assertion is not connected with reality, because "we know that no murderer has eternal life in him."
And, therefore, excused from the moral restraints imposed by the Ten Commandments?
The New Covenant referred to in Holy Writ does not exclude the moral restraints imposed by the Ten Comandments. On the other hand, evolution provides no rational basis for such moral restraints.
I am not a subjectivist, a relativist, or an instrumentalist. I am not a primative. Morality does not mean accepting the unthinking prejudices of your tribe. Morality has to include doing the best job you can of determining what's moral.
Evolution theory cannot provide any accounting of why one is obligated to obey any impersonal principle. But what you refer to as "unthinking prejudice" such as a legal proscription within the Hebrew tribe against the practice of divination and its attendant idolatry and mixing of other religions with the Hebrew religion was viewed by them, and I think proved to be good for the survial of the Hebrew tribe. This is an argument from your own terms. After all, they survived. You are entitled to your own personal preference in this regard, but evolution provides you no principle with which to condmemn Hebrew legal proscriptions against idolatry and divination simply because the Hebrews had a different personal preference than yours.
Cordially,
I didn't know you asked.
The jews do not accept christ as savior, therefore, jews who do not spurn the traditional sacred beliefs of their fathers are unsaved. True or False?
True and False. Abraham, Moses, David and the like predate Christ but are obviously saved. And in Romans, it is made clear that people who never heard about Christ would be judged based on the law written in their hearts. And in Hebrews, the Word says that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. On the flipside, once the truth of Christ has been made known to a person and that person willfully rejects Him - he is lost.
Try reading it again putting yourself in the place of Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, noting that this ghetto's existence predates Hitler by many centuries, wondering how this could have come to pass?
By saying Because it is so, you seem to recognize that Matthew and John speak the truth of the circumstances. As to what happened in Nazi Germany, I believe you and I have different views. Hitler claimed to be Christian, but was not:
Did Christians Cause the Holocaust?
From the early second century, the church fathers, puzzled over the fact that Jewish leaders did not interpret their own Scriptures as Jesus and his apostles had, concluded that the Jews were blind, obdurate, stubborn, hard-hearted—and possibly demonic. John Chrysostom called the Jews, "… inveterate murderers, destroyers, men possessed by the devil, [whom] debauchery and drunkenness have given…the manners of the pig and the lusty goat." Despite their harsh words, many of the Fathers did not cease to appeal for Jews to come to Jesus (though, tragically, they required such converts to give up their Jewishness). Nor did church leaders advise or officially support violence against Jews: the Jews were to be preserved in misery as a sign of reprobation, the Fathers concluded, until the Last Day when God would exact judgment…
Nazi anti-Semitism was different. It targeted Jews as a race. Even those who had been baptized and assimilated were sought and rooted out, even from monasteries and convents. It was their fantasized racial characteristics that threatened the mythology of Aryan blood purity.
In March, John Paul II emphasized that same distinction between historic Christian anti-Judaism and various secular, racialist anti-Semitisms in his cautiously worded apology for the role some "sons and daughters of the Church" played in the Holocaust. Nazi acts and ideology, he claimed, had their "roots outside of Christianity."
You Mean Hitler Wasn’t A Priest?
A shocking story has been revealed: Adolf Hitler was not a Christian after all. Instead, he hoped to destroy Christianity. This news flash comes courtesy of a group of students at Rutgers University School of Law at Camden, who have posted papers on a website [lawandreligion.com] detailing Hitler's desire to eradicate Christianity. The documents are from the archives of Gen. William J. Donovan and were originally… prepared for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, so we can safely assume they are authentic. The Rutgers project's editor, for example, seems to have been taken a bit by surprise. Julie Seltzer Mandel told the Philadelphia Enquirer that "When people think about the Holocaust, they think about the crimes against Jews, but here's a different perspective." The Nazis, she says, "wanted to eliminate the Jews altogether, but they were also looking to eliminate Christianity."
That will unsettle those who have been taught that Hitler was a Christian of some stripe — and indeed, by some accountings, an enthusiastic Catholic…
Hitler was indeed a baptized Catholic, but his rejection of the faith was profound. "My pedagogy is strict," he once explained. "I want a powerful, masterly, cruel and fearless youth... There must be nothing weak or tender about them. The freedom and dignity of the wild beast must shine from their eyes... That is how I will root out a thousand years of human domestication." That domestication, of course, was in large part due to the influence of Christianity. Hitler was blunter still on other occasions. "It is through the peasantry that we shall really be able to destroy Christianity," he said in 1933, "because there is in them a true religion rooted in nature and blood." His countrymen would have to choose: "One is either a Christian or a German. You can't be both."
Indeed, he understood all too well that Christianity, in the long run, was his enemy. "Pure Christianity — the Christianity of the catacombs — is concerned with translating the Christian doctrine into fact. It leads simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely wholehearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics." Switch a few words around and you'd think you were listening to Joseph Stalin. And like Stalin, Hitler believed history was on his side: "Do you really believe the masses will ever be Christian again? Nonsense. Never again. The tale is finished... but we can hasten matters. The parsons will be made to dig their own graves."
That promise was to come true in a frightful number of cases. Polish Christians felt the full force of the persecution, as historian John Morley reminds us. "In Poland, both Jews and Christians were objects of Nazi oppression and manipulation." The clergy were a chief target: "In West Prussia, out of 690 parish priests, at least two-thirds were arrested, and the remainder escaped only by fleeing from their parishes. After a month's imprisonment, no less than 214 of these priests were executed... by the end of 1940 only twenty priests were left in their parishes — about three percent of the number of parish priests in the pre-war era." The toll of murdered Polish priests would rise into the thousands; their Protestant counterparts (though a much smaller group) fared no better, with many members of the clergy perishing in the camps.
A-G,
You'll appreciate this link. Hitler revealed an absolute loathing of Christianity and expressed a desire to destroy it.
OK, Don. You can have the last word.
When the Alpha Centurians, knowing that humans have a high nutritional content, come for the harvest, what will you tell them? "Don't eat me, I cause heartburn."?
donh: Look, you can't make this true by just saying it over and over. Humans are physical...
Prove it.
It's certainly an imperfect and easily corrupted source of morals, but you can't make it not be morals by imposing your special definition about physicallity on them.
And you can't make it be morals by imposing your special definition about physicallity on them.
If it looks like a moral, acts like a moral, and smells like a moral, it's a moral.
If it looks like a thought, acts like a thought, and smells like a thought, is it a thought? Does thought exist? Do morals exist? Or is your moral basis just more hallucinating?
What you have done is define it away
You’ve defined away everything.
Sure it has problems, any human construct does. Sure it has no provable base in transcendental reality--whatever that is. But neither does anything else. It's a lousy system, but it's the only one that chooses to make itself available for reference and dissection.
Prove it without resorting to objectivism.
donh post 863: Since we are proudly basing our notion of morality on NO AVAILABLE PHYSICAL EVIDENCE--than you have no way to tell whether we are the chosen people, or the Alpha Centaurians are the chosen people, and we are just food being prepared for their table. All you have done is wave your hands at this problem dismissively--that is not an argument--it is just an exercise in wishful thinking.
You’re right, it isn’t an argument. Scripture is an axiom. Since you are proudly basing your notion of morality on physical evidence, PROVE WE ARE PHYSICAL, and nothing but physical (or is the validity of physical evidence an axiom you subscribe to?). If you can’t, all you have done is wave your hands at this problem dismissively--that is not an argument--it is just an exercise in hallucinations.
When the Alpha Centaurians come, or a little heartburn, or Judgement Day, or heaven, or hell, you can always chalk it up to eternal hallucinations.
Ecclesiastes chapter 12:
Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain: In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened, And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of musick shall be brought low; Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets: Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity. And moreover, because the preacher was wise, he still taught the people knowledge; yea, he gave good heed, and sought out, and set in order many proverbs. The preacher sought to find out acceptable words: and that which was written was upright, even words of truth. The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd. And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.
You: Yes. Not much of a handicap for my side of the argument, now is it?
It destroys the basis of rationality and argument itself, not to mention the reality of moral rules.
What are the physical properties of your argument? There are none. Moral rules are not physical in nature. Things such as propositions, concepts, numbers, and the laws of logic do not have any physical properties. They have no chemical characteristics. They don't extend into space. They have no weight. No empirical evidence can be adduced that that such things are physical. The only explanation I can think of for the belief that moral qualities are physical is that the evolutionary model would fail otherwise.
Evil as a value judgment means a departure from some standard of moral perfection. But if ALL that exists in the universe is physical, then what are you comparing the universe WITH when you for instance judge that a certain Pope's actions (part of the physical universe) were "immoral" or "unjust"? How can a physical property be immoral or unjust?
All evolutionary explanation can do is to attempt to describe past behavior. It cannot inform as to future actions. Morality, on the other hand, is essentially PRESCRIPTIVE, not descriptive. It tells us what SHOULD be the case as opposed to what IS the case. So if I ask you why shouldn't I be selfish, the only thing evolution says is that when I'm selfish I hurt the group. But that answer presumes another moral value, that is that I ought to be concerned about the welfare of the group. But why should that concern me? You will say that if the group doesn't survive then the species doesn't survive. But as I've alluded to in previous responses, why should I care about the survival of the species? If you counter that we have the moral obligation to evolve, then my point is made; if we have moral obligations prior to evolution, then evolution itself can't be their source.
Cordially
I didn't know you asked.
Well, I did, and now I'll ask again, since you seem to have inadvertantly failed to answer in your haste to dig up yet another utterly irrelevant response:
If the the story of Abraham meant you should sacrifice your first born, would you do it? Happily explaining all the time the moral superiority of transcendental standards of morality, untethered by mere physical human concerns?
It does no such thing.
What are the physical properties of your argument? There are none.
Relationships between physical properties may be considered physical properties (philosophers generally avoid getting into this argument by referring to "material" entities, meaning both things you can hold in your hand, and relationships between them), yet there is no way to hold, say, the law of gravity in your hand. Does that mean the law of gravity does not physically exist, and that anyone holding to it has "destroyed" the rationality of physics?
And you think I am the one trespassing against rational thought? Think again.
All physical astronomy can do is explain past orbital behaviors, It cannot inform as to future actions. It cannot safely guide us to land on the moon, since that's never been done before.
You have a severe case of argument from wishful thinking obscured and made to look sensible by dressy, orotund rhetoric.
I get so tired of going over this with you over and over--specific morals are not built in. The sentimental prediliction for morals built into humans can be easily accounted for by evolutionary forces, quite similar to those that produced familial love, as tribal altruism, which is common in large social mammals, and has obvious acute survival value for our DNA.
You’re right, it isn’t an argument. Scripture is an axiom. Since you are proudly basing your notion of morality on physical evidence, PROVE WE ARE PHYSICAL,
I don't have to, as my claim is a much milder one than yours. Your are claiming transcendental certainty. I am claiming you should tentatively believe what you can demonstrate.
When the Alpha Centaurians come, or a little heartburn, or Judgement Day, or heaven, or hell, you can always chalk it up to eternal hallucinations.
Ecclesiastes chapter 12:
So this is your refutation? If the Alpha Centaurians were trying to produce a human race that was co-operative, meek, and unwarlike--so that we'd be numerous, healthy, and uncombatative when they came to harvest us--by sending us Jesus as Savior, why would they not re-inforce their story by also telling us we are the central apple of God's eye? I would.
This is at least as likely a scenario as any other ID has produced.
When the Alpha Centurians, knowing that humans have a high nutritional content, come for the harvest, what will you tell them? "Don't eat me, I cause heartburn."?
Amusingly enough, This is one the moral arguments for vegetarianism. When you tell the AlphaCents about your transcendental morality of universal love and charity, and they ask you why you have all those cows and chickens in the backyard, what will you say? Did God proscribe cows and chickens in the Sacred Writ?
At any rate, if I am going to concede that human morals are imperfect and derived from human concerns, than I am conceding that they do not apply to Alpha Centurians. They certainly didn't seem to apply with any great force to the humans the jesuits and dominicans first encountered and helped administer Genocide to in South America, did it?
Apparently, transcendental morality isn't much a safeguard even just here on this planet. You can do nothing to morally dissuade the Alpha Centarians, with your brand of transcendental morality, any more than you can with my brand of tentative morality, even if you sprinkle fairy dust, and turn around three times. At any rate, we do not determine the accuracy of material notions by examining their effect on the social fabric, if adopted. We measure them against the available reality we have to look at, to see if they can accurately predict and control our environment.
So, as I said, if a Jew--who obviously knows the story of Jesus--wished to remain true to the religion of his fathers and his ethnic clan since time out of mind--which holds the worship of christ to be idolatry, and therefore disobedient to the 10 commandments--he is not saved. He is Lost.
Hence, in christian countries, he can be treated as a native non-citizen. He is not a mere heathen, he is a willful apostate. Just like it says in the Bible, and just as the Popes point to to justify special hebrew laws, and ex-communicating those who disagree with this allocation. He can be put in special gated prisons called ghettos, forbidden to work at certain jobs, branded with special apparal requirements. Subject to having his children kidnapped by the Pope, if his spouse converts.
Hitler did not invent any of this--Hitler did not build the Warsaw ghetto, and populate it exclusively with Jews. Hitler did not invent making special laws for Jews. Hitler did not invent dis-enfranchising Jews. Hitler did not invent pogroms. Hitler did not preach, for 1600 years, that the Jew is unsaved, unclean, lost. Christians did that, with the holy scripture as backup authority.
Hitler merely harvested what the christian world sewed at the clear behest of the Bible.
By saying Because it is so, you seem to recognize that Matthew and John speak the truth of the circumstances.
Sorry, I was being cheeky.
If you will examine what I have said about this recently here, you will see that I do not regard this as an accurate account. It seems incredibly obvious to me, as it has been to the historians of the Jesuit order for some time, that the Romans killed Jesus--the Jews didn't remotely have the motivation, the Romans did,-- John and Matthew dressed the story up so as to blame the Jews, because they were in the business of promoting the struggling christian sect over the old orthodox regime in Judea.
As to what happened in Nazi Germany, I believe you and I have different views. Hitler claimed to be Christian, but was not:
This is a mighty thin reed to be clinging to. Practically all political leaders are pretty much guaranteed to be amoral thugs or zealots at heart, but they can't do a thing without the willing help of the population. Hitler did not kill 6 million jews single-handedly, or out of historical context. Or without noticable help from the christian churches, as I have detailed in earlier posts. Those who would excuse the holocaust too readily are always eager to take up the conclusions of various cults of personality.
Focusing on Hitler, or Pius XII, is an attempt at camoflage, whether intentional or not.
The christian world owes what Jesuits call a "moral duty of repair" for the holocaust. The more we hang on to convenient bogeymen, and refuse to acknowledge the everyday details of history, the greater the moral harm.
But, by all means, let it go. Who cares if another holocaust's foundation is laid in this new century by Holy Writ. No skin off our behind, right? After all, it's unquestionable transcendental TRUTH, isn't it? We're not going to modify it just because it kills a few Jewish tribes every millenia or so--after all, they number amongst the unsaved.
Earlier, I erroneously credited Elie Wiesal with "The Sunflower" which was actually by Weisenthal. Elie Wiesal's "Night", was the intended reference. Sorry. Kogon's "Theory and Practice of Hell" was a reference I should have also mentioned in this context. Although it is not altogether complimentary to my argument.
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