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The attacks on the World Trade Center and
Washington DC by Muslim Fundamentalists on September 11, 2001
c.e. crystallized a number of ideas that had been drifting around
in my head for several years. These attacks were a sign that
the Culture War between Modernity and Fundamentalism has become
irredeemably deadly. Though there were multiple non-religious
motives behind that day's terrorism, this essay will focus on
the religious factors sanctifying and justifying mass murder.
Parts of this essay have been moved to Some
Thoughts on Terrorism elsewhere on my website.
The Problem of Fundamentalism
As I discussed in another essay, Understanding
the Religious Reich, Fundamentalism, whether Jewish, Christian,
or Islamic (or Marxist, for that matter), has become the primary
threat to world peace and even to civilization itself. Let’s
put this as clearly as possible: a bunch of religious lunatics
murdered thousands of people on September 11, 2001 c.e. There
is absolutely no reason to believe that they (or others like
them) won’t do something just as awful over and over again,
if given the opportunity.
I strongly suggest reading that essay first,
as I defined there a lot of the terms I will be using here.
Regardless of what happens in the so-called
“war on terrorism,” regardless of whether Osama bin
Laden and his associates are caught and killed, this war will
never end. Why? Because military action abroad and police
state security measures at home will still be treating the symptoms
instead of the diseases. I have some secular opinions about that
in my essay Some
Thoughts on Terrorism. In the meantime, let me return to
the area of human behavior I have devoted my life to studying:
religion. I believe that a necessary step to creating a world
in which no one lives in fear is to eliminate religious fanaticism
as a socially acceptable form of belief and behavior. So
here is my...
Call to Arms
Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Fundamentalists
have long been waging a “culture war” with the Western
world’s concepts of justice, science, democracy, and pluralism,
which they refer to as “the Forces of Evil.” It
is well past time for liberal, moderate, and even conservative
Jews, Muslims, Christians, Neopagans, Unitarian Universalists,
Atheists, Agnostics, and everyone else who isn’t a religious
fanatic, to start consciously fighting back against deliberate
ignorance, religious bigotry, and sanctified violence —
that is to say, against Fundamentalism.
As I said before, it is time to take effective
action to “contain, subvert, and dethrone Fundamentalism
wherever and whenever it oppresses its own and other peoples.”
What does this mean? To begin with,
- Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative,
and secularized Jews have to stop respecting those
Orthodox and Hasidic Jews (at home and abroad) who advocate violence
against non-Jews in Israel, who attempt to revoke the civil liberties
of those who have different moral visions, who oppress and abuse
their wives, who deliberately keep their kids ignorant, and who
use money and weapons to oppress, enslave, and kill other human
beings.
- Liberal, moderate, conservative, and secularized
Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christians have to stop
respecting those Fundamentalists in their communities (at
home and abroad) who advocate violence against abortion doctors,
who attempt to revoke the civil liberties of those who have different
moral visions, who oppress and abuse their wives, who deliberately
keep their kids ignorant, and who use money and weapons to oppress,
enslave, and kill other human beings.
- Liberal, moderate, conservative and secularized
Muslims have to stop respecting those Islamic Fundamentalists
(at home and abroad) who advocate violence against heretics,
who attempt to revoke the civil liberties of those who have different
moral visions, who oppress and abuse their wives, who deliberately
keep their kids ignorant, and who use money and weapons to oppress,
enslave, and kill other human beings.
- Atheists, Agnostics, Deists, Freemasons,
Rosicrucians, Gnostics, New Agers, Neopagans, Unitarian Universalists,
and members of other belief and non-belief systems have to stop
pretending that Fundamentalism is just another belief system,
entitled to full social and political respect, one that will
eventually “go away” as people become more enlightened.
It isn’t and it won’t. Fundamentalism
is a mental and spiritual illness that endangers and oppresses
billions of innocent people around the world. It is a dysfunctional
form of belief that deliberately attempts to control its victims
to prevent them from ever becoming more enlightened, because
its leaders know that scientific education, exposure to other
lifestyles, gender equality, and spiritual awareness all spell
the end of their dictatorships. In fact, ancient and modern
Fundamentalism is the most dangerous collection of “cults”
in history.
Effective action means that the full resources
of modern nations and modern people as individuals must be used
to overthrow Fundamentalist governments, even if the leaders
are financially helpful to American corporations and the Pentagon’s
plans for world conquest. There are no Fundamentalist democracies,
so we aren’t likely to be going against the “will of
the people” in so doing. We need to swamp the Middle East,
Ireland, China, Southeast Asia, and American radio and television
talk shows, with accurate information about the world
outside, about modern science, about modern liberal attitudes,
about absurdities and atrocities in their scriptures, about the
crimes of current Fundamentalists and their theocratic plans
for the future. Air
America is beginning to fulfill this role in the USA and
over the internet, but it will succeed only when it sees itself
as something other than a voice for the Democratic Party, dualistically
mirroring Faux News and the right-wing radio stations.
Our Central Intelligence Agency has shown
that it’s really good at assassinating democratically elected
officials, overthrowing liberal governments, and training death
squads to torture, rape and kill liberals and moderates. Let’s
see how good they can be at overthrowing Fundamentalist dictators
(where their people have no legal options) against the will of
their oil-rich supporters, now that they have the free hand they
were begging for. Oh! I forgot, it’s the oil billionaires
in Saudi Arabia and Texas that the CIA really works for!
Computer hackers could become true freedom
fighters by destroying the electronic walls that Fundamentalist
dictatorships have erected between their populations and the
internet, and then flooding their previously closed networks
with accurate information about science, democracy, and critical
scholarship about their scriptures and the real history of their
religions.
When Islamic Fundamentalists crashed jumbo
jets into the World Trade Center, they weren’t just declaring
war on the United States. They were declaring war on the entire
modern world. When American Fundamentalist Christian ministers
Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blamed the September 11th, 2001
attacks on liberals and secularists in American culture, they
weren’t just making asses of themselves, as they have done
so many times before, they were declaring their solidarity and
sympathy for the insanity that is Fundamentalism:
“I really believe that the Pagans, and
the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians
who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle,
the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried
to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say
‘you helped this happen.’ ” (Jerry Falwell)
“I totally concur.” (Pat Robertson)
As more than one political cartoonist put
it, while Osama bin Laden and his friends were rejoicing that
“God has punished America for her sins,” Falwell and
Robertson were saying, “Amen, brothers!” Randy Cassingham,
author of This is True, in a break from his usually humourous
writing about weird new stories, called them America’s
Taliban. Said he, “I consider those two men’s comments
downright treasonous.” I couldn’t agree more. Let us
never forget the words of hate and divisiveness they spoke at
a time when a shocked and reeling America needed words of comfort
and unity. Don’t let their later denunciations of the barbarism
of nations living under Islamic law blind us to the fact they
they themselves advocate many of the same medieval punishments
for similar crimes in their longed-for Christian
theocracy.
The first, and perhaps
most crucial, step to stopping terrorism is to stop Fundamentalism. Then we can deal with those aspects of terrorism
that are rooted in political, ethnic and economic conflict, past
and present. But terrorism can ultimately be defeated only by
a massive, unrelenting, worldwide campaign of education in the
modern principles of pluralism, relativity, secular politics,
and economic justice for every living human being. The first
three parts are blasphemy to Fundamentalists; the last is blasphemy
to the multibillionaires who run the First World. But that’s
a topic for another essay. For now, I’ll just point out
that leaving a fifth to a quarter of the world’s population
in the thrall of Fundamentalism — ignorant, uneducated,
and hostile to the rest of the world — is not a cost-effective
way to run a planet. The hundreds of billions of dollars that
will be needed to repair the physical damage of September 11,
2001 is just a down payment on what Fundamentalism will cost
us in the years to come if it is not stopped.
Now, on to a few related topics:
What about “Nice Fundamentalists?”
I receive complaints from some Fundamentalist
readers that, “I’m a nice person and I’m a Fundamentalist.
It’s those nasty ones who aren’t real Fundamentalists.”
I’ve said many times over the years, I have known nice people
who called themselves Fundamentalists, but none of them was considered
“a real Fundamentalist” by other Fundamentalists. Nice
Fundamentalists find that they must bend the rigid theological,
social, or political rules of their denominations to allow themselves
to be kind and decent. If they are lucky enough to live in a
social and political situation that allows them that freedom,
they may never know the difference. If they aren’t, they
get ostracized, banned, a cross burned on their lawn, stoned
to death, or dragged from their homes and murdered by religiously
motivated mobs.
So who does get to define whether certain
actions and beliefs are representative of a community? Only the
(poly-)theologians? I choose (the root of “heresy”)
to take into consideration the observations of historians, sociologists,
political scientists, psychologists, anthropologists, and other
trained and more-or-less neutral observers. Then, like other
(poly-)theologians who use secular sciences and scholarship to
inform my beliefs, I express my conclusions.
Based on those secular observations and my
own personal experience, I see anger, hatred, fear and bigotry
as core Fundamentalist characteristics, with violence never very
far beneath the surface. Self-identified Fundamentalists who
differ with that view are in the same situation as those in the
Neopagan movement who understand that “witch” isn’t
the correct historical term for what Wiccans believe and practice,
and that it has far too much negative historical baggage to ever
be completely rehabilitated. Hate-mongering, violent, abusive
Fundamentalists long ago ruined any positive value the terms
“Fundamentalist” or “witch” might have had.
Nice Fundamentalists can either leave their denominations or
be ready for a very long and very dirty fight with their co-religionists
for the heart and soul of their faiths. Let us know if you win.
Islamic Fundamentalists = Bad
Ordinary Muslims and Arab-Americans = Good, Bad, Middling
I hope I’ve made it clear that I don’t
like Islamic Fundamentalism any more than I like Christian or
Jewish or Marxist Fundamentalism. But as a committed advocate
of religious freedom and pluralism, I try very hard not to treat
specific individuals of those faiths as enemies until such a
time as they show themselves to be such. Because the September
11th, 2001 attacks were perpetrated by Islamic Fundamentalists,
it is all too tempting for Americans of all faiths (and none)
to lash out and attack our Islamic and Arabic neighbors, assuming
that they are all, “just the same.” Try to remember
some important facts:
- Most Muslims consider their Fundamentalist
fanatics to be just as crazy and evil as most Christians and
Jews (publicly or secretly) consider their own Fundamentalists
to be. Yes, the liberals and moderates
in these faith communities are usually too cowardly to denounce
their fanatical brethren, but that doesn’t make them supporters
except in a negative philosophical and moral sense.
- As Clovis Maksoud, a Muslim college professor
said on MSNBC Sept. 24, 2001, every religion has its lunatics
and, “Just as all Christians should not be judged by the
Ku Klux Klan, or Jim Jones, or even Jerry Falwell, all Muslims
should should not be judged” by their Fundamentalists.
- A major reason that many Muslims move to
the United States or other Western nations is precisely because
they aren’t Fundamentalists and don’t
want to live in a Fundamentalist tyranny.
- A large number of American Muslims aren’t
Arabic in ancestry (lots of them are
African-American or Pakistani-American) and many Arab-Americans
are Orthodox Christians (not to mention agnostics, atheists,
and yes, Pagans).
Or to put it as simply as possible:
What about Liberal Muslims?
For over 150 years, every attempt made by
educated, liberal Arabs to modernise their peoples by Western
standards, has been systematically undermined and resisted by
corporate and political interests in the same West that piously
touted the virtues of mass education, democracy, etc. In this
the Arab world is just like the rest of the Third World.
Educated people in real democracies try to
control the worst excesses of the corporations operating in their
nations. They create domestic corporations that compete with
the foreign ones. Their citizens demand more than pennies per
day to work in foreign subsidiaries. They decline to give away
valuable raw materials to foreigners for dirt cheap prices. They
start paying attention to environmental issues and worker safety.
All this is seriously detrimental to the profit margins of multinational
corporations.
Arab rulers keep their people poor, ignorant,
and powerless because that’s how Western corporations and
governments like them. Islamic Fundamentalist
preachers, like their Christian and Jewish counterparts, support
these same goals for their own reasons: to ensure their populations
remain isolated from other worldviews that would challenge the
preachers’ power.
Liberal Muslims, like liberal Christians
and liberal Jews, have become spiritual and political cowards when it comes to fighting against the repressive
tyrants in their religion. Of course, Fundamentalists of all
varieties usually have lots of guns and bombs, and they are quick
to use them against those who dare to disagree with them. I am
not advocating religious civil war within Islam, I am saying
that it will happen sooner or later, and that it is the
only way that Islam will ever drag itself out of its Middle Ages
and into the modern world.
American secular Arabs (and everyone else
who is sick of the killing in the Middle East) could start pressuring
the American government to stop supporting the sleazy oil dictators
we installed as “kings” and “princes”. They
could finance a pro-democracy movement for the Arabic world,
broadcast liberal Islamic views and Koranic commentaries into
Islamic nations, and otherwise subvert the dominant paradigm
in that part of the world. They could help the internet hackers
I mentioned earlier to break the stranglehold the Fundamentalists
have on public knowledge.
Such a campaign could dethrone Islamic dictators,
unleash the creativity of what was once one of the world’s
greatest cultures, and allow millions of women to be treated
as if they were actually human beings. It would also cost oil
companies trillions of dollars in lost profits, leading them
to charge Americans as much for gasoline as Europeans routinely
pay, costing American car makers more billions as their customers
switch to fuel efficient vehicles, etc. Therefore we should expect
more resistance from the American government towards any groups
who might try to liberalize the Islamic world. The Bush regime
will support only the sorts of “democracies” that they
can firmly control.
How Should We Begin?
There is a slogan that civil rights activists
have long used, “No justice; no peace.” Unfortunately,
that slogan is true on many levels. Poverty, despair, hunger,
and injustice are all too easy to manipulate by terrorist organizations.
This is why I agreed with (and advocated) the policy of American
and European troops in Afghanistan bringing food, tents, and
medicine to the Afghan people. Afghans were starved and brutalized
by the Taliban regime, which was not an elected government
supported by the Afghan people, and reacted well (at least in
the beginning) to genuine help from outside their nation (when
we weren’t bombing wedding parties). I believe we should
watch and continue to support the process of creating a genuinely
democratic government there. But we can and should also say,
“No justice; no peace” to the terrorists as we hunt
them down.
Also in the short term, it’s time for
the mass media and the vast majority of Westerners to treat all
Jewish, Christian and Islamic Fundamentalist leaders who preach
hatred and violence against competing world views, and who scripturally
sanctify murder, with contempt — not respect. Let’s
not fall for the ingenuous argument that we shouldn’t be
biased against them — we should be biased against bigots.
It’s time for all those who truly believe
in freedom and democracy to use every kind of power that they
have, whether political, economic, military, social, cybernetic,
spiritual, or magical, against the specific individuals who promote
Fundamentalism, enslave entire nations, and commit mass murder.
Talk about this with your friends. Write letters
to your political representatives. Send harsh feedback to popular
media figures who whitewash violent Fundamentalism. Do binding
spells on the villains responsible. Subvert the would-be dominant
paradigms!
Final Clarifications
When I advocate a “war” against
Fundamentalism, I am NOT advocating
physical violence against your nearest Fundamentalists. I am using the phrase in the same way as the (abandoned)
war against poverty or the war against breast cancer. Yes, if
our hearts are filled with hatred and revenge, we are in danger
of becoming similar to our enemies. But we must still fight vigorously
and unrelentingly until Fundamentalism is no longer the threat
to freedom and democracy that it is now. This is an intellectual
war of competing memes.
All who believe in freedom, democracy, genuine science, and pluralism
must work against sanctified ignorance and bigotry, which is
to say, against Fundamentalism.
Likewise, I am not advocating hatred towards
Fundamentalist individuals, though that is their (overt or
covet) attitude towards all who are unlike them. I am advocating
honesty and forthrightness about expressing the meme that Fundamentalism
is not worthy of respect as a religious path because it
is all too easily turned to violence and oppression. Creedism
has got to become as socially unacceptable as racism or sexism,
and Fundamentalism
is creedism.
And, yes, I know that this essay doesn’t
sound very spiritual or New Agey. I’ve already received
plenty of commentary from fluffy-bunny types who want people
to respond to terrorism by holding hands and sending white light
and love to the whole Earth. They have been saying the same thing
for many years and nothing has changed in world politics or the
Religious Reich as a result. I will send out good vibes when
that is appropriate, but loving your enemies when they are trying
to kill you is suicidal.
I have written and spoken elsewhere about
the ethics of magic and prayer. Most beliefs that these activities
somehow require a separate set of ethics from the ones we use
in our secular lives are rooted in the Western Dualism
that separates spirit from matter. The touchstone I use in teaching
is that any action that is ethical when using physical, artistic,
intellectual, or social means, is ethical when you are using
magical, psychic, or spiritual ones. Follow your own spiritual
beliefs, but remember that refusing to take action is itself
a decision that will reap karmic consequences for you and
all the Earth.
Do we want to end terrorism in the world?
Then we have to remember one core concept:
We can break the equation, and we must.
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