Religious Extremism: My Thoughts [Archive]

Apollo

May 20th, 2007, 04:39 PM

Ok I'll just paste it here from the blog to get discussion on it.

Despite being the major reference point for debates; the attacks by Al Qaeda in 2001 were not the only such assaults on innocent persons in recent years. To the contrary, the September 11 attacks seemed to have a great deal in common with religiously themed violenced that has spread across most major faith systems. There is religiously motivated violence by both Jewish and Muslim groups in the Middle East, and there are religious groups that advocate violence in the namae of the Christianity in the United States.

These groups, despite their obvious religious differences, are often startlingly similar to one another when it comes to motivation and worldview.

One common motivator of religious violence is, you see, what sociologists and political scientists call a totalist out-look on life. This is essentially the belief that one's own cause is entirely good, and the cause of one's opponents entirely bad. Totalism can also be described as the belief that a single narrow set of ideas can and should permeate all of society, eradicating all ideas that oppose it, both in their practice and existence.

It is crucial to understand that totalist movements don't spring from within religious traditions sponstaneously. They have social causes, among which are oppression, deprivation, psychological trauma, and prolonged periouds of social instability.

Groups that act along religious lines to achieve political goals without recourse to violence are, ofcourse, common around the world. These groups usually seek to resolve identifaible social problems. Groups that act along religious lines to achieve political goals through violent means, however, often aim to worsen the varied social and political problems they claim to be acting in opposition to. If there is violence on the ground, they want to accelerate it. If there is discrimination and racial strife, they want to increase it. Members of these groups have concluded, in most cases, that the perpetuation of chaos and injustice is the likeliest, and perhpas the only, way to defeat their opponents.

It's frequently suggested that the best response to various global international terrorist groups is to undertake the aggressive conventional military campaigns to "root them out". This approach, however, runs the risk of playing directly into the hands of the terrorists. Their object is to accelerate whatever social chaos or dislocation they may find in their region or movement, because the greater the chaos, the more likely there are to be aggrieved young men or women to recruit to their cause. War invetably brings suffering, disorder, and rage for these terrorists leaders to exploit. The act of launching a military campaign against a terrorist organisation has been compared, with some justice, to the act of shooting a swarm of bees with a machine gun.

Religious extremists distort, quote out of context, and otherwise manipulate their own religious scriptures. The Christian Identity groups in the United States, for instance, conveniently overlook New Testament teachings concerning peace, reconciliation, and brotherhood, and choose to instead to emphasise their own twisted interpretations of the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Revelations anad the law of the Old Testament. The same phenomenon plays out in radical Jewish and Muslim groups around the world.

No major contemporary religious tradition on Earth promotes as an article of faith the killing of innocent people. By the same token, however, no major religious system is arranged in such a way to make it impossible to misinterpret or manipulate its teachings in a destructive way.

So what's the answer to all this?

There isn't an easy response to the challenge of religious extremism and politically motivated religious violence. The first and most important thing, however, is to understand that holding any single faith responsible for all deeds carried out in its name will only hasten and accelerate a cycle of mutual intolerance (already seen on most discussions) and increase the likelihood of new totalist factions. A Christian, is not, by definition a terrorist because some misguided person calling himself a Christian believed that the Bible supported his plot to bomb the 1996 Olympics.

If we focus on the actions of an extremist group affiliated with any given faith, and repeatedly emphasise what we believe to be that one faiths "terrorist" tendancies, we increase the likelihood that rank-and-file members of our faith will come to view all those who believe differently than we do as extremists. This is in fact the aim of many terrorists; to accelerate the polarisation of religious life, and to make it more difficult for people in different faiths to appreciate each other's humanity.