Why Are There Suicide Bombers?
Religion. You can’t fight it. No amount of reasoning and logic can beat it. It kills. It destroys. It creates. It saves. It is a point of view, immutable, irrefutable, untouchable. There is no more compelling force than a call from a higher power. Nothing on this world can even compare. Arguing from a worldly standpoint is hopeless. Arguing from a religious standpoint even more so. So here’s my advice to the world: change everything or give up. Stop pretending you don’t understand why people kill each other in the name of God. Either do something big to change it or stop complaining.
Fundamentalism is not wrong. To be specific, fundamentalism is not wrong to fundamentalists. In fact, to believe that fundamentalism is wrong a fundamentalist notion itself. Christian fundamentalists don’t think they’re doing a disfavor to humanity by trying convert people to their faith. When some of their ranks lynch homosexuals or blacks or repress women or conquer and enslave nations, they don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. Quite the opposite is true: they believe that their actions will result in the salvation of souls, often including their own and those of their “victims”. To them, what is death, what is torture, what is suffering in this world compared to the infinite suffering of eternal damnation? The sacrifices we make in this world are infinitely negligible compared to the ultimate reward and punishment. And so to these fundamentalists, the death of a human being, the deaths of millions of human beings, are completely justified.
Extreme Islamic fundamentalists are no different. I’ll get right to the heart of the matter: September 11, 2001. What are the deaths of a few thousand people and the suffering of a nation compared to the salvation of millions of souls? To carry out God’s will is a higher calling than anything on this earth. And so to the executors of 9/11, their actions are more than perfectly justified. 
Their actions are a divine necessity to accomplish a goal that’s far greater than any mortal goal.
So by now you should obviously know what I’m getting at here. It’s Nietzsche’s relativity of morals, that each religion defines its own set of morals even though they may be exactly counter to the morals of another religion. In his Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche talks about one religion in particular, Judaism, and the concept of slave morality: that the Jews were too physically weak as a subjugated race so they flipped everything and redefined all their weaknesses as virtues. If you don’t get it, here’s an analogy. Let’s say you’re playing some one-on-one basketball with your friend. Unfortunately, your friend is taller, stronger, faster, more accurate, etc. He basically possesses more of all the skills that it normally takes to be good at basketball. But then let’s say you decide to flip all the rules around. You now say that scoring a basket makes you lose points and now instead you get points for being shorter and weaker. The analogy is obviously oversimplified but the idea comes off clearly. You can change the rules to suit your own particular advantages.
What we have now are different religions claiming that their rules and only their rules are right. When the different sides come into conflict and argue, they cite their own rules as justification for their actions. So who’s really right? Who’s rules should be really be playing by? Are the Christian fundamentalists right in conquering and enslaving nearly all of world’s great civilizations or are the Islamic fundamentalists right in flying two 747s into the World Trade Center?
Nietzsche says that none of them are right, that “God is dead”, and that somehow we must strive to rise above the relative morals of religion and move on “beyond good and evil”, which happens to be the title of one of his most famous works and a central theme throughout his philosophy. Then he runs off and starts talking about the übermensch, the overman or superman that all of humanity is leading up to, which is a kind of religion in its own right. So the problem of irreconcilable differences, to use the words of divorce attorneys, among religious is never quite resolved. And it never will be resolved unless we take very, very drastic action. Like brainwashing the entire human race into believing in a single religion. (Any takers for the religion of science?) Otherwise, the same problems will always persist and we’ll always have people squabbling over whose morals are more moral.
And if you don’t want to pursue such an extreme option, then there’s another option available: quit whining and stop acting so surprised when conflicts arise between religions. Stop saying stupid things like “How could people be awful enough to kill thousands of people like on September 11th?” and “I just don’t understand suicide bombers”. Of course, you don’t “understand” them: they follow a set of morals and religious goals that differ from yours just enough that your respective religions can never peacefully coexist unless all fundamentalists from those “opposing” religions are completely eliminated. Even then, new religions will spring up no matter how repressive the dominant religion is and the war will just keep on going. That’s why brainwashing sounds like a better idea. So if you don’t like brainwashing, try at least to realize that everybody isn’t exactly like you.
The wars between religions are inevitable and will always exist as long as the human mind is free to question and create. That’s just human nature, and for now all anyone is willing to do is pretend that their religion preaches the truth and spend every last cent and every last drop of blood to see that their religion reigns supreme and that all other religions exist under their conditions. Looking back we can see that the history of religion has been a vicious one and a cyclical one. But then again, isn’t the history of anything so profoundly human the same way too?
4 comments:
It would be interesting to see a graph of levels of fundamentalism over time. Recent history (i.e. the last five to ten millenia) has shown us that fundamentalism often hits a relative peak whenever a culture feels especially vulnerable. People do not need to understand the morals and religious goals of other cultures; that is almost impossible, because such facets of a culture change parallel to the particular culture's state of being. Instead, it is more important for the momentary dominant culture (likely experiencing very little "religious fundamentalism") to understand the struggling culture's strife. If you asked Abd-ar-Rahman I how he felt about the Christian Visigoths, he would probably respond quite similarly to Americans today. Rahman held together the beginnings of a very tolerant caliphate on the Iberian peninsula, and its steady growth tore apart the Christian settlements which used to dominate that land. Christians could live exceptionally freely under his rule, so it may have puzzled him when some Christians reacted so aggressively to his culture's spread. The answer was not because Islam followed one moral path and Christianity followed another. It was because the way of life that the Christians had lived by for centuries was threatened, more vulnerable than ever before.
I think we all know what culture feels threatened in todays world. They are not worried about Jesus replacing Mohammad; they are worried about the Coca-Colas, the McDonalds, and the "made in U.S.A."s exterminating the identity of their culture. We would react the same way, in their shoes, and that is a crucial point to understand. As you say, history is cyclical, and many cultures have faced this before. Fundamentalism feeds on a worried mind. I agree; fundamentalism is not "wrong", for it is a symptom inevitably felt by a culture infected by vulnerability, no matter what religion they appear to follow. Fundamentalism represents the shift in ideals caused by this infection, such that we can never assign the role of antagonism to Islam or any other religion. Fundamentalism is a reaction, not a religion, so the goal of leaders today and tomorrow is to identify the action which caused such a reaction, and possibly change all of our lives for the better.
It's true that fundamentalism is a reaction, not a religion, but religion is a potent catalyst. When one's relative morality comes from a religion where a good life is rewarded with Paradise and seventy-two virgins in heaven, one has to question how much fuel religion is bringing to the fire. Even though the phrase "good life" is relative, and to a different culture such a phrase might produce compassion and love under all circumstances, this loose intrepretation of morality is clearly risky and dangerous.
I don't suspect that a profound feeling of cultural vulnerability was the main reason for all the riots and murders that occured after the printing of "anti-Muslim" comics in Denmark.
I think this new discussion is interesting. I really encourage you both to continue. This is really not that relevant, but the discussion actually misses the point of the original article. To clarify: Everything is a religion. All morals are relative. But your discussion is valuable in and of itself.
haha well i'll be taking a class on ethics next semester, so more on this later.
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