The threat of the ‘other’ Taliban…

Whilst it’s very common to find discussions of the role of political Islam in motivating and justifying violence, it’s much rarer to hear any in-depth discussion of the role of political Christianity in supporting the US military; yet, religiosity and support for the military do go hand in hand as is evidenced by this study as well as the plethora of religious iconography deployed by American military fanatics.

Religious people are born into a belief system which is already embroiled in a war; a battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. To sophisticated believers this is an analogy, or expresses a spiritual struggle as much within themselves as in the external world. To the more literally, fundamentalist minded, it lends itself to being easily translated into physical warfare.

To the American Christian Right, God and Country are founding pillars of their beliefs, and the country’s war is God’s war; be it against the ‘godless communists’ of the cold war or the ‘false religion’ of Islam today. Further back in history, the idea of Manifest Destiny supported the genocide of Native Americans, and after that, slavery. Christianity’s pedigree of violence and bloodshed is proven.

Some apologists will argue that Christian violence is all a matter of history, a point which becomes moot when one considers the bloodthirsty support of the Christian Right for the violence meted out by the US military. They play an essential role in providing political and spiritual cover for US military aggression. Their violence is merely disguised under the uniform of the US soldier and hidden beneath the veneer of state sanctioned conventional warfare.

The results are the same – beheadings, burnings and dismemberment.

Support for Israel is also heavily intertwined with Christian belief, particularly amongst dispensationalists for whom the Kingdom of God will be a literal Kingdom which lasts for a thousand years, based in Jerusalem with Jesus at its helm. These ideas don’t even originate from scripture; they come from the Scofield Bible which is a heavily annotated Reference Bible widely used in the United States and virtually nowhere else. The idea of the Rapture comes from the same source, and is equally unfounded.

The irony that, if the Bible is to be believed, Jesus was nailed to the cross by soldiers following orders, for breaking the law, is completely lost on most soldier-worshipping Bible bashers. In the same way, the instruction to ‘turn the other cheek’ is one of the few they choose not to take literally.

It’s no less the case for many of these fundamentalist Christians than it is for ISIS that eschatological beliefs play a central role in shaping their view of the world. To them, the forces of good and evil are on a collision course which will come to a head with the destruction of the world as we know it, and after which the wicked will be punished and the good rewarded. Of course, the one difference being that each regards the other as evil and themselves as good. What they hate in each other is simply a reflection of themselves made ugly by a vision cleared of self-justification.

Another of the consequences of American exceptionalism, which attributes economic bounty to blessings from God rather than to global imperial domination, is that it assumes that if prosperity is a consequence of godliness, then inversely, poverty must be be a consequence of sin. It completely negates any basis of legitimate political grievances derived from the economic disadvantages with which poorer nations are confronted. It is this which makes simple tropes like ‘they hate us for our freedom’ more credible than any actual analysis of economic, political and military cause and effect.

Once faith and politics combine, the mixture is toxic. As Bertrand Russell once commented, ‘The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.’ Any political ideas are open to debate and persuasion, whereas religious ideas derive from faith and have no ideological basis. They are far less mutable, and debating them can lead into a minefield of Biblical or Qur’anic quotations, interpretations and refutations… unless of course one simply goes for the foundation, the faith itself.

To me, as an atheist, there’s nothing more amusing than watching a Muslim and Christian in debate. However, the consequences are no laughing matter; with the certainty that God is on your side and that your actions are willed by God as part of a war against evil there is little room left for evidence, nuance, compassion, empathy or rational discourse. ‘They’ are evil, and evil needs to be destroyed. No matter the level of violence employed, the death and destruction caused in the name of holy war, the fundamentalist never reflects on their own actions to consider if they, too, might be evil.

The binary nature of beliefs is a problem. To me, nothing is ever entirely good or entirely bad, the beauty of any subject is found in understanding the complexity and nuances within it. Fundamentalist religious belief polarizes everything to one extreme or the other, both of which are wrong.

In their rejection of science, evolution, knowledge and intelligence in favor of the infallibility of an ancient Bronze Age text; religious fundamentalists of all persuasions represent a real challenge to all of the advances mankind has achieved since the Renaissance. They threaten to take us back to the world as it was before; rife with superstition and torture, where pain and suffering were seen as holy atonement for wrongs committed by a mythical ancestor who in all probability never existed. If the aim of religion is to elevate the human condition, it fails miserably in the hands of any literalist. It’s brutal.

If the consequence of a focus on ISIS is that the Christian Right is ignored, or worse, strengthened, then the threat of the rise of a Christian Taliban in the United States becomes ever more real. Given the power and armaments at the disposal of the US military, should they ever fall under their command, this is a far, far greater threat to humanity than ISIS could ever be.

We ignore it at our peril.

A Caricature of Islam

The issue of Islam is once again centre stage in world news and public debate since the recent murders in Paris. Can the actions of Islamic extremists simply be put down to the nature of Muslim beliefs, or is there something more fundamental at work?

Terrorists run amok in Paris

Typically, the debate has become polarized, and because simple explanations have the appeal of being easy to understand many people are being seduced by the binary, good versus evil simplicity of blaming the entire problem on the Islamic religion and Muslim people in general – much like the offending Charlie Hebdo cartoons did. Their barbarity and intolerance is contrasted against the peacefulness and freedom of western civilisation, and provides a new opportunity for our leaders to portray themselves as valiant defenders of freedom, as opposed to what they actually are – corporate stooges and war mongering mass murderers who are increasingly spying on and restricting the rights and freedoms of people at home and abroad. From the right, calls for all Muslims to be deported are being made with renewed vigour.

Personally, I’d be quite happy to see a world without religion, although this issue isn’t the subject of this page. The point is though, that whilst it’s fine to attack religion itself, and discuss whether the ideas and beliefs that religions promulgate are actually true, that’s very different from attacking religious people, or worse, persecuting people of one particular religion regardless of their individual guilt or innocence.

There are many very violent Christians, and the Bible, if you read it, contains far more violence than the Qur’an. Parts of it are in fact very disturbing. Yahweh starts out essentially as a war god, defeating the enemies of the tribe which created him – the Hebrews. His character changes throughout the course of the text, gradually evolving as the ideals of the society he represents evolve, until we reach the apparent personification of goodness and love in Jesus – how much of this has been altered and revised by later writers is impossible to precisely quantify, except to say that it certainly was altered, added to and revised again in the process of constructing Christian mythology.

The Inquisition

Despite this, historically Christianity has a very bloody and oppressive past, and that changed not because the Christian church decided to reform itself, but rather because its followers rejected the authority of those who led the Church along with the monarchies they legitimised. That change happened in spite of the Church, not because of it.

Based on the same Biblical Abrahamic roots as Christianity, I’m not convinced that Islam is “the religion of peace”, and it certainly allows for violence in defence of Muslims under attack. Like Christianity, which has many different branches and sub sects, so does Islam. They may all be based on the same book, but there are a wide variety of interpretations, most of which, especially in places where western imperialism has had less of an impact, are relatively harmless compared to the Wahhabi Islam which emanates from Saudi Arabia, our close and favoured ally. All of the Gulf States are essentially monarchies where there is no meaningful democracy. Religious laws are ruthlessly enforced and dissent isn’t tolerated.

In the West, the transition from monarchic theocracy to democracy was a long and very bloody one. First, there were the 100 years war and the 30 years war, which challenged the power of the Church of Rome to control the affairs of European nation states. The English civil wars gave rise to the Puritan movement,  which was essentially a fundamentalist movement – they even banned Christmas, and were not unlike the Wahhabiist we see today in their desire to resist decadence and return to what they saw as the core values of their religion, and enforce that violently. They too rejected the opulence of the Church and the concept of “Divine Right” which legitimised an equally opulent and decadent monarchy. Where “Jihadi John” has allegedly beheaded journalists and charity workers, in England Oliver Cromwell beheaded King Charles I and slaughtered thousands of innocent civilians (which he claimed was “the righteous judgement of God”). In the years which followed, those Puritans unable to accept the compromises which resolved the conflict  fled to the New World – now known as the Pilgrim Fathers, they founded the the oldest continuously inhabited English settlement in what was to become the United States of America, and at the same time established their ideals at the core of American folklore.

The second stage arose out of the Enlightenment movement which established reason, rather than religious dogma as the basis of knowledge, and civil consent, rather than Aristocratic heredity as the basis of power. It would perhaps be wrong to abstract this from changes in the economic sphere, where Feudal production was being replaced by Capitalist production, bringing the burgeoning capitalist class into conflict with the old order.

16,500 people were beheaded following the French Revolution

The French Revolution and the American wars of independence were both directly inspired by the Enlightenment. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre beheaded 16,500 people, and many others also died. In the end though, the nation states which emerged were founded on reason and democracy, and where the monarchy did survive their power was greatly reduced. Adherence to the edicts of the Church, now firmly separated from the state, became increasingly voluntary, until today where despite the clear influence of the Christian religion in society more and more people are identifying as non religious or atheist. Despite some resistance, moral values are being rewritten along more humanist, tolerant lines, and our view of our place in the universe and how we came to be here is being increasingly informed by science and less by mythology and superstition.

Christianity was able to make this transition without outside interference, which complicates the process enormously in the Islamic world. Cultures shape their resistance to internal oppression and external aggression depending on their existing cultural and religious beliefs, so it’s not surprising that forms of Islamic fundamentalism are born this way. It’s really got nothing to do with Islam, and everything to do with people, human beings and human society. The absolutism of religious ideals and the belief that somewhere an all powerful intelligence is somehow controlling events and will ultimately dispense justice is naturally appealing. In societies in turmoil and transition, these core values are often the first refuge of the oppressed.

In contrast to the way our leaders attempt to shape our perceptions, our wars today have nothing to do with assisting, or even impeding that process – they’re nothing to do with defending freedom of expression or democracy. They’re about access to markets and resources, as our alliance with the most oppressive monarchies of the Gulf States concurrent with the destabilisation and destruction of mostly secular Arab states, such as Libya, Syria and Iraq, clearly indicates. Radical Islam has been deliberately and cynically fostered to fight the cold war, to remove regimes unpopular with the West, and to create pretexts for invasions and military campaigns to advance global economic and military power.

Most victims of Islamic terrorists are Muslim too, and hundreds of thousands have also been killed as a direct result of western imperialist aggression. The world is a complex place, full of nuances and shades of grey. There’s good and bad in everyone, some more than others, but the vast majority of people fall somewhere in the middle where there is much common ground to be found. Most people simply want to live in peace, to be able to raise their families in safety and make a sufficiently good living to support them.

The skyline of modern Doha, Qatar

Real change happens in the world as a result of the battle of ideas, far more so than as a result of military conflict, which sometimes it can give rise to as power is shifted and resisted. Ideas emerge from the material conditions in which people find themselves and the economic relationships within them. The Middle East is far from immune from the very profound changes resulting from the rapid growth of both wealth and inequality which have occurred in that region over the last 50 years or so. Thanks to the internet, ideas are more fluid and move more rapidly than ever before, particularly amongst younger people, so change is inevitable.

The fight against the spread of fundamentalist Islam should be and needs to be an ideological one, exactly the same as the fight against western imperialism needs to be… and I guess that is what this page is about after all.