On Feb 3, 2008, at 7:28 PM, shag wrote:
> ...when 9/11 happened, I happened to be in the
> anti-terrorism business,and as part of my job had to read the lit on
> the
> why behind the phenom, so it would never occur to me that religion
> was an
> important issue. what i am curious about though is what your sources
> say
> are the issues involved.
>
>>>>
>>>> 5. There's A REASON Why Atheists Don't Fly Planes Into Buildings
>>>
>>> False. It is fairly well established that the actual reasons for
>>> flying
>>> planes into buildings are shared by atheists and believers.
>>>
>>> Carrol
>>>
>>
>> I suspect that a lot of readers here are going to be
>> perplexed by Carrol's somewhat cryptic remarks.
>> However, it is probably true that in the case of
>> suicide bombings, the role of religion as a motivation
>> has been overemphasized by many commentators.
>>
I think that all this discussion on the motives of Tamil Tigers, kamikaze pilots, expendable GIs, etc. is a bit beside the point. Carrol wrote: "the actual reasons for flying planes into buildings." The purpose at issue is *to kill innocents* at the cost of one's own life. But whence such a purpose? Perhaps revenge against the kin of those who have committed horrible crimes against you or your kin? Assuredly--but that emotional pathology was quite absent from the 9-11 nineteen. Or Muslims who blow themselves up inside a mosque.
The point I am getting at is that the only motivation for the intentional suicidal mass murder of innocents that seems plausible to me is ideological: *devotion to a transcendant cause*. Since I can scarcely conceive of a secular ideology capable of inspiring the indispensable feeling of suicidal transcendance, what alone remains plausible is precisely a *religious* motivation.
But what makes the mass murder of innocents so *religiously* compelling that suicide is a price gladly paid to accomplish it? At this point I could, but will not, go much deeper into the roots and essence of religion. Let me only make a few summary points:
1. The essential point of the great theistic religions is that God (or The Gods)
is to be feared. Greatly feared. The truly religious are *godfearing*.
2. All religions start with blood sacrifice. For routine propitiation of the Gods
animal sacrifices may suffice--but when really needed, human sacrifice is
the sole remedy. The blood of steers cannot persuade the wind to blow,
but that of Iphigeneia is effective. The auto-da-fe is pleasing to God.
3. Religions try to hide and sublimate their human-sacrificial origin. Christianity
celebrates the sacrificing of Jesus by symbolically reenacting it compulsively.
Jews and Muslims celebrate the "forgiven" sacrifice of Isaac by blood-sacrifice of sheep but skip gaily over the sacrificial murders of innocents by Samson, Jephtha, Elijah...
4. The sacrificer must sooner or later face punishment. Christians perpetually
punish this figure in the form of Judas--and often the rest of his tribe. Elijah,
like Cain, is thrown into perpetual exile, "taken directly into heaven." The
Aztec priests sacrificed human hecatombs to keep the Gods from destroying
the world--and in the process destroyed their own world. Agamemnon is
ritually sacrificed by Klytemnestra who in turn is sacrificed by Orestes. For Samson the sacrifice and the punishment are simultaneous. Hitler shoots
himself in a cellar.
5. No existing society sanctions the underlying propensity to human sacrifice at
the same time that well grounded apocalyptic fears resonate throughout
the human unconscious and more and more erupt into open consciousness.
So what now can give religious sanction to the mass murder of innocents?
The sole sanction possible is one's own death. Everyman his own Samson.
If anyone is still reading and wants to consider these ideas more fully, the essential book is "The Sacred Executioner-human sacrifice and the legacy of guilt" by Hyam Maccoby (Thames and Hudson, 1982.)
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things...it consents and does not consent to be called Zeus."
Herakleitos of Ephesos