I will, on reflection, agree that Joseph Kony will read as me cheating.

My intention was to show that in order to achieve a level of conviction that exceeds the value placed on ones own life requires faith. Joseph Kony does not (as far as we know) intend to commit suicide to prove his point, and is therefore a very poor choice of example. But it is for exactly this reason that I also dismiss Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler and Mao Zedong; they were quite keen on killing others but not so keen to speed their own demise. Their cause was more important to them than the life of millions of others, but not more important than their own life.

But I can’t help thinking in this context that religions are very like totalitarian regimes. Everything you say, think and do is controlled by some set of rules that are open to an infinite level of interpretation, so that at no time can you be completely certain that you are within the rules that exist at that point. (Mark asked the question earlier: what use is a holy book that is not open to interpretation? So if each individual can interpret the book their own way, where is their guarantee that their interpretation will achieve the salvation (or whatever) they seek?).

In most parts of the world suicide has a stigma attached to it; it is considered wrong of people to commit suicide and those left behind feel as though they have failed the suicide in some way when it happens. Japan is an exception to this where seppuku is seen as an honourable way to die. I suspect that the situation in micronesia you mention is a social phenomena whereby the sheer number of suicides is making it seem as though there is no stigma which “permits” more suicides to occur so that it becomes a kind of self-perpetuating anomaly; perhaps not actually accepted but no longer actively condemned.

Earlier in the discussion it was mentioned that a high proportion (70 - 80%) of Palestinians support martyr operations, so maybe a similar thing is happening here? Just a suggestion and I am neither a psychologist nor a social scientist so I am more than happy for someone to point out where I am in error, but if the local populace don’t see it as being a bad thing per se will that not tend to perpetuate the practice and make it more common?

Kamikaze - Divine Wind - fanatics in Japan were recruited and trained by Buddhist and Shinto priests who taught their adepts that the Emperor was a Golden Wheel-Turning Sacred King, one of the four manifestations of the ideal Buddhist monarch and a Tathagata, or “fully enlightened being” of the material world. And since Zen treats life and death indifferently, why not abandon the cares of this world and adopt a policy of prostration at the feet of a homicidal dictator?

According to Hitchens, “Although many Buddhists now regret that deplorable attempt to prove their own superiority, no Buddhist since then has been able to demonstrate that Buddhism was wrong in its own terms.” A conclusion which, if correct, would seem to indicate that at least some of the “necessary circumstances” you refer to are still there, lying in wait for some temporal cause to spark them into action. Maybe what is required is a particular combination of political or social “cause” to serve and the extreme faith of a religious fanatic who values the cause more than his own life. That would make religion a vital (though admittedly not sole) motivator for suicide bombing. But it still does not explain why there have not been any Buddhist suicide bombers, any Jesuit suicide bombers or indeed any catholic suicide bombers. Do these religions not exist in societies that have social “causes” worth dying for?

This, I believe, brings us back to your guy Sayyid Qutb [pronounced kuh-tub]. I read about him in Lawrence Wright’s excellent (and Pulitzer prize winning) book, “The Looming Tower” which has the sub-title “Al-Qaeda’s road to 9/11″ and opens with Qutb sailing to New York from Alexandria in 1948. Qutb is the point from which the ideology that led to al-Qaeda started. From him we derive the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Jihad, Saudi Arabian moslems fighting in the Afghan war against the Soviet army, and ultimately al-Qaeda.

All societies have rich and poor - in relative terms, homeless, unemployed, the downtrodden and the oppressed. What Qutb gave moslems was something else. He taught them that whereas the prophet had told them they were the chosen people and that everyone else was an infidel, it was not obvious in the 1940’s what benefits being chosen had brought them. In America Qutb saw the dawn of rampant consumerism where virtually everyone had a job (unemployment in the USA in 1948 was less than 4%) and half the world’s total wealth was in American hands. Qutb, however, came from a country where half the population lived in conditions that by comparison were not far short of squalor.

What Qutb did was he opened the eyes of moslems to the dichotomy between what they might have expected from being the chosen people and where they actually stood in relation to how your average infidel lives. In 2000 years of scientific and cultural change the infidel West had come a long way, but the majority of moslems still lived the life of a dirt-poor desert nomad with virtually no prospect of ever being anything else. If that isn’t enough to make the “chosen people” jealous then I don’t know what is.

The oil changed that for only a very small minority.

I am not, incidentally, claiming that they were or are jealous of our consumer goods and lax views on sexuality, or even our limited dress code. They are jealous that we can be so perverted and yet prosper, that we can essentially win by cheating in the great game of life. The resentment (some of them) feel at this is the “cause” they need to add to their faith to make the mix potent enough to spawn suicide bombers.

This also might help to explain why the majority of suicide bombers are reasonably well educated and middle class. A goatherder might look at America and know that even if he moved there his prospects of being anything other than a goatherder are pretty slim. But an educated person can see prospects, he can see numerous possibilities for employment, investment and business. So in that sense he is able to envisage how he has lost out in the lottery of the religion into which you are born.

If I understand you right (it seems that with you we really have to be careful with laying out the facts clearly :D), you think that the fact a terrorist bomber commits suicide can only be explained with his expectations that he will go to heaven. So, you’re implying that men treasure life that much that they would not be willing to sacrifice it for a greater goal that transcends their own existence on earth?

Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point mentions a surge of suicide among young men in Micronesia.

In the early 1960s, suicide on the islands of Micronesia was almost unknown. But for reasons no one quite understands, it then began to rise, steeply and dramatically, by leaps and bounds every year, until by the end of the 1980s there were more suicides per capita in Micronesia than anywhere else in the world. For males between fifteen and twenty-four, the suicide rate in the United States is about 12 per 100,000. In hte islands of Micronesia the rate is about 160 pero 100,000 - more than seven times higher. At that level, suicide is almost commonplace, triggered by the smallest of incidents.

We have only to look at a few typical suicides during the past year to sense the contrast. There is the 16-year old boy who, when refused the dollar that he had begged from his father, ominously replied that his father would soon be spending a hundred dollars or more -on his funeral-and then hanged himself. A boy of barely 13 was found dead after arguing with a sister who had taken his flashlight without his consent. Another teenager took his own life when his mother continued to ignore his complaints that there was no food prepared for him after he had returned from a drinking bout with his friends. Clearly this is not the stuff out of which grand tragedy is usually made, either in folklore or in real life. And yet each of these incidents ended in the self-destruction of a young man. Reasons seemingly every bit as trifling as these have accounted for the deaths of many others during recent years, as the information we have gathered shows.

http://www.micsem.org/pubs/articles/suicide/frames/microhangspreefr.htm

It seems to me that the right settings can lead people to believe that suicide is the solution and they do not even have to have a really good reason.

Oh, and what about the Japanese Kamikaze pilots? Where’s the religious background?

If there are no Buddhist suicide bombers it might be because the necessary circumstances have not come up yet.

Oh, I see it now. It isn’t gentle Jesus meek and mild and an ever-loving god after all. Instead of being the final word in world-wide morality in which just thinking about masturbation is a sin, what we actually have is that religious bigots can be just as bad as the four worst genocidal maniacs in human history.

Please remind me, how exactly is that supposed to put religion in a good light?

We were actually talking about suicide bombers; apologies if I did not make that clear. But if you want to talk about genocide we can always do Rwanda, if that’s more to your taste. You remember Rwanda, the African country in which 65% of the population are Roman Catholic and a further 15% are various protestant sects. This was the country where in response to a series of visions of the virgin Mary a million or so Tutsi were put to the sword in 1994 with the help and collusion of a number of ministers of the church, including Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka and the Bishop of Gikongoro otherwise known as Monsignor Augustin Misago. There were also some nuns in the dock at the subsequent trials.

Maybe you also remember the denunciation of this atrocity and the church’s part in it offered by the pope in the vatican? No, thought not, because they never did denounce it.

The Aum sect Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway were horrible terrorist atroticites, accepted. But they weren’t bombs, were they, and the five people who released the gas all had getaway drivers ready and waiting. So they weren’t intending to kill themselves, were they?

So I stick by what I said; there are no Buddhist suicide bombers, and any attempt to explain the motivation of the islamist suicide bombers has to account for that fact. I have done that. Your, “have you forgotten Stalin…” is a weak attempt to sidestep the issue under discussion.

“there are no Buddhist suicide bombers.”
The Aum sect who did this sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway.

As Asahara believed the Buddhist path to be the most effective, he selected original Shakyamuni Buddha sermons as a foundation for Aum doctrine;

In Asahara’s view, Aum’s doctrine encompassed all three major Buddhist schools: Theravada (aimed at personal enlightenment), Mahayana (the “great vehicle,” aimed at helping others), and tantric Vajrayana (the “diamond vehicle,” which involves secret initiations, secret mantras, and advanced esoteric meditations).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo

Probably anything can be distorted, but I still tend to believe that Buddhism offers less room to be interpreted in a violent way as Islam and Christianity.

Regarding your claim that you need religious faith in order to commit atrocities in these dimensions, may I remind you of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong? It seems that a person’s compassion for another human being dwindles the moment they think that their suffering is justified for the sake of a higher goal and this goal can be anything. People do stupid things all the time, not necessarily, because they hope to gain something for themselves, but because they think they are in the service for something greater than themselves and with greater I don’t mean God.

Erich posted about a three-part BBC documentary called “The Power Of Nightmares” (it’s pretty interesting, but I still need to watch the third part):

Regarding the Islamic extremist element, credit is given to the teachings of Sayed Kotb, an Egyptian man who spent time in Colorado as a young man. Kotb became convinced that the individual rights and liberties of Americans thoroughly corrupted human beings. In their lust for material goods and carnal pleasure, Kotb perceived that people isolated themselves to the point where shared social bonds where destroyed. The quest for material goods thus trapped people in their own animalistic desires. Even though people felt “free” pursuing their individualistic needs and wants, they weren’t. They were decaying from the inside out.

Kotb later became convinced that his Egyptian brothers had also become corrupted and therefore also had to be wiped out like their Western counterpart.

People like Kotb are not driven by the desire of a happy afterlife, they are driven by the conviction that something is wrong which transcends their selfish biological instinct to survive.

Ok, this is the case where you have people who are ideological fanatics and dream of new social structures and a better world, how nightmarish it may seem to regular people. Others like Stalin or Hitler are driven by power, there is nevertheless a considerable lack of religion in their motivation.

Our discussion in this thread has been about the relationship between faith and conviction, where you have argued that although a majority of suicide bombers might be moslems it has not been their faith that has motivated them but some other cause or causes that I shall for the sake of convenience draw together under the umbrella of political conviction.

I, on the other hand, have argued, less persuasively so far, that it cannot be a coincidence that they are predominantly moslems, nor can it be an accident that there are no Buddhist suicide bombers. I think therefore that we are agreed on the relative proportion of suicide bombers who are moslems; all we disagree on is their motivation.

Having thought about this I am now ready to argue my case more cogently, and I hope more persuasively. In fact, I shall argue that it is ethics not fear of the everafter that motivates us to be good, it is humanism not fundamentalism that inspires our empathy and charity, but that the darker side of the moral divide is the sole preserve of blind religious faith.

If you recall Erich has on occasion mentioned his religious friends. He says that they are basically good people who perform charitable acts and social kindnesses of the sort that make most of us aspire to be more like them. Their only curious aspect is that for an hour or two on a Sunday morning they profess an irrational belief in a supernatural deity.

So let us consider what it is that makes people good, or at least do good things. In his book, “God is not great” Christopher Hitchens tells us of a debate chaired by the philosopher Bryan Magee between Bishop Butler - about whom we are told no more - and the late Professor A.J Ayer, the celebrated humanist. At one point in the debate Ayer said that he had seen no evidence for the existence of god. At which the Bishop broke in to say that in that case he must have lived a life of unbridled immorality. Such a charge, which is essentially a claim that only the religious can be moral, is so monstrously untrue that to quote Gould, it is not even wrong; it is so far removed from any kind of truth to which I can subscribe that even to refute it is unnecessary. Or at least it would be if it were not for irrational unthinking idiots like Bishop Butler.

If I were to search my life for good deeds I would not exactly be spoilt for choice. I did, however, once cook a lamb stew for a widow and her three children on the day her husband died. Hardly heroic, but nonetheless good, and it was empathy not the ecstasy of salvation that motivated me to do it, and it is difficult to see how anyone might think faith was required at all much less be a pre-requisite.

On a much more heroic scale is the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who was hanged by the Nazis because he refused to collude with them. Neither you nor I will ever truly know what inspires someone to do something like that, but I would argue that to claim that he only did it because he was a man of faith is to deny him his humanity.

It is empathy not evangelism that inspires us to be good.

But to strap a bomb to yourself and blow yourself and countless others to smithereens takes faith. Your objective might be the attainment of a political ideal, but you wouldn’t do it without the religious conviction that you are going to a better place. To learn to fly with the sole objective of piloting your plane into a skyscraper in order to kill as many others as possible can be dreamed up in the mind of a political activist, but it can only be carried out by someone of faith.

Let’s move away from Islam and look instead at Joseph Kony. He is the leader of the “Lord’s Resistance Army”, a guerrilla group dedicated to converting Uganda to a theocracy. He recruits his soldiers by kidnapping children, initiating them by forcing them to commit murder and whipping them up to 300 times. The misery inflicted by these child-wretches turned zombies is almost beyond imagining. They raze villages creating a vast refugee poulation, commit hideous crimes such as mutilation and disembowelling and continue to kidnap children (one guess on the Wikipedia page says up to 60,000 abductees so far) to prevent the local tribes from taking countermeasures lest they harm one of their own. And all this is done in the name of the lord.

In 2006 the International Criminal Court indicted Kony on 33 charges including 12 crimes against humanity including murder, enslavement, sexual enslavement and rape. There are an additional 21 counts of war crimes including murder, cruel treatment of civilians, intentionally directing an attack against a civilian population, pillaging, inducing rape, and forced enlisting of children into the rebel ranks. Kony’s response to this is to say that he is not willing to be tried by the ICC “because he has not done anything wrong”. According to Kony, all he is doing is bringing the ten commandments to the people of Uganda.

The Acholi people, who have suffered this atrocity since 1992, have established a centre for the rehabilitation of kidnapped and enslaved children. These children, some as young as eight years old, are given the medical attention, care and love they so desperately need to bring them back to some kind of normality. Any secular organisation could do this; fit prosthetic limbs, provide shelter, counselling, food and love, but to be Joseph Kony one has to have faith.

I contend that any human can do good things. We do not require a belief in a supernatural deity or that we will be saved to motivate or inspire us, empathy or compassion are both necessary and sufficient. But to be Joseph Kony, or to be a suicide bomber requires a special kind of religious faith so that in the end it does not matter whether you have a political ideal or not. Your whole view of the world is so screwed up by your religious ideology that everything centres on your unshakeable conviction that you are acting in the lord’s name.

I dare say some religious person will respond that “that is not the same lord I worship,” which to me is the moral equivalent of putting your hands over your eyes and pretending. I tried debating this with a religious colleague at work but her reaction was that how other folks praise the lord is up to them, as long as, “it does not impinge on my life” that’s okay with me. A reaction that sickens me, and it really scares me that an apparently intelligent adult woman who calls herself a christian can be so morally bereft as to believe that.

I do not have any of the following: mobile phone, television, three-piece suite, refrigerator, car, video recorder, dishwasher, washing machine. I therefore think it fair to assume that I do not view consumerism as the road to happiness.

I have absolutely no idea what makes the markets work, and my determination to think about it is approximately equal to zero. I suspect that it is not an invisible hand.

As for poor people having only themselves to blame, I wasn’t even aware that anyone actually thought that.

It is possible I subscribe to some irrational belief not listed in your post.

Some of my friends own at least some of the consumer goods listed above. My longest friendships are with folks whose beliefs can be supported with reasoned arguments; they don’t have to agree with me, just justify their point of view. I also value the ability to see both sides of an argument. A discussion is more likely to end with, “well, I see your point of view but I’m not sure I agree with you,” than with anyone actually changing their mind. But I see that as a good thing, because it suggests that the arguments were thought out in advance.

I find it very difficult to relate to folks who just say the first thing that flashes across their mind, folks who interrupt when I am talking, and folks who expect me to abandon my well thought out beliefs in favour of their knee-jerk reactions with trivially obvious counter-arguments.

I do not do superficial, pop culture or the cult of the celebrity and can’t imagine having a friendship with someone who did.

Does that count as consistent?

This is not to say that I agree with everything John Haught says. For example, I disagree him (see the italicized portion) when he says this:

But the question is, can you justify the hope? I don’t have any objection to the idea that atheists can be good and morally upright people. But we need a worldview that is capable of justifying the confidence that we place in our minds, in truth, in goodness, in beauty. I argue that an atheistic worldview is not capable of justifying that confidence. Some sort of theological framework can justify our trust in meaning, in goodness, in reason.

But I do agree with him when Haught says this:

From the beginning of the modern world, science decided quite rightly that it wasn’t going to tackle such questions as purpose, value, meaning, importance, God, or even talk about intelligence or subjectivity. It was going to look for purely natural, causal, mechanical explanations of things. And science has every right to be that way. But that principle of scientific Puritanism is often violated by scientists who think that by dint of their scientific expertise, they are able to comment on such things as purpose. I consider that to be a great violation.

Haught identifies a key question as this: “How do we account for the courage to go on living in the absence of hope?” I would phrase this question as this: “How do we account for the courage to go on living as decent and kind-hearted people in the absence of easy answers to questions like “What is the meaning of life?” or “What should I do with my life?” or “To what extent should I spend my life energies helping others as opposed to serving my own whims and wants?”

Again, I disagree with his proposed theological answer. I don’t think that “God” is any sort of answer. It is just a label. I think a better approach (I hesitate to call it an “answer”) lies in our bones, deep in our bones, in ways that have been explored by cognitive scientists who have really taken Darwin seriously, for instance, by Frans de Waal.

I did cite Haught, as Martin, mentions, but I did so for a specific purpose that I spelled out in the post: “[The New Atheists] over-estimate the ability of science to provide substitutes for whatever it is that religious moderates get out of their practice of religion.”

Believers in God aren’t the only ones who make this same point. Consider, for instance, arguments made by philosopher Philip Kitcher (from the December 2007/Jan 2008 issue of Free Inquiry – some of the articles are available free online, but not this one). Here’s what Kitcher has to say and finding life’s purpose through science:

A secular humanist is someone who is interested in the project of humanity-interested in human values and an advancing the well-being of humanity, broadly construed. I think of secular humanism not simply as a reaction against religion but as a positive set of beliefs in its own right. One of the problems with contemporary secular humanism is that it has tended to emphasize the secularism and hasn’t paid sufficient attention to the humanism . . .

I am not at all happy with any of [the books of the new atheists]. They have something of a biting tone and are in many ways unremittingly negative. They want to get rid of religion, to sink it, without seeing that, while religion has in so many places and at so many times given rise to extremes of human unhappiness and suffering-and continues to do so today-it has also provided meaning, consolation, and genuine uplift for people. To snatch this away and say in the voice of a very commanding doctor, “Read a couple pages of the Origin of Species and you’ll feel better in the morning” is simply not enough. There has to be something more positive about the contribution of secular humanism than what we are seeing at the moment.

[Religion's replacement] needs to treat the same symptoms and conditions of life. People have to be given a sense that their lives matter. The countries that have achieved secularization most easily are the ones in which a widespread spirit of community has been fostered. There is a social network, a safety net, to support people better than they are in the United States. Religion thrives in places where people feel most at risk. Where people feel secure and feel that those around them care about them, we can meet their genuine human needs without lapsing into discredited myths. This is putting the “human” back in “secular humanism,” which is part of a humane social program that holds the well-being of humanity as central.

You can listen to the entire interview with Philip Kitcher (“Living with Darwin”) at http://www.pointofinquiry.org. Kitcher is the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University.