This Is a Religious War - New York Times Magazine
Oct 7, by Andrew Sullivan
Sullivan’s basic thesis is that making out that this is not a Religious war does not hold up under scrutiny. It is a pretense that hides the incontrovertible fact that for Bin Laden & Co. this is Jihad, and we are implicit. His argument is that at the core, the Civilized World is facing a war against Religious Fundamentalism and Extremism whose values are diametrically opposed to our own. He reminds us that these deviant qualities must be understood in context, and that they are neither exclusively owned by any single country nor by any particular period of time.
While his focus is on the Islamic version of this blight in the here and now, he looks too at our own historical development (Jesus, Crusades,Spanish Inquisition, Hitler, Soviets), and also comments on the situation in the US today. His point being that these dynamics are nothing new to us, but that we have evolved, by moving on from such ways of thinking. Fundamentalism has been eclipsed by the modern world, and there is a new, better set of Rules in the ascendent Modern Society. He states the argument a little more eloquently than that Italian guy did.
He highlights for example, how in the US, the separation of Church and State was introduced so as to not only preserve religion but specifically to avoid landing up with a rubbish bin at our helm. He concludes that in essence, this is a fight for our deepest Freedoms.
in the authors words:
The security against an American Taliban is therefore relatively simple: it's the Constitution. And the surprising consequence of this separation is not that it led to a collapse of religious faith in America -- as weak human beings found themselves unable to believe without social and political reinforcement -- but that it led to one of the most vibrantly religious civil societies on earth. No other country has achieved this. And it is this achievement that the Taliban and bin Laden have now decided to challenge. It is a living, tangible rebuke to everything they believe in.
his final two paragraphs.
But Islamic fundamentalism is based on a glorious civilization and a great faith. It can harness and co-opt and corrupt true and good believers if it has a propitious and toxic enough environment. It has a more powerful logic than either Stalin's or Hitler's Godless ideology, and it can serve as a focal point for all the other societies in the world, whose resentment of Western success and civilization comes more easily than the arduous task of accommodation to modernity. We have to somehow defeat this without defeating or even opposing a great religion that is nonetheless extremely inexperienced in the toleration of other ascendant and more powerful faiths. It is hard to underestimate the extreme delicacy and difficulty of this task.
In this sense, the symbol of this conflict should not be Old Glory, however stirring it is. What is really at issue here is the simple but immensely difficult principle of the separation of politics and religion. We are fighting not for our country as such or for our flag. We are fighting for the universal principles of our Constitution -- and the possibility of free religious faith it guarantees. We are fighting for religion against one of the deepest strains in religion there is. And not only our lives but our souls are at stake. nytimes.com
I am posting this because I think it is a good article.
My only regret is that he did not take this opportunity to acknowledge, amongst his many examples, the Native population of "our" lands.
The Settlers used God to Justify. There had to have been a better way. I'm not trying to make a big deal out of it. That was then, this is now, been there, done that. Let's hope that we've learned something and that we can teach these troublesome f*ckers a lesson...(sorry ladies) |
