September 11: Christians blamed
Gerard McManus reviews the press and what the intellectual elites have been saying about the events of ‘September 11’ and about who, and what, are really to blame.
LEADING secular commentators
from around the world seized on the horrifying events in New York on September
11 to promote their own long-running campaigns against organised religion with
Christianity in particular singled out as the root cause of such evil acts.
One would have thought the most obvious candidates for
blame for the September 11 atrocities might have been Moslem extremists actually
responsible. Or, if one were looking for remote conditions or
catalysts for the events, one might, conceivably, have identified – as some
have done - US policies on the Middle East. Or, more distantly, as an influence
upon international enmities, the disparities between rich and poor nations. But
Christianity? The Catholic Church?
In what seems certain to become an increasingly
strident theme over the coming years, this group of intellectuals sees religion
as the principle cause of war, intolerance and discrimination and of much of the
suffering which exists in the world.
Amidst calls by western politicians for the imposition
of severe restrictions on individual freedom, particularly, and ominously,
compulsory personal identification tags, came calls from the intellectual elite
to curtail religious freedoms as well.
One-by-one these influential opinion leaders stepped
into the public debate in the aftermath of the suicide bombings to argue that,
at a minimum, the masses should be re-educated about the follies of religious
belief.
Just four days after the event Britain's Guardian newspaper
published a piece by Richard Dawkins, professor of the Public Understanding of
Science at Oxford University and author of books such as "The Selfish
Gene’’.
Dawkins compared the suicide terrorists to pigeons and
accused religion of being a system of mind control.
"Testostrone-sodden young men too unattractive to
get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins
in the next," he wrote, referring to the promise of an Islamic paradise
made to those who die martyrs.
Dawkins believes that religion devalues the meaning of
life because it teaches "the dangerous nonsense that death is not the
end".
Dangerous nonsense
The more strident opinions extended toward proposals
which might impose severe restrictions on religion. Professor Paul Handley,
chair of philosophy at Cambridge University, said the world's main religions
fostered a view that other faiths were evil and have to be exterminated.
"It would be far, far better if people could be
brought to feel guilty about some other common words: words like faith and
orthodoxy, or God, Allah and Jahweh," Handley said, writing in the Independent newspaper. Scottish Sunday
Herald columnist Muriel Gray wrote on October 7 about
"that ugly many-headed monster, religion".
Commentating on the plans of the British Government to
prohibit religious hate, Gray asked: "Will you be able to express the
opinion that Catholicism is guilty of deliberate Third World social engineering
that threatens women's lives with Dark Age views on sexuality and
contraception?”
Hate
"I most certainly and unambiguously hate religion,
and I use the word hate quite deliberately.”
Another Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee said the world would be better
off with a debilitated religion.
"The only good religion is a moribund religion:
only when the faithful are weak are they tolerant and peaceful," she said.
Australia's own Peter Singer, now professor of
bioethics at Princeton University, said the way to prevent a repeat of September
11 was for politicians like George Bush to "take on" the real enemy -
religious fundamentalism.
However, Singer lamented in the Melbourne Age (October 11) there
was little chance of this happening given that Bush attained the presidency
through the overwhelming support of Christian fundamentalists who backed his
antiabortion stance.
"America has a higher percentage of its population
who will say that they definitely believe in the Devil (45 per cent) than any
other country in the world," Singer wrote.
"About one-third of Americans say they definitely
believe that the Bible is the actual word of God and it is to be taken
literally, word for word. Bush himself says he regularly reads the Bible, and
that his ‘faith’ (Singer's emphasis) helps him to make decisions. So he is
in no position to criticise anyone else for holding irrational beliefs about God or the afterlife.”
Singer admits stamping out irrational
religious faith is difficult, but says education is the key.
"Even in America, religious belief is
lower among those with higher levels of education. To say this is not to deny
that some religious fundamentalists - including, it seems, some of the hijackers
themselves - have high levels of education.
"Nevertheless, it is possible to hope
that a highly educated nation will provide a less fertile soil for religious
belief.”
The Age's Associate Editor, Pamela Bone, also put the
boot into Christianity which she said caused some people to go mad and that the
solution was to teach children to be "kind to one another without invoking
a God to tell us whom we should hate".
"All written religions have some
terrible passages. Christians, in general, appear more able to ignore the bad
bits that some other religions," she wrote.
Writing in the Age's sister
paper, the Sydney Morning Herald, religious affairs correspondent Chris
McGillon went straight for the Catholic Church.
Catholic fundamentalism
"It is easy to
identify the fundamentalism in other people's religion. More than ever, however,
it is necessary to identify it in our own,” McGillon said.
Quoting John D'Arcy May, a scholar in
ecumenism and religious pluralism at Trinity College, Dublin, McGillon wrote
that fundamentalism is also present in the "centralising tendencies within
his own Catholic Church".
In the Spanish daily El Pais on September 27 "lay theologian" E. Miret
Magdalena argued that violence and religion go hand in hand.
From the stories of the Old Testament up to
the conflicts in Yugoslavia, Magdalena concluded that history was full of
examples of violence being carried out in the name of God.
In the same newspaper, another Spanish
writer Eduardo Haro Tecigen stated that the "great assassins" of the
world have invented gods to justify their crimes, their wars and their
accumulation of riches. Tecigen called for an end to the gods that have caused
2000 years of bloodshed.
Britain’s Christopher Hitchins provided
one of the most chilling accounts of the parameters of the intellectual
onslaught unleashed by September 11, during an interview on the ABC's Foreign Correspondent programme.
Hitchins, who has built an international
reputation as an iconoclastic writer - Mother Teresa was one his targets -
described the current contest as being "between the literal mind - the
fundamentalist and the totalitarian mind - and the ironic or the rational
mind".
"People talk about the clash of
civilisations - civilisation consists of the leaving behind of fanaticism, of
the mentality of certainty, of the mentality of holy books and the word of
God," he said.
"Civilisation begins where that stops
in all societies and all cultures, in the Muslim world no less.”
Future grim
"I feel certain as never before, this
is a war between those who are for faith, those who are for holy books, for the
Word of God, for acts of faith and those who believe in reason ... I couldn't be
more ready to spend the rest of my life fighting it - which I'm absolutely sure
I'm going to have to do.”
As for the final word, and a glimpse of a
possible future, turn to the much published Melbourne academic, Paul Monk, and
his essay "Seven Theses of War", in which he set out what he thought
was at issue in the events of September 11: a portent of what Robert Kaplan has
called "the coming anarchy".
"What is ultimately at stake is the
very idea of a humane global civilisation,” wrote Monk.
"What is called for is a paradigm
shift in our common appreciation of what such a world order requires of us
individually and collectively. It must be a world order in which Western
secularism, Christian, Muslim and Jewish monotheism, Confucian humanism, Hindu
polytheism, Buddhist compassion, and the countless other variations on the human
search for meaning and dignity can find common cause.
"As human beings, not true believers,
(my emphasis), we have a common future in the stewardship of this stunningly
beautiful and utterly isolated oasis of life, this earth.
"So let this catastrophe become not
merely the catalyst for crying havoc and letting loose the dogs of war, but
rather a defining moment in the 21st century enlargement of universal
humanism.”
