from Sam Harris, The End of Faith
"What can be said of the nuclear brinkmanship between India and
Pakistan if their divergent religious beliefs are to be "respected"?
There is nothing for religious pluralists to criticize but each
country's
poor diplomacy—while, in truth, the entire conflict is born of
an irrational embrace of myth. Over one million people died in the
orgy of religious killing that attended the partitioning of India and
Pakistan. The two countries have since fought three official wars,
suffered a continuous bloodletting at their shared border, and are
now poised to exterminate one another with nuclear weapons simply
because they disagree about "facts" that are every bit as fanciful
as the names of Santa's reindeer. And their discourse is such that
they are capable of mustering a suicidal level of enthusiasm for
these subjects without evidence. Their conflict is only nominally
about land, because their incompatible claims upon the territory of
Kashmir are a direct consequence of their religious differences.
Indeed, the only reason India and Pakistan are different countries is
that the beliefs of Islam cannot be reconciled with those of Hinduism.
From the point of view of Islam, it would be scarcely possible
to conceive a way of scandalizing Allah that is not perpetrated,
each morning, by some observant Hindu. The "land" these people
are actually fighting over is not to be found in this world. When will
we realize that the concessions we have made to faith in our political
discourse have prevented us from even speaking about, much less
uprooting, the most prolific source of violence in our history?
"Mothers were skewered on swords as their children watched.
Young women were stripped and raped in broad daylight, then . ..
set on fire. A pregnant woman's belly was slit open, her fetus
raised skyward on the tip of sword and then tossed onto one of
the fires that blazed across the city.8"
This is not an account of the Middle Ages, nor is it a tale from Middle
Earth. This is our world. The cause of this behavior was not economic,
it was not racial, and it was not political. The above passage
describes the violence that erupted between Hindus and Muslims in
India in the winter of 2002. The only difference between these
groups consists in what they believe about God. Over one thousand
people died in this month-long series of riots—nearly half as many
as have died in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in more than a decade.
And these are tiny numbers, considering the possibilities. A nuclear
war between India and Pakistan seems almost inevitable, given what
most Indians and Pakistanis believe about the afterlife. Arundhati
Roy has said that Western concern over this situation is just a matter
of white imperialists believing that "blacks cannot be trusted
with the Bomb".9
This is a grotesque charge. One might argue that
no group of people can quite be "trusted" with the bomb, but to
ignore the destabilizing role that religion plays on the subcontinent
is both reckless and disingenuous. We can only hope that the forces
of secularism and rationality will keep the missiles in their silos for
a while yet, until the deeper reasons for this conflict can be finally
addressed.
While I do not mean to single out the doctrine of Islam for special
abuse, there is no question that, at this point in history, it
represents
a unique danger to all of us, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.
Needless to say, many Muslims are basically rational and tolerant of
others. As we will see, however, these modern virtues are not likely
to be products of their faith. In chapter 4, I will argue that
insofar as
a person is observant of the doctrine of Islam—that is, insofar as he
really believes it—he will pose a problem for us. Indeed, it has
grown rather obvious that the liabilities of the Muslim faith are by
no means confined to the beliefs of Muslim "extremists." The
response of the Muslim world to the events of September 11, 2001,
leaves no doubt that a significant number of human beings in the
twenty-first century believe in the possibility of martyrdom. We
have, in response to this improbable fact, declared a war on
"terrorism."
This is rather like declaring war on "murder"; it is a category
error that obscures the true cause of our troubles. Terrorism is not a
source of human violence, but merely one its inflections. If Osama
bin Laden were the leader of a nation, and the World Trade Center
had been brought down with missiles, the atrocities of September 11
would have been acts of war. It should go without saying that we
would have resisted the temptation to declare a war on "war" in
response."
From today's news:
Hindus Orchestrated Babri Mosque Destruction [don't worry, it's just
a phase transition]
CAIRO — Hindu nationalists who were key government and opposition
figures orchestrated the destruction of the historic Babri mosque in
1992, according to a 17-year Indian investigation.
Former premier Atal Bihari Vajpayee was a part of the "meticulously
planned" destruction of the 16-century mosque, according to leaked
excerpts from the investigation published by the Indian Express daily
on Monday, November 23.
Also involved were L.K. Advani, the current hardline leader of the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) who was then deputy premier, and former
BJP president Murli Manohar Joshi.
Advani traveled across India in 1990 to draw support for his campaign
to install a temple on the site of the Babri mosque in the town of
Ayodhya in northern Uttar Pradesh state.
Mobs of Hindu militants tore down the 16-century mosque in 1992,
claiming it stood on the birthplace of their god-king Rama [TMers
call him "Raj Ram", the war god of Hindu fundies like Mahesh yogi].
The demolition triggered some of the worst Hindu-Muslim violence
since the partition of the Indian sub-continent in 1947, with more
than 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, left dead.
