“With regard to your description of the mosque suicide bombing: Even though your horror and disgust over this and similar terrorist incidents is understandable, I think when you deny this act is a product of religious fanaticism and instead ascribe it to some kind of reified “evil”, you run the risk of relieving both individuals and religious and political institutions of responsibility. No, this is precisely religious fanaticism. Suicide bombings are hardly the first time that religious fanaticism has brought horror to the world. Look at history. Look at European history. Look at Catholic history. Look at Nazism and Communism, which denied religion but acted as religions. One could make a good case for the fact that fanaticism is the core problem of humanity, the outward symptom of our deepest psychological and spiritual dilemma. Calling it “pure, nihilist evil” lets us off too light, lets it get away and scuttle off into the darkness again. It is not pure, nihilist evil; it is precisely religious fanaticism, and precisely what we need to recognize and acknowledge as a universal human issue if we ever intend to take responsibility for it and grow beyond it. Don’t give it a place to hide by reifying it or blaming it on the perpetrator of the day. This shadow belongs to all of us. Drag it front and center and make us look at it.”
I take the point. My point, perhaps artlessly made, is that this is a kind of religion which does not do justice to the genuine article. No true Muslim can believe that suicide and mass murder in a religious place is religiously mandated or permissible. This distortion, this pride, is an evil that can occur under any totalist philosophy, including atheist totalitarianisms, as well as religions. But someone who truly struggles to understand God cannot arrive at the kind of moral certainty and extremism of al Qaeda. They have substituted man for God, as the Catholic church has done at various points in its history, and as other nominally Christian bigots have also done, in coopting the Bible to justify any number of hatreds and pathologies over the centuries. Where religion ends and evil begins is an interesting question, of course. How can something that does so much good be turned to so much evil? My own tentative view is that this moment arrives whenever human beings really do believe they have achieved certainty about the great unknowables. That certainty masks itself as revelation or authority but is in fact an abandonment of the humility that is the mark of genuine faith. You see that certainty in the Islamists and, to a far lesser extent, in the Christianists. And at some point such certainty becomes evil. With al Qaeda, that happened a long time ago.
The Dish 