A Different Take

Over on Thoughts from Kansas, Josh Rosenau has an interesting take on CPOST’s latest publication Cutting the Fuse. He juxtaposes Cutting the Fuse with Sam Harris’ End of Faith, whose argument he summarizes thusly:

He argues that suicide bombing is absurd, and only exists because of religion. A footnote to EoF acknowledges that suicide bombing was first deployed on a large scale by the Tamil Tigers, who were not fighting a religious war, but rather were part of an ethnic and nationalistic conflict. He waves this objection away at HuffPo by writing: “it is misleading to describe the Tamil Tigers as ‘secular’ … While the motivations of the Tigers are not explicitly religious, they are Hindus who undoubtedly believe many improbable things about the nature of life and death. The cult of martyr-worship that they have nurtured for decades has many of the features of religiosity that one would expect in people who give their lives so easily for a cause.” In other words, they aren’t motivated by religion, but their longstanding ethnic/nationalistic war has produced something just like religion even though it isn’t actually religion. Therefore religion is still the problem.

This is the first time I have heard it put quite this way, although it does follow logically from the logic of the book. While so far the majority of the people who have picked up the book and are carrying its torch fall within groups who either want to view the U.S. as a problem, Muslims as not a problem, or just want the U.S. to stop doing what it is doing, Rosenau points to an important sub-point in the book as well: religious people are not intrinsically crazy (or at least Suicide Bombing is not evidence of this).

Perhaps instead of viewing Cutting the Fuse as a salvo in battle over U.S. security policy, we should also look at it as a scientific take on the popular argument made by the  New Atheists, like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who argue that religion is the cause of so much ill in the world.