Stardate 20021205.1639

(On Screen): Aziz Poonawalla sends me a pointer to an article by David Warren. I've been reading his writings for a long time but hadn't see this one yet. Warren is Canadian, but spent much of his childhood in Lahore, Pakistan, because his father was a teacher there. He is Christian, but grew up immersed in the Asian culture, especially that of Islam. He is no scholar studying Islam but has more than just a passing knowledge of the religion and the cultures associated with it. I suspect Aziz hopes that it will convince me that I've been making too generalized of condemnations of the extent to which Islam contributes to the things which have caused our enemies to attack us, in part because Warren actually takes on the argument I and others have made that part of why "they hate us" is because they're failures and we're successes.

Warren says that they do feel some of that, and I don't think I've ever contended that this was the only reason they're attacking us. Anything like this will be extremely complicated, and at the lowest level every single participant will have subtly different motives for doing so; it's impossibly to attribute this kind of thing to any single simplistic cause, nor do I believe I've ever tried to do so. (Although I can see how someone reading what I've written might come to that impression.)

Warren is also pessimistic about the outcome, but Warren writes as a Christian. As an atheist I see the situation as being far more positive, and oddly enough I am encouraged by the same things that make Warren fearful.

In particular, he writes:

We concentrate too much on the foreground circumstances. The bigger issue is that the Muslims themselves have begun to wonder whether their God exists, whether he is really going to help them.

It is in moments of doubt that one often makes the wildest, most desperate, professions of faith; and in a way Osama bin Laden is doing this within his own person, and calling to fellow Muslims who are experiencing the same dark night of the soul. It is as if they were confronting not us, but instead Allah, and saying, "Show us! Prove to us you still exist; because, if you don't, we will give up on you entirely."

If that's correct, it gives me even more hope for a positive outcome in this war, for it means that a sufficient number of terrible setbacks for their side will shatter that faith, as the infidel keep winning and Allah keeps not showing up for the fight.

I know that's not something a devout Muslim like Aziz would think is desirable, but for me as an atheist I see religion as being helpful for individuals but largely negative for society collectively. To the extent that individuals practice it without it becoming a societal force, it's net positive (in most cases) providing comfort and guidance. When it starts meddling in politics, the effects are uniformly negative in part because it is uniformly anti-pluralistic. Thus for me the ideal state is actually something like what we have in the US, where religion is quite common but there are so many different ones that no single one attains critical mass. (I am not an evangelistic atheist; I do not think my nation would necessarily be improved if most people adopted the faith I have that there are no Gods.)

Of course, my own belief in this particular case is that their God does not exist since I don't believe any God exists, and I fully expect that their God will not become involved in this war on their side. And as long as He doesn't, we (the US) are far better able in every way to fight this war than they are, if we have the resolve to do so.

If, as has been proposed elsewhere, the attack last year was not so much a political statement or attempt to influence us through violence (i.e. classic Clauswitzian war as a form of diplomacy and politics) but rather a grand exhibition of religious purity, truly an "act of faith", then the longterm failure of it to advance their cause will instead advance the crisis of faith that Warren says they are currently facing. ("They" being the subset of Islam that Warren himself discusses.)

All through Warren's paper there's a clear demonstration of his belief that the success of nations is proportional to the extent to which they've secularized, a point with which I agree. He talks about the glory of Cordova in Muslim Spain, and how Baghdad was once the greatest city in the world, and all this happened in an interval where the European world was effectively ruled by the Catholic church and the Muslim world was relatively secular.

And now that we've embraced secularism in the West, and many Muslim nations are embracing religion more closely in their governments, it is we that prosper.

And the US is the most secular nation on the planet, with secularism a part of the Constitution since the ratification of the First Amendment (and in fact this idea is also in the Constitution itself, which forbids religious tests for candidates for political office). I think it no coincidence that the US is also the most successful nation on the planet, though that is not the only reason why.

I've been wondering for a while, and have sometimes voiced the possibility, that indeed one way for this war to end is for us to shatter Islam itself; not Islamism or pan-Arabism, but Islam outright. At the very least, the most fundamentalis