Triple Six

How mainly political? 51%? 75%? 95%?

Considering the emphasis in your replies you are putting a great weight on the politcal aspect.

And in your reply to NOGO how can you equate a first strike aggressive act like 9/11 with altruistic self sacrifice?

mattmattmattmattv

Not suicidal terrorism, perhaps, but people do sometimes commit suicide to achieve purely political causes. Remember those monks in that country that doused themselves with gasoline and lit a match?

~~matt

mattmattmattmattv

True dat.

echidna

Correct, I do. 88.37% I don’t think percentage allocations to such issues are meaningful.

Well you were around when it happened. Hell, every man & his dog wanted to use the WTC as a reason to push their own barrow. People were claiming it was revenge for American Middle East policy , American imperialism, others said it was hatred at America’s global economic aggression, and others wanted to use it as proof of Islam’s hate-mongering.

You’ll find no shortage of political reasons for anti-American hatred, and plenty of people willing to fight for them. Not saying right or wrong, but they’re there.

Truth is, whatever their motivation, political, economic, emotional, religious, they felt it was in the interests of making the world a better place. As far as they were concerned, it wasn’t terrorism, it was justified warfare. Similar any other “terrorist” act. Remember it is only from the comfort of affluent PCness that we apply such labels.

Your terrorism is their altruism That’s the way subjectivity works.

[ July 26, 2002: Message edited by: echidna ]</p>

NOGO

I agree with you as much as religion does take advantage (and abuse) human weaknesses.

If I tell renounce your faith or you will be tortured to death. What will you do?
I would do what Galileo did. Sure, the earth is fixed and the sun rotates around it. Have you noticed that science does not have any martyrs. Christians like Polycarp could not renounce their faith and became martyrs. Remember Peter. He denied that he knew Jesus. If Jesus died for Christians then why should Peter attempt to save his life. Jesus told him "he who saves his life will lose it and he who loses it will gain it" or something like that.

I don't have time here to go into more details but the whole bible is full of martyr generating ideas.

David Bowden

She would be absolutely wrong.

Doubtless the anti-Western ideology espoused by the Taliban and its sympathizers had more to do with recruiting the Sept 11 bombers than any specific verse in the Quran. To this extent, 9/11 was politically motivated.

For whatever reasons, the US hasn't done much diplomatically to reassure traditional Muslims that we respect their ability to self-govern, and they resent that about as much as we'd resent them setting up a puppet in Washington. An extreme political reaction is inevitable under such circumstances.

But: Islam itself is very much about creating an ideal society and ridding the world of elements incompatible with Islam. Politics and religion are not distinct in Islam - religion is the whole of life. Since Mohammed's time they have been aspects of the same thing: bringing oneself and one's world into submission to Allah's design for society as laid out in Muslim teaching.

Those who planned and carried out the attacks believed sincerely that God sanctioned their actions in principle. To this extent, religion did play a role in 9/11, and will play a role in future actions performed by those believers who are desperate to provide their families with the sort of society God intended.

The conflict between western 'modern' society and Islamic traditional society produces socially and politically active fundamentalism - they are fighting and dying for their way of life, and they are doing it because they believe God wants them to have a certain way of life which is being directly and perniciously threatened by "Godless" (how ironic) American culture.

OBL and co. are idealists of this sort; I do not buy the notion that they are atheists or anti-social nihilists. If all bin Laden wanted was power, he could have had it much more easily by abandoning his conservative Islam and moving to the west and setting up shop here, than by getting himself ostracized from Saudi Arabia and holing up in Afghanistan. He believes it's God's work, and that he's in a spot to lead his God's people to defeat a great enemy. It's a deluded ideology, but one well-grounded in Islamic history.

Just my $0.02.
-Wanderer

echidna

When you describe them as weaknesses, I hope you don’t entirely see them as such. Actually I’m quite attached to the human willingness for self-sacrifice which is so closely linked with altruism & compassion.

It just needs to be remembered that the blade cuts both ways.

BTW, your tone seems to assume I’m a theist ? FWIW, I’m not, just an occasional sympathiser with the more liberal ends. NT literalism doesn’t really appeal too much to me.