SOME SAY that if we withdraw from Iraq, it will collapse in a bloody religious sectarian tribal genocide, and become a failed Taliban/Al Quaeda state.
SOME SAY that Iraq will self-stabilize if we withdraw, and turn against Al-Qaeda and drive all foreign elements out of the country in a paroxysm of newly found national pride.
The guarantee behind both statements seems to be certainty that the behavior of religion in an overstressed society is predictable. I find that a foolish notion.
However, I can see some good in all this, on a planetary scale. If there is a huge massacre, it will occur amongst the religious, whose accidental rendings of the precious fabric of society are getting very annoying and dangerous to world peace.
I agree that nationalism and imperialism are bad, and I agree that the USA is an expoitative monster, and I am working to make that known and dial them down so far that they aren't a factor on the world, for us or any nation. Nations are a dying concept.
To me, the best sign of approaching peace would be a appearance of another box on government census questionnaires about race.
The box would be named "Human" and would indicate that the government recognized it own people were aware of our great commonalities and tired of being urged to think of themselves as "The Other" than as many categories of people as a bureaucrat could think up. "Asian Pacific Islander?"
People may not be able to change their genetic structure, but their genetic structure can certainly allow changes in world culture, and we surely need some changes.
To introduce another concept in the mix: I note with pleasure another in the growing list of books and articles calling religion the destructive force it really is. Christopher Hitchens has written a new book, in his inimitable and powerful language, called "God Is Not Great: How religion poisons everything."
Hitchens is hitting the book tour circuit, all the talk shows brave enough to engage him, and making a powerful case for shoving religion to the back of the bus in cultural influence. I have not yet read the book, but the Amazon.com reviews are delightful, and the NYTimes published a wonderfully peevish negative review, damning with faint praise the whole enterprise.
Those of us who read between such lines know that there is a mighty wave a-swelling on the theocracy beach, and these epistles from Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and others may be, I hope, the precursor of a massive rejection of state and social religion, in all its evil forms.
Whenever I hear some jackassery like the current pronouncements of Pope Benedict-Ratzinger against abortion, I am always reminded of the warning in the Bible, of all places, of the Devil quoting Scripture, as I am doing now.
How could any analytical mind not notice that the arrogantly inerrant Bible warns us that it may be interpreted wrongly by the very people who shove it down our throats?
So I view theocracies and their advocates: fatally flawed, and doomed to destroy themselves and whoever, nation or tribe, that allows themselves to be swept up by fear and its passions into wars based on greed and religion, as the Iraq war so strongly demonstrates.
Iraq is based on the idea that God approves of our greed and slavery based irrational lifestyle, and that if Islam, or any other idea objects, then they must die.
My worry, for my children, is that religion will kill them as it stings itself to death in the MidEast. I have amazingly mixed feelings, because to me the death of a religious fanatic is Darwin in action.
We have lost our ability to judge the flaws in our own society, not through poverty and despair, the supposed drivers of suicide bombers, but through spoiled greed and fear.
How's your day going?