--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Sal Sunshine <salsunsh...@...> wrote: <snip> > Alright, at the risk of being so labelled, I'm > going to quote from one of Sam Harris' books, > The End of Faith, in which he starts out by describing > a seemingly ordinary day in the life of a seemingly > ordinary young man, as he boards a bus: > > "The young man takes his seat beside a middle-aged couple > smiles. With the press of a button he destroys himself, > the couple at his side, and twenty others on the bus. The > nails, ball bearings, and rat poison ensure further > casualties on the street and in the surrounding cars. All > has gone according to plan. > > The young man's parents soon learn of his fate. Although > saddened to have lost a son, they feel tremendous pride > at his accomplishment. They know that he has gone to heaven > and prepared the way for them to follow. He has also sent > his victims to hell for eternity. It is a double victory. > > These are the facts. This is all we know for certain about > the young man . Why is it so easy, then, so trivially > easyyou-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it easyto guess > the young man's religion?" > > > While the passage is chilling enough, IMO, the real > kicker I think is the second paragraph, in which > his friends, neighbors and even his parents celebrate > his final "victory."
(Huh, I can't find anything in that paragraph about his friends and neighbors. Minor quibble, I suppose, but interesting.) > I suppose you could label Harris a bigot too, > altho he never mentions the young man's religion, > or much of anything else about him, > it being clearly unnecessary. I think we can label Harris a bigot *because* he sees it as unnecessary to mention the man's religion-- a bigot pandering to bigoted readers like Sal and Vaj. Maybe I'm bigoted too, because my first thought, remembering the hero status accorded in some Christian circles to the man who shot abortion doctor George Tiller, was that the guy on the bus was a fundie Christian. For a minute there, I actually thought Sal was supporting do.rkflex rather than Vaj. Silly me. Then I realized Harris's little story was a double- whammy, bigoted not just against Islam but against religion in general. The question *assumes* the bomber was religious. Statistically, of the perpetrators of the 315 suicide attacks that occurred from 1980 to 2003, 57 percent were secular. Of the 41 perpetrators of suicide attacks by Hezbollah during that period, 8 percent were Muslim fundamentalists. Of the rest, 21 percent were communists or socialists; 71 percent were Christians. Other studies have shown that "Islamic ideology...is an idiom articulating the frustrations of alienated Muslims; it is not the root cause of these frustrations," according to this essay (which is also the source of the stats above): http://www.naseeb.com/naseebvibes/prose-detail.php?aid=5817 > I think Vaj has Islam as it is practiced today > in much of the world pinned down, and all > these attempts to label him and discredit > what he's said are pathetic. Nobody ever > denied there are terrorists in most faiths, > but in no other *today* has it been so > accepted and even glorified. There has *always* been acceptance and glorification of terrorism by those in whose cause it's committed. Not by all, of course; many devout Muslims are appalled by the terrorism purportedly committed in the name of Islam.
