| Sunday, April 14, 2002 |
21:27 - We're more alike than we think (or sound, or our best testing indicates)
|
(top)  |
I've had this cynical anti-religious set of reasoning in my utility belt for a while now; it goes like this:
HIM: You should join my religion, because it is the One True Way to salvation.
ME: Okay, tell me: Why are you trying to get me to join?
HIM: Well, because only those souls who accept <SAVIOR> will receive eternal reward in Paradise.
ME: In other words, if you do what your religion says, and make sure other people do too, you get to go to Heaven.
HIM: Er, yes.
ME: So what you're saying is, the human motivation to which religion appeals is... selfishness?
This always makes people put their index fingers in the air and go "Uhhh..." and sputter and get all indignant. But honestly, it's really an ingenious little trick, as old as time: Disguise social conscience as self interest, and because people will always act in a way that serves their own interests, this way you get all the good things religion teaches-- charity, brotherhood, love, peace, kindness, etc.-- because the people practicing it are acting in their own interests. They aren't trying to better the community or build strong families or whatever. They're doing what will benefit them in the long term. They get to go to Heaven.
So when I run across the following, quoted by Ken Layne...
Khaled, a hotel worker, spoke in wonderment of a martyr's encounter at the gates of heaven as someone having their file checked: "There will be blessings for 70 of his family and friends. The 72 virgins are real -- their skin is so pale and beautiful that you can see the blood in their veins. If one of these virgins spits in the ocean, the seawater becomes sweet. The martyr is so special he does not feel the pain of being in the grave and all that his family has to do to cleanse his file thoroughly, is to repay his outstanding debts."
Surely, we ask, this view of the Koran should be seen as philosophical? As a parable? But no, there was a chorus of disagreement from a gathering of his friends in the teeming Jabalya refugee camp near Gaza City: "No. This is real . . . this is as it will be," said Khaled, as much for himself as on behalf of younger Palestinians who now talk endlessly of the benefits of death over life in a bombing campaign that has killed more than 200 Israelis in 18 months.
But Dr Rabah Mohanna, whose Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine has claimed its own share of the violence - including last year's assassination of a minister in the Israeli Government -- is confounded by youth's lunge for the grave: "Thousands of young men and women are ready to be blown up. It is a new phenomenon -- you have no idea how big it is."
...My first reaction, like (I believe) many other people's reactions, is along the lines of "Geez, these guys are really serious about building a Palestinian state, aren't they? They're so dedicated to their cause that they're willing to die for it. They're willing to see the cause succeed even if it means they can't be a part of it. God, I can't imagine believing so strongly in an ideal that I would go to that extreme, not in our culture. They must be so different from us, there's no way we can negotiate!"
And, well, I'd be wrong. Because the only thing that makes them different from us is the stories they believe.
Consider: You're a Palestinian teenager. Your life sucks. You live in a refugee camp. Instead of Digimon or N'Sync, your entertainment is the promise of 72 virgins awaiting you after death. There's no question that this is real; it's universally accepted as truth. So death is better than life-- that's all well and good. So let's all kill ourselves, right? Well, no-- there's a catch: you have to die as a martyr in order to get the 72 translucent virgins. Okay, so what's a martyr? Well, it's like a sports star. It's someone who dies a certain way: fighting in jihad. It's a role model, an example to follow. It's a "When I grow up..." figure.
Note that Israel isn't necessarily even part of this picture.
You're a teenager who wants the 72 virgins. Your overriding concern here is the virgins, not the jihad. The martyrdom is a means to an end. You're not thinking about a Palestinian state; you're just thinking "Hey, look-- a convenient cause which will qualify me as a martyr." And so you strap on a bomb and take out a Jerusalem coffee shop.
Mission accomplished.
When pressed, sure, they'll shout for the blood of the Jews to run in the streets. Of course they will-- incendiary rhetoric is easy to instill and amplify. People love to absorb stories to repeat, and they love to believe in a cause and shout out to the world about why it's right. We do exactly that in the Christian world; just look at a televangelist or two. But the motivation is still those 72 virgins. It's whatever will fulfill us personally, not the ideals of the rhetoric itself.
They're serving self-interest, not social conscience. Not the greater good. Not the Cause.
Whoever has been fomenting the recent fascination with the suicide fantasy among Palestinian firebrands is a genius: he knows exactly how to motivate people.
Just like Westerners, they're motivated by selfishness. It might look like piety and idealism, but deep down it's the same thing that drives people anywhere to do what they have justified to themselves as being "right".
Doesn't mean that we have to accept that it's right, though.
I've never been a religious person, because far too often I've seen exactly this kind of motivation at work, right here at home. Sure, religion is a fine way for many people to make sense of the world. I have no problem with that. But we'd better not be lying to ourselves when we think about why we're religious; because if we are, we're blinding ourselves to the mindset of other cultures-- particularly cultures that think nothing of making us infidels dead on their way to translucent-virgin-land.
|
|
