Thoughts on the Norway attacks

And so it came to pass that the bombing and massacre in Norway were carried out by a homegrown, lone-wolf terrorist with anti-Muslim sentiment, contrary to conjecture about al-Qaʿida or other Islamist groups masterminding this horror.  I have to admit that Islamist terrorism was the first thing that popped into my head when I first heard that there was a bombing, but I wasn't so reckless as to make public declarations about it before I knew the details.  I would have hoped that professional journalists would hold themselves to an even higher standard than an ordinary citizen, but who am I kidding?

Left-wing commentators have been coming down hard with criticism toward anyone who incorrectly speculated that Islamic terrorists were behind the attack, solidifying their view that Christian extremists are just as bad. But is Anders Behring Breivik really a Christian extremist?  Anders Behring Breivik thinks so.

How sincere are his religious convictions?  From what I've gathered by skimming his manifesto, he was just an all-around deranged madman who admittedly hedged his bets on Pascal's wager before what he thought would be a suicide mission in the name of "cultural Christians" against the threat of multiculturalism.  Regardless of how much of a True Believer™ Breivik was, attempts to associate or dissociate him with Christianity are pointless; Jon Stewart did a great job pointing out how ridiculous it has become:

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Right-wing pundits were quick to suggest that Breivik was right about the Islamic threat in Europe, though bombing government buildings and massacring children isn't a very effective way of fighting that threat.  If he believed that his country was under siege by Muslim invaders, why didn't he take the "fight" to his perceived enemy?  What did he think he was accomplishing by murdering all those people?

For what it's worth, I can somewhat understand the concern about multiculturalism - the "live and let live" attitude many Western governments have toward immigrants with no pressure to assimilate can lead to de facto segregated communities in which custom may supersede local law.  I've heard reports of troubling inicidents in majority Muslim communities in other countries such as the UK before, though I'm not sure how factual they are; similar reports coming from Dearborn, Michigan are mostly sourced from a Christian group with its own agenda.  Concern is one thing; paranoia is another.

Here's hoping that this atrocity is an isolated incident and not the start of a wider right-wing terror campaign.  The last thing any secular society needs right now is the additional threat of self-styled Crusaders attacking civilians.

Using religion as a scapegoat for bigger problems

I have, and things wouldn't be any better.

A trope I've noticed among fellow "New" atheists, particularly of the blogging variety, is the blaming of society's evils on people taking orders from an imaginary being.  The sentiment is that if all people embraced a naturalistic worldview, then things like war, terrorism, pseudoscience, sexism, and homophobia would all but vanish from our civilization.  

I think that's a naive attitude.  Just as all of religion's positive effects (charity, volunteering, community, etc.) could easily come from secular sources, isn't the same true of the evils it has produced?  Is belief that you are acting at the behest of an almighty spirit necessary to torture dissenters? To enslave and/or rape those weaker than you? To ritualistically starve your children or deny them medical treatment? To crash airplanes into occupied buildings?

I suppose it depends on how broadly you define "religion"; should it include cults of personality? We've seen people do some awful things in the name of charismatic leaders, never applying a skeptical mind to their sovereign's claims.

Officially, most North Koreans are nontheistic, but is the Juche philosophy really so different from a religion apart from its answer to the "god" question?  The Dear Leader promotes an air of veritable divinity around himself even as his country's citizens starve, and he need not appeal to a higher power to keep it that way.

Religious obedience, or tribal loyalty?

Even religious fanatics like the Muslim extremists assaulting and killing non-Muslims in the Middle East are not too dissimilar from criminal gangs; it's tribalism in its most extreme form.  We see its benign cousin every time there's a major sporting event, though the disdain that one team's less sportsmanlike fans express toward the opposing team tends to subside after the game (the violent and destructive episodes of football hooliganism being a notable exception).  Belief that violence against the "other" makes some invisible being happy is unnecessary; it only requires pent-up anger, often brought on by socioeconomic factors, to be channeled as hatred toward another individual or group.

Now there's the matter of suicide terrorism.  The promise of an eternal paradise after death is certainly a useful tool for convincing people to sacrifice their lives, but is it the only way?  I think it's entirely possible for someone who accepts that death is followed only by the end of consciousness to willingly die for what they think is a good cause.

If you were utterly convinced that your people were at war with an entire civilization, a monolithically evil enemy whose every member was like a worker wasp supporting the nest you want to destroy, could you be persuaded to commit a kamikaze attack that would take out thousands of them?  Would you need to believe you would be rewarded for it in the afterlife, or would it be worth it solely to aid in the defense of your loved ones back home? It's really only necessary to unquestioningly hate those you perceive as enemies, to believe that every last one of them deserves to die, to carry out an attack like 9/11.  

A disease, or merely a symptom?

Christopher Hitchens claims that "religion poisons everything"; I can't help but wonder if it's analogous to potassium cyanide sprinkled atop the arsenic cocktail we'd be drinking anyway.

Perhaps a better analogy is that many atheists see religion as a disease when it may well be merely a symptom of other ills to which the human mind is inherently susceptible.  I'll dare to assume that most people are not skeptics, and even people who consider themselves skeptics are fighting an uphill battle against their own desire for certainty.  This gives the masses a tendency toward blind obedience of authority, whether that authority is a manufactured deity, an ideology, or an individual psychopath.

Even if religion vanished overnight, we'd still have no shortage of man-made problems. Hateful people create hateful gods in their own image, and those people would remain hateful even without their imaginary friends egging them on.

bin Laden is dead... So what?

Thanks to social media, the news of Osama bin Laden's death has spread around the world, even before the major news outlets have had a chance to get the President in front of a microphone.

Well, they win this particular match, anyway.
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I do feel some faint satisfaction that the world's most wanted terrorist finally got what's coming to him, but he seems like more of an afterthought now.  Al-Qaida isn't some monolithic organization that will crumble without the Dark Lord's leadership.  The seeds of Islamist terrorism have been planted in dozens of nations, and those groups will continue to be a threat regardless of how many hydra heads we cut off.


The Taliban has once again begun its spring offensive in Afghanistan, kicking off with a 12 year old suicide bomber in a marketplace.  Lone wolf terrorists still spring up everywhere, a unique threat distinct from the terrorist cells that have splintered off from Al-Qaida.  They've lost a figurehead but possibly gained a martyr.  Time will tell whether this development demoralizes or emboldens them.


Side note: Obama, thanks for reaching out to all Americans in remembrance of 9/11 regardless of "which god we pray to" and implicitly showing that nonbelievers are still outsiders in the eyes of most of the nation.