Why the faith of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects doesn’t matter, but yours does

[Phillip McCleod]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/why-the-faith-of-the-boston-marathon-bombing-suspects-doesnt-matter-but-yours-does/2013/04/23/dd3b696c-ab63-11e2-b6fd-ba6f5f26d70e_story.html

It simply does not matter that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the two Chechen-born brothers suspected of perpetrating the attacks were Muslim. Any religion, or lack of one, can be co-opted and used by a person or people as a justification for extremism.

What matters right now, and into the future, is the way the faith and values of every other American can either help us resist the fear-generating effects of terrorism, or help that fear grow and take root like a weed, choking out trust and diversity.

/*
* agree or disagree? does the line between fundamentalism and violent extremism hinge on, 'the faith and values of every other American', or not?
*/

[Sekhmets Daughter]

1. If you're like me and consider 'faith' in any religion

the root cause of most our societal problems, you take a dim view of the 'faith' of other Americans and the values related to that faith.

[Phillip McCleod]

3. i hope my bias wasn't showing too much in my OP, but, yes..

..i take a dim view of faith as a basis for social mores. psychology and sociology, with all their fluffy faults, at least employ a measure of repeatable methodologies in their analyses of human behavior. the same cannot be said for al qaeda fanboys or senator inhofe, the westboro church, etc.

[Sekhmets Daughter]

4. No, your bias didn't show at all.

In fact I considered not replying as I thought you might be offended... I used "you" in the more general sense. I honestly believe if man hadn't created god, the world would not only be happier, but better!

[Phillip McCleod]

5. cool, that's what i was going for.

i am actually somewhat dispassionately interested in what 'people' think about the line between fundamentalism and violent extremism, and whether or not religion *in general* (any religion) implicitly encourages more extreme manifestations of magical thinking..

.. like that the end is nigh, or that bombing the boston marathon would show 'em.

[Warpy]

2. My yardstick for religious insanity is the Irish Catholic stuff

I grew up with, especially the stuff from my Irish granny who was extreme enough to believe women should be "churched" after childbirth, even childbirth in marriage.

I'm sorry, but no other religion has come lose in sheer lunacy.

Most Muslims I've worked with over the years have been pretty indistinguishable from garden variety Protestants except they didn't eat pork. They're reasonable people who really don't stick out in a crowd, get most of the jokes, and certainly aren't bucking for sainthood.

I really don't get the paranoia, but then again I don't live in a small town or white bread suburb where people are insulated from meeting folks anything unlike themselves.

And yes, it does help being brought up in a bonkers religion.

[okasha]

8. Curious--what did «churching» signify to your grandmother?

In the Anglican/Episcopal tradition, it's a brief service for giving thanks that a mother has come safely through the danger of childbirth and dates to a time when complications to delivery constituted a major cause of mortality among women. Not sure why this should be considered particularly dotty unless there is a different meaning involved.

[Warpy]

9. You had to appear before the congregation and ask forgiveness

for committing the sin of sex (which is a sin only for women, yanno, because we're the ones who produce the babies). No, it didn't matter if you were married. Sex within marriage was every bit a sin.

I told you they were nuts.

[Dorian Gray]

14. That was Catholic?

I've never heard of anything like that. (And I'm a 41 year old Catholic.)

[Warpy]

16. My grandmother was born in Ireland in 1877

You've spent your whole life under Vatican II.

BIG difference.

[Dorian Gray]

17. Yes, big difference

I won't argue that. But I had grandparents, too. Born in the early 1900s. (In the US, albeit.) I've never heard of anyone doing anything remotely like that.

[hrmjustin]

18. It sounds very old school Isish Catholic to me.

Sounds like something that men who feared or hated women would come up with.

[okasha]

19. That's. . . strange.

I've never heard of anything like that, before or after Vatican 2.

[rug]

6. I don't think so. But its success does.

[struggle4progress]

7. Tolerance for diversity and sense of community require constant effort

to build, and history suggests that extremists can all too easily destroy community tolerance, as happened in nazi Europe, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda

So, in fact, I rather agree with the sentiment that our own response to sick lunatics may matter a great deal: there is real danger their idiotic philosophies could spread and poison our entire society, unless we ourselves redouble our efforts to build tolerance for diversity and sense of community

[dimbear]

10. You could kill a person with an AK-47, but you could also have used a sack of potatoes.

The two are equally dangerous, by the logic of the cited author. Dimbear demurs.

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. REM The faith does matter, because efforts to pull back violent extremists will have to come

REM from inside the faith, practically. As we can see with Tamerlan, if his reaction to mentioning
REM MLK is "you can't admire him, he's not Muslim", then there's no way he'll listen to a non-Muslim
REM trying to persuade him to give up violence.
REM
REM Since fundamentalist religions are closed-minded, and proud of it, the contact to change them
REM must come from people with close, but non-violent, beliefs.
REM
REM And, in reality, we are seeing Islam being used as a justification for violent extremism far more than
REM other religions. And far, far more than 'lack of religion'.

[Phillip McCleod]

12. NIN ..what you say is true..

NIN ..the line between fundamentalism and violent extremism is buried deeply in a particular
NIN faith community.. or even a particular sect. would Tamerlan have crossed it without the
NIN encouragement of already radical role models like the Armenian 'teacher' we've heard of?
NIN
NIN clearly people cross the line from non-violent to violent for non-religious reasons, family can
NIN drive some people nuts, haters will find people to hate, but when it's religiously motivated
NIN versus strictly political terrorism, when it's *politicized religion* i guess.. then we worry?
NIN
NIN when do we start worrying when our sons stay up late at the kitchen table getting good
NIN with god with their new spiritual teacher?

[Act_of_Reparation]

15. You win the internet, sir

Always nice to find another nails fan lurking about

[trotsky]

13. Religion isn't "co-opted" for extremism.

It creates, empowers, and reinforces it. Until people can admit that religion is a force for bad at least as much as it's a force for good, nothing will change.

[Mango40]

20. Proving a Conservative Caricature of Boston Bombing Coverage Wrong

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/04/proving-a-conservative-caricature-of-boston-bombing-coverage-wrong/275293/

The Conservative Media Were Wrong

"The slug at the top of the page online: "Bombing Suspect Cites Islamic Extremist Beliefs As Motive." The lede:

The portrait investigators have begun to piece together of the two brothers suspected of the Boston Marathon bombings suggests that they were motivated by extremist Islamic beliefs but were not acting with known terrorist groups -- and that they may have learned to build bombs simply by logging onto the online English-language magazine of the affiliate of Al Qaeda in Yemen, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.

This is an undeniable instance of a "mainstream media" outlet explicitly tying the bombing to Islamic extremism. Now look at how Mark Steyn invokes that same NYT article at National Review's group blog.

Here's the whole post:

Former brother-in-law Elmirza Khozhugov explains Tamerlan Tsarnaev's grievances to the New York Times:

He was angry that the world pictures Islam as a violent religion.

So he blew up an eight-year old boy and a couple of hundred other Americans.

And now the media are full of stories about how the Tsarnaevs were all-American kids and "beautiful, beautiful boys" and maybe it was the boxing or the Ben Affleck movies or the classical music but, whatever it was, it was nothing to do with Islam. Nothing whatever. So I guess it worked."