There's a widespread belief, amounting almost to a cultural assumption in many influential circles,
that the songs to religion and religious difference an inherent tendency to violence,
an extreme expression that encapsulates this and much else is Christopher Hitchens subtitle to the American publication of his book, God Is Not Great.
The subtitle is How Religion Poisons Everything.
And many more examples could be cited. They are indeed cyberbullying.
Bill Kavanagh's book, The Myth of Religious Violence. So I'd like to read them.
The assumption also carries with it the thought that religion is predominant or even unique in
embodying the tendency to violence in the case of terrorism and certain forms of outright warfare.
Included history of late 20th century and early 21st centuries and a great deal of terrorism that is widely and
understandably viewed as principally religiously inspired and in fact principally inspired by one specific religion.
So that the expressions Islamic terrorism,
the militant Islamic terrorism and many other similar titles have become familiar coinage in the 21st century,
especially in the discourse and public imagination of citizens in Western democracies.
The attacks of September 11, 2001, plus the subsequent atrocities most recently the Sri Lankan tragedy have contributed to producing
or popularising this picture of religious violence as particularly concentrated upon Muslim faith.
This focus is already loaded with a specific version of the assumption about religion that I want to subject to critical examination.
I'll begin, first of all, with the assumption that religion is somehow inherently and perhaps uniquely or distinctively prone to violence,
and then examine the way this supposed tendency is linked to terrorist actions.
Later, I will discuss the weaker thesis that, as a matter of fact, religion has on occasion been the cause of terrorism.
Before moving on to the claim that even when religion is not a cause of terrorist acts,
religious motivation is characteristically and uniquely responsible for some distinctive and unwelcome features of terrorist campaigns.
This line of thesis is, in many respects, an echo of the comment long ago by that very eminent religious thinker,
Blaise Pascal, who said Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
End of quote.
Pascal's comments show clearly, but the thesis of some of the wider assumptions are not restricted to the non-religious or the anti-religious.
Religion and violence. First of all, some words about Kavanaugh's critique the assumption that some sort of distinct, evil,
intrinsic link between religion and violence and the implications thereof for
such issues of terrorism have started to come under scrutiny in recent years,
most radically in William Kavanaugh's writings, culminating in his important book, The Myth of Religious Violence.
I really have to admit a long discussion of the difficulties of defining religion and the details
of Bill Kavanaugh's response to these difficulties by rejecting the concept of religion.
He sees that the concept of religion in his book as a sort of pseudo concept developed only after the Enlightenment,
which characterises religion as a phenomenon separate from the rest of life, and I syllable as the often inherent cause of violence against this.
I argue, though I won't repeat the arguments here,
that his historical claim about the late emergence claims about the late emergence of the concept of false but abandoning the
concept and hence showing the incoherence of the violence claims is unwarranted in spite of the real difficulties of definition.
Yet even where the concept of religion of late addition to our vocabulary and even a
construction used for various socio political purposes inimical to particular faces,
Kavanaugh believes it wouldn't follow and fails to make out anything interesting and even valuable for contemporary discourse.
I suppose the concept of virtual reality is unknown before the 20th century
and may even have been coined with a dangerous bias against actual reality,
which should give us pause. Even so, the concept marks a significant phenomenon in our real lives that can't be ignored and has obvious utility
for analysing and discussing new technical and social developments and may even illuminate past realities.
Indeed, I argue that it's possible to proceed with investigation of claims about religion's role in violence,
using some paradigms and forms of what I call flexible social focal meaning.
In that investigation, though, I won't develop what I mean by focal meaning.
I shall take Kavanaugh's critique from.
It could take the insight contextual from his conceptual pessimism that religion cannot in general be considered as a factor in life.
Quite isolated from a range of other human commitments and identifications,
such as those due to political, social, sexual, racial and biological outlooks.
To take a terrorist to take the terrorist activities. Sorry section called how a focus on religious motivation obscures complex realities.
To take the terrorist activities of contemporary Islamic fundamentalists are simply manifestations of religion, for instance,
is to ignore the way that their religious commitments complement and intersect with political conflict and grievances.
That would make perfect sense to non-religious people if only they took the trouble to examine
them without the blinkered conviction that the cause of the violence is wholly religious.
One has made such an examination as Robert Pipe,
who has argued that close attention to the motives and backgrounds of suicide bombers from 1980 to 2003.
A total of 315 attacks, excluding those commissioned by states,
strongly suggest that religion was seen at any rate, a seldom a significant factor in motivations.
Pipe. Pipe was more recently upgraded this database and is now examined 2000 cases of suicide bombing with similar conclusions.
He sums up his initial findings as follows The data.
The data shows that there is little connection between suicide, terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism or any one of the world religions.
Rather. But nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal to compel modern
democracies to withdraw military forces from territories that the terrorists considered like their homeland.
Religion is rarely the root cause,
although it's often used as a tool by terrorist organisations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective,
unquote. Inevitably, paperwork and methodology have come under criticism,
especially his strong claims about the unique role of foreign intervention and occupation in provoking terrorist attacks.
Nonetheless, these basic claims about the relatively slight or secondary nature of the religious
motivation in most suicide bombings examine compared to perfectly earthly motivation,
give serious thought to food for thought and any resort to religion as a leading cause of terrorist acts.
Similarly, scepticism about prevailing views regarding the predominant role of religious faith in generating
contemporary suicide bombing and terrorism has been expressed by the anthropologist Scott Atran,
who says in his book Talking to the Enemy, that his extensive investigations, including many interviews with terrorists themselves, show that, quote,
Islam and religious ideology per say are the principal causes of suicide bombing and terror in today's world.
And quote, Atran, who is himself an avowed atheist,
thinks that the more important factors are bound up with the sense of identification with a peer group who are who have developed
strong feelings of outrage at what they see as examples of cultural and political domination over those with whom they identify.
Atran and other investigators have often remarked on how superficial the understanding of any version of Islamic religion is,
with most of the young men drawn to the violent struggle called jihad.
This superficiality has been borne out in examinations of the views of many Western born
recruits to icis in the terrorist activities of this appalling group in Syria and Iraq.
A study of U.S. study of ISIS volunteers who returned to their original Western countries was carried out for
the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism in 2017 and found that despite claiming to protect Muslims,
most of the returned fighters were novices in their religion and some did not know even how to pray properly.
Study.
But Professor Hamad El-Sayed of Manchester Metropolitan University and terrorism expert Richard Barrett found that most of the would be jihadists.
Quite like any basic understanding of the true meaning of jihad or even of the Islamic faith itself.
In quote, these studies suggest at least four things that the focus on religion supposed special tendency toward violence tends to obscure.
One, religions have played no significant part in many extreme outbreaks of violence,
surely obvious that there have been many dreadful outbreaks of unjustified violence or terrorism.
The causal motivational origins of which have nothing to do with religion Pol Pot,
Mao, Hitler and Stalin in our own era were responsible for staggering massacres,
most of them palpably terrorist, by my definition, but cannot be attributed to their authors religious inclinations or that of their followers.
Other ideologies, including democratic ones, can play a significant role.
Second point other ideologies, including credit ones, can play a significant role in promoting violence.
Not only are there many outbreaks of political and other forms of violence that have little or nothing to do with religion.
But some of the conflicts cited above show. Non-religious worldviews.
Ideological outlooks. What roles calls comprehensive doctrines are sometimes themselves.
Plausible candidates for playing an important role in causing or motivating widespread violence.
They are often exempted from the odium put upon religious motivations in connection with violence and terrorism.
Most recently, of course, the shocking slaughter of 50 people in two Muslim mosques in New Zealand by a right wing neo-Nazi nationalist Australian,
of course, has tended to redress the balance. A balance that should have been already tilted away from religion.
Apply such other massacres motivated by neo-Nazi ideology such as that of Anders Breivik in Norway.
Even those who would make the bombings of German and Japanese cities culminating in the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were terrorist,
as I would do not talk of democratic terrorism or democratic extremism,
even though the defence of democracy and its values was an element in the motivation of the attacks.
By contrast, at the height of the Northern Irish troubles, there was a tendency to ignore the economic,
imperialist and nationalist aspects behind the conflict and speak exclusively of Catholic terrorism or Protestant terrorism.
As for the contemporary relevance of certain forms of democratic ideology to extreme political violence,
we could cite the neocon project of bringing democracy to the Middle East that played a part in the violent and I think,
palpably unjustified invasion of Iraq.
Nor should we ignore the Democratic rhetoric and rhetoric of defending our liberties that surrounds the war on terror and war that
includes the resort to torture and drone attacks on Pakistan and Afghanistan and elsewhere which have killed so many innocent people.
As to come close to what I have called neo terrorism and even on some occasions direct terrorism, free the focus on religion,
constitutional mandate and specific causes of conflict, even where they are not specifically ideological.
Quite apart from obscuring the role of non-religious outlooks in the outbreak of terrorism, the focus on religion as a major cause of wars,
terrorism and other forms of political violence obscures many of the more mundane and specific causes
of conflict that political leaders and many of the rest of us find inconvenient to acknowledge.
Such grievances might be relatively independent of ideology.
This is true even in those instances where there are issues of religion regularly invoked by
the leaders of the campaigns of violence and used to some degree to motivate their followers.
Osama bin Laden's various diatribes, referring to holy duties and caliphate, also contain numerous claims about straightforward political grievances,
such as Israel's occupation of Palestinian land, Israeli military policing and political persecution.
As he thought of Palestinian people,
claims about past and present Western support for Middle Eastern dictatorships and Western exploitation of Middle Eastern assets such as oil.
The United States historic deployment of troops throughout our lands and more recently,
the US led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan is a fascinating example of the way evocations of
religious explanations can come to dominate and distort our understanding of violent outbreaks.
And obscure and thereby obscure specific political motivation is to be found in Peter Wilson's recent huge book, A History of the 30 Years War.
Wilson rejects that. Wilson argues that this war so often invoked as the are typical of religious war,
the duration of which was caused by religious fanaticism was, quote, not primarily a religious war at all, unquote.
There were, of course, religious elements which probably have been otherwise in 17th century Europe,
where Christian faith was an aspect of life integrated to varying degrees with other central aspects.
But most contemporary observers, quote, spoke of imperial Bavarian Swedish, although in truth not Catholic or Protestant.
The war indeed began with a somewhat religious episode. The famous defenestration, but its real cause, with some ferocity and duration, were not due,
argues Wilson, to religious fanaticism but dynastic ambition and political fissure.
They don't know what the different installation of. Some do it.
This is my amusing joke I was going to leave out. But I can't. I'm warning you, it's a joke.
So you go to a different abstraction occurred in Prague in 1617, when three imperial officials, Catholics,
all were flung out of a window 50 feet above the ground by a group of armed Protestants angry at the Catholic Hapsburg rule in the Holy Roman Empire.
On one popular, though probably sadly apocryphal account, they fell calling on the Virgin Mary for help.
Amazingly, they escaped death from this huge shot by falling in a dummy and survived to warn the emperor of his disquiet.
I suspect this surprising event will fill many in the audience with amusement rather than the Dundee pub,
rather than a respect for the efficacy of prayer. I will only remark that the two reactions are not incompatible.
God may very well have something like a sense of humour and a robust, robust appreciation of the ridiculous.
Indeed, I think he has, as one review of the book, summarised the argument about the causes of the length of the conflict.
The Empire's hundreds of small territories were cash poor to fight so assumed
impossible death debts adulterated their coinages and triggered a ruinous inflation.
Unpaid armies could neither be for blood supply. Georgia's famine for excess remained in the field, nourished on plunder rather than religion.
Religions are number for all. Religions are a very diverse phenomenon.
Simple credos about a strong connection of religion with war and terrorism ignore too many distinctions between and within religions themselves.
There are and have been all sorts of different religions with a great many different practices,
ethical commitments and changes over the course of their histories.
It may well be that some religions or some versions of the same religion are prone to spur their adherents towards violence,
where other religions or other versions of the same religion have no such tendency.
This is an issue that needs to be resolved by detailed, historical and sociological investigations.
Loose talk about Islamic terrorism needs just such attention.
But even if it could be shown that versions of Islam, such as Osama bin Laden's or even more plausibly that of the ISIS militants,
had an inherent commitment to unjustified violence, including terrorism.
This might have little or no relevance, for instance, just to the Sufi version of Islam.
Nor do a great deal of mainstream Muslim believers, whether they profess Sunni or Shia or some other variant of the doctrine.
This is obvious enough the casual observation of Muslim citizens in various parts of the world.
But evidence of it is available in the search results of surveys, such as the findings of a 2011 Gallup poll.
This poll investigated attitudes towards attacks upon non-combatants in various groups across the world.
It avoided the word terrorism or terrorist because of definitional problems, but they followed attitudes to attacks upon civilians.
So their findings are clearly relevant to terrorist acts as I define them, which you don't know about, but just take my word for it.
They found in this poll that, quote, placing high importance on religion generally relates positively with rejecting violent religious intolerance.
A function of less, not more. Religion is generally associated with greater sympathy for attacks on civilians, unquote.
A crucial point that underlies these four considerations is that a primary factor in many outbreaks of violence is attachment to identity and alarm,
and perceived threats to religion certainly provides one focus for this attachment of Islam.
But so to a great many other things, identity is closely related to power, self-respect and perceived cultural positioning,
so that religion will also be appropriated to bolster or create culturally significant
identities for those who have or want power or in need of group life support.
The relationship between the sexes provides a case in point the fashioning of male identity with often dominant roles of female over against females.
It has been a feature of history in which religion has certainly contributed,
but it seems to be even more diverse and deeper sociological than any religious influence in some Islamic communities.
And in the fanatically militant groups waging jihad against the modern world, for instance,
the punitive obsession with hiding women from view within the home and in all covering clothing as well as denying them
education and other cultural opportunities is arguably as much an exercise of male domination as a religious party.
Whatever explicit appeals to interpretations of religious teaching or tradition might be made.
It's worth noting that the major religions, in terms of numbers of adherents of many less popular religions,
contain a great deal of teaching about the importance of values like peace and charity.
Peace is a complex concept with many interpretations and conceptions built around it over the ages.
Without being an expert on comparative religion.
I would conjecture that there are very few religions that don't make the value of peace a significant part of their doctrine.
Augustine, for instance, places at the heart of his Christo centric ethical system.
Along with love. It's true that, as with many other Christians and non-Christians, he thought that compatible with the idea of a just war.
In certain circumstances, though, other Christians have thought that it required pacifism.
Certainly there's room for peacemakers and activists to build upon doctrines of peace within many religions.
And they do. I come to an important objection.
It may be urged against much of the above discussion, but whatever the success it has against the idea of the religious alliance is inherently,
uniquely or even merely commonly prone to reduce violence.
It does nothing to dispel the accusation that on occasion,
religion might be the cause or the principal cause of particular outbreaks of religious of terrorist acts or other acts of unjustified violence.
Nor does it damage the claim that some specific forms or interpretations of religion may be made them so as being directly prone to violence.
I don't want to examine these propositions.
On the first proposition, many will cite contemporary or near contemporary events frequently referred to, as we mentioned above, as Islamic terrorism.
We've already seen scepticism about reason for scepticism about this appellation
with regard to the causes of much terrorism that is frequently given that label.
But although we can often find the leaders of groups such as Al Qaeda cite as reasons for their kind
of faith alleged offences of a palpably political nature against groups or regions they identify with.
It cannot be denied.
They also employ strong religious rhetoric and appeals to religious interests in denouncing their enemies and exhorting their own followers.
This much I've already conceded. The pressing question is whether such rhetoric, along with other considerations,
means that in those circumstances, religion is the cause or primary cause of such terrorist acts.
Obviously, a good deal turns on what we mean by cause, and much philosophical ink has been spilled on this topic.
One final idea behind much of ordinary thought about cause is that one event
would not have occurred without the occurrence of the other antecedent event.
Whereas the 18th century philosopher David HUME would have objects rather than events where if the first object had not been the second,
never had existed. This pregnant remark,
though apparently in conflict with Hume's official regularity theory of causation spawned to for or against industry of counterfactual theories.
Given momentum by David Lewis's analysis of counterfactual propositions in terms of possible worlds, clearly some idea along the line.
If it wasn't for X, we wouldn't have had. Why is it work when people talk about X causing Y?
But it's a very passionate in which to catch all that can be made by such remarks.
Usually the action question covers much more than one factor. Or, to put it differently, if X is a single factor,
then it will seldom travel trigger Y without being conjoin with several other factors or conditions.
So the possibility exists. That aside from those many cases where religion plays no role at all in producing terrorist acts,
the religious factor where significant remains nonetheless merely one element
conjoined with several others and ignoring those others is fraught with risk,
both intellectual and practical. Often the talk of what causes terrorist acts is concerned with silence without the speaker or the context finds.
The most significant factor in bringing about the acts.
But the significance is very interest and context dependent, which is not to deny it subjective status.
That said, there may seem to be clearly cases in which religion has played such a prominent part in bringing about significant episodes of terrorism,
such as, for instance, the various Christian crusades waged against parts of the Muslim world in the Middle Ages.
More recently, of course, the religious loaded denunciation of infidels that accompanied the ISIS massacres of
enslavement of various groups regarded as hostile to the group's religious outlook,
provide more evidence the ISIS terrorist attacks upon the Yazidi sect, for instance, seem a primary case for religiously cause terrorism.
But even here, one must not ignore the secular aspects of the attacks,
such as the quest for political domination of an area or the gaining of slaves, including sexual slaves.
Religion and increased ferocity. Another important claim about religion in a good deal of academic literature.
On terrorism, even if it's often too simplistic to claim a solid or critical role for some forms of religion in terrorist activity.
The appeal to religion, when it does occur,
serves to make for more sustained and vicious resort to terrorism than is the case with predominantly non-religious motivations.
The idea is that religious doctrines appealing to the support of an omnipotent God and perhaps the rewards
of an afterlife make an absolute commitment to unrestrained violence that is unique in religious outlooks.
Mark Kirk and Spock Jurgens, both, for instance, who is commentator on terrorist matters,
generally seeking a middle path between the view that religion does cause terrorism and the view that it does not.
Argues that religion is at least a problematic factor in the mix of motivations because of the divine dimension it brings to the conflict.
As he puts it, Mark on your hand. Religion brings more to the conflict than simply a repository of symbols, of an aura of divine support.
It problematise the conflict through its abiding absolutism, its justification for violence,
and its ultimate images of warfare that demonise opponents and cast the conflict in trans historical terms.
There are three claims, at least about religion tied together, and Jurgens must comment sorry,
the four claims about religion tied together and judges might comment on the distinct but relate the first concerns.
Sorry. Three. The first concerns the role of absolutism.
The second, the justification of violence. The third, the demonisation of opponents.
I'll examine these in turn with an eye to the relations between them, because they're not totally unconnected.
The idea of religions absolutism has a great vogue, but its widespread acceptance is inversely proportional to its clarity.
What is often meant, though solemn explain,
is something epistemological to the effect that the religious hold they believe with more certainty and conviction than the non-religious.
And they wrong to do so depending on the belief in question.
This is or ought to be plainly false.
Many atheists and agnostics have just affirmed just as firm a conviction as any religious in their belief that right is a great wrong to the victims.
But democracy is preferable to tyranny, that slavery is evil.
But friendship is a great good and much else, including for some, that religion is dangerous and full of false beliefs.
And as the philosopher Jean-Paul famously argued, there are a range of obvious truths.
Evident is, he believed, common sense on which nearly everyone is adamant,
such as the fact that all my audience here today have a head and only one head each.
But none of us was born yesterday. But for burns, that logical reasoning is mostly better than guesswork and so on.
These are many other convictions.
Moral and otherwise are too commonplace to require much notice, but nonetheless the facts on which absolute conviction is necessary to ordinary life,
and even more significantly, the very existence of reasonable doubt.
Since without to be reasonable, it must have a firm foundation. Baseless doubt is just neurotic.
Moreover, deep and firm, absolute moral convictions amongst some religious people constituted one central reason
why the ghastly business of the slave trade in the West was eventually outlawed.
The influence of crude versions of ethical and factual relativism upon popular culture,
often fostered by some postmodernist simplicities filtering down from the Academy, can obscure these realities.
What is really possible to extract from the sloppy allegations of absolutism is a genuine worry about fanaticism.
Fanaticism as an intellectual and moral voice, though there is some complexity in assessing its nature,
it can be a mere term of abuse, the application of which tends to be more in the eye of the beholder than anchored to clear criteria.
And this is much like the application of stubborn whereby your belief,
your behaviour evokes that adjective and my own identical actions are invoked instead.
For me, the description resolute.
Nonetheless, although we should be cautious in throwing the term around, there is a real phenomenon of fanaticism and a disturbing one.
The Oxford Short a dictionary defines it in terms of an excessive secular enthusiasm, especially for an extreme cold.
And it mentions religion and politics as areas where the term is commonly implied.
The two main qualifiers here are excessive and extreme, and their application is clearly open to debateable judgement in context.
This is someone who shows uncommon enthusiasm for abolishing the practice of enslaving women for prostitution.
A fanatic both excessive and extreme expression.
Negative evaluations, one on a disproportionate degree of enthusiasm or dedication, the other on the wrong is or dubious measure the call of a cause.
Unusual acts of singular dedication may make many of us believe cosy and singular and regular lives feel uncomfortable,
but they are not thereby fanatical. In this pejorative sense,
Father Damien devotion is a selfless life of service to the leper colony on the island of Molokai was a dedicated commitment.
That's not for everyone. It's not penned by fanatical British politicians.
Thought Mahatma Gandhi, a fanatic for his campaign of non-violent resistance to imperial rule in India.
But that expresses their bias rather than objective judgement of his cause and methods.
This is not to deny that religion, like many other elements, has been involved in fanaticism,
but fanaticism is a common risk of the implementation of belief systems generally,
as is evident in the zealous prosecution of the record by many free market enthusiasts in the recent history of capitalism,
not to mention the even more dangerous fanaticism sometimes involved in 19th century imperialism and 20th century totalitarianism.
Some forms of fanaticism don't involve bad causes, but rather a distorted pursuit of good ones.
And here they're connected in complex ways with the phenomenon of moralism that I've explored elsewhere.
I'll talk a bit about that, but I'll leave it out.
Avoiding fanaticism does not involve a total retreat from conviction, but holding the right convictions in the right way.
The Australian painter Sheila Mullin seemed aware of this when she worried, quote,
The difficulty is to avoid the perils of fanaticism as well as the paralysis that comes of seeing both sides at once.
And G.K. Chesterton, who perhaps I'd rather too many convictions, would nonetheless write.
About vacuous talk of an open mind when he visibly remarked, Merely having an open mind is nothing.
The object of opening the mind as of opening the mouth. It's a shout to begin on something solid.
Otherwise, it's more akin to a sewer, taking in all things equal.
But surely it will be said fanaticism is a more likely feature of outlooks that claim
the authority of God for their beliefs and practices than those without such recourse.
Jurgens model relies on this proposition for his claim about absolutism,
but also for his insistence that religion uniquely imposes an image of cosmic
war between those fighting a spiritual battle against merely worldly opponents.
Even Louise Richardson, vice chancellor of this university, who is one of the more nuanced commentators on terrorism and who argues that the
picture of religion as the cause of terrorist acts is simplistic and mistaken.
Even in the case of Islamic fundamentalism,
terrorism also insists that the religious elements in some forms of terrorism produce certain distinctive features,
such as reluctance to compromise or negotiate. Such terrorist groups, she says, exhibit a tendency to be more fanatical,
more willing to inflict mass casualties and better able to enact unassailable commitment from their adherents.
Again, this raises the question of the necessity of theism for religion.
But believing that aside, it does seem plausible that people are confident in the almighty support would be spurred to
perhaps excessive termination in their pursuit of objectives they regard as divinely endorsed.
Certainly the non fanatical father, Damien,
attributed his steadfast dedication to the welfare of the workers on the island of Molokai to his conviction that God had guided you to this role.
So if people wrongly think that God wants them to pursue some evil path, they may do so with determined energy must.
I think we readily agreed that the invocation of God's support has often been a spur fanaticism,
but two considerations somewhat soften the force of this argument.
The first is that the utilising God and unworthy cause is a form of blasphemy which should be condemned on religious grounds from within Christianity.
To take one example.
There's plenty of scope to caution against the invocation of God on behalf of an eternal pursuit of objectives that cause unjustified harm to others.
And indeed, this is often enough happened in the history of Christianity, as with the Nazi denunciations by many courageous Spanish theologians of the
conquistadors who pillaged in the newly discovered Americas of the 16th century,
and of the theological reasons often used by those invaders and their political sponsors for the violent conquest.
The invaders claim to write a violent conquest because the natives of Salt Lake sought to dispossession,
plunder for paganism, and hence have no legitimate and no political legitimacy for their land and its treasures.
Among the objectors to this were the Spanish Dominicans, Bishop Bartolomeo de la Costas and the Tomas theologian Antonio Montesinos.
Montesinos denounced the genocidal activities of the Gold Coast Spanish colonists and publicly preached against what he called,
quote, the cruelty and tyranny that you practice on. These innocent people told me.
I want rival justice to you. Hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible slavery.
I want write to your wife such detestable wars on these people who live mildly and peacefully on their own lands,
where you consumed infinite numbers of them with unheard of murders and desolation, unquote.
Secondly, some of the spoilers with non-religious ideologies have had as much fanatical drive as
any religious enthusiast when it comes to spectacular resorts to violent persecution.
As the history of the 20th century illustrates abundantly stollen melting pot, Pol Pot,
as already noted, did well enough in the fanaticism stage without resort to divine assistance.
And when it comes to opposition to negotiation compromise,
the allied powers in World War Two was adamantly opposed to negotiation and compromise to end the war with the Axis powers.
As any religiously inspired group, they ruthlessly pursued unconditional surrender and were happy to destroy by terror bombings,
as Churchill himself called it, vast swathes of civilian occupied cities in Germany and Japan in defence of liberal democracy.
Nor were the leaders of many followers of Nazi Germany and Japan lacking in fanatical pursuit of their war aims.
Even when virtually certain defeat was looming and their commitment to vicious tactics was as great as any sanctioned, violent religious zeal.
It seems that support for whatever it is that you regard as the highest value or sanction for your history,
ethnicity, science, the proletariat, the nation, democratic liberty,
the race or manifest destiny will do to drive unrelentingly some fanatical enterprise,
especially when it coheres with the usual HUMINT, human instincts for power, glory and riches.
Jurgens Meier emphasises the way that religious commitments can instil apparently
unrealistic expectations for victory and commitment to endless struggle.
He cites a conversation he had with Abdul Aziz Rantisi, the late leader of the political wing of Hamas,
in which Rantisi replied to his insistence that Palestinian military efforts could never defy defeat the military might of
Israel by saying that Palestine had previously been occupied for 200 years and his comrades could now endure at least as long.
Jurgens attributes to this this conviction to confidence in God's support.
But he doesn't quote Rantisi. Invoking God and confidence in the power to prevail in the long term can come from
many sources and has sustained secular revolutionary movements of all sorts,
notably in the 20th century, those inspired by Marxism.
In fact, much of the argument about the spatial motivational power of religion displays a common contemporary mindset amongst intellectuals,
then finds idealism and confidence about the future difficult to sustain or even comprehend.
But this might be a symptom of cultural malaise rather than a form of maturity.
In any case, there have been many non-religious people who've remained firm in their ethical commitments and endeavours,
even where the odds against success were high.
No doubt some of the British citizen citizens and their leaders who persisted resolutely against overwhelming odds in the military
and political struggle against the Nazi war machine in the early years of World War Two were sustained by religious motives.
But many others drew upon secular sources of hope and conviction.
Jenkins model also urges a close connection between religious outlooks and the demonisation of the enemy.
But once more, World War One had plenty of that on both sides.
Without a strong religious element, both Germans and Britons would predominantly Christian.
And what differences of religious doctrine would evolve played no part in the causes of prosecution of the war.
Nonetheless, vilification of the harm persisted in British propaganda in a way parallel with
that by which ISIS more recently vilified and demonised the enemy infidel.
Another claim by Jurgens, more echoed by others in the terrorist literature,
is that religious convictions also lead to the endorsement of more extreme and immoral, violent measures than would otherwise be the case.
Religious warriors have certainly behaved in morally atrocious ways, as in the medieval crusades,
where gross violations of widely accepted norms against atrocity were common as well.
In 1099, Western Catholic Crusaders massacred Muslims and Jews, not sparing the elderly, the women or the sick.
But again, as we earlier saw in the discussion of absolutism,
the existence of a moral ferocity in violent conflict is not the sole province of those with religious commitments.
As Dermot McCulloch commented in the course of discussing and denouncing the violent horrors committed by religious people.
It's true, he said. But those who who've rejected traditional forms of religion, including Hitler and Stalin, the perpetrators,
perpetrated the atrocities as heinous as those committed in the name of God or gods, unquote.
A more recent example is the way in which the moral prohibition on deep repugnance against torture was so readily
abandoned by the Western military and security practitioners with the support of many secular liberal intellectuals.
The War on Terror provided the context for this,
and in many places the result of hitherto unthinkable practices gained widespread popular endorsement.
No hint of religious motivation here, but plenty of democratic and self-protective ferocity in the name of civic duty and national emergency.
I got. Three more pages and pages.
Maybe it's for. We've dealt with Jurgen Klopp, his first and third players and since they overtook over last summer, so is my treatment of them.
His second claim is rather different and needs some unpacking. So in one control my response with Echo's responses to the first and third claim.
The second claim is that religion is particularly problematic with respect to terrorism because of its justification of violence.
But this raises difficulty of interpretation,
since in the first place there's widespread acceptance beyond religious circles that violence can be justified in certain circumstances.
Hence, the idea that religions have often justification for violence shows in itself nothing distinctive about religion.
Indeed, only complete pacifists reject global justification for violence.
On another interpretation,
it may be that Jurgens means that religions offer unsatisfactory justifications for political violence like terrorism or war.
The restriction to political violence is plausible because terrorism, for instance, is the topic of this discussion.
But some religions, for instance, the Quakers offers of no justification for any forms of political violence.
Others offer justification for some forms of political violence in some circumstances, but not in others.
The question is whether the justifications they offer in some circumstances are
fragile and in some circumstances are morally and intellectually respectable,
and also whether they distinctive or similar to the respectable justifications offered by the non-religious.
These are questions that can't be answered by some comprehensive reference to religion as such must be treated on a case by case basis.
In Christianity, for instance, some of the early Christians were pacifists and then unjust war doctrine was developed and later influenced with common
justification comes with secular Western thinkers and some Eastern thinkers and the fashioning of international law.
There are two important features to note about the complex tradition of the Gulf War in the West.
The first is that always placed restrictions on the right to go to war and that these
restrictions became more stringent over the course of the development of that doctrine.
And the second is the tradition.
Although heroes within Christianity always relied upon appeal to common reasoning for its later manifestations, what was called natural law.
That tradition was certainly at times polluted by the concept of holy war.
But later, medieval theorists gradually removed religious war from the scope of just war.
And with it, the idea that the pursuit of supernatural ends sanctioned the use of otherwise immoral means, such as the slaughtering of children.
In modern times, many Christians have been adamant about the stringent restrictions.
So, for instance, religious people within allied countries were amongst the few who criticised the devastating tactics of their own leadership in
the airing of bombing campaigns aimed at the slaughter of civilians and wholesale destruction of German and Japanese cities.
The Anglican Bishop of Chichester drew George Pell, not George Pell.
George Pell repeatedly condemned the bombing in speeches in the House of Lords and elsewhere during the war.
And the American Jesuit priest, John C Ford, in 1944 wrote an article in Stern Condemnation of the practice.
Fuller's article marked an influential moment in the later development of aspects of the Catholic peace movement,
especially with regard to nuclear deterrence.
It's not been my intention to downplay the evil involved in the use of religion to support a terrorist act,
nor excuse in any way those avowedly religious people.
They've been moved too often by the understanding of faith to condone or perpetrate terrorist acts.
I've been concerned, rather, to highlight confusions and misleading implications of common talk about religious war and terrorism,
particularly the ways in which non-religious aspects and factors involved in the causation and motivation of terrorist acts can be.
Obscured by the concentration upon religious affiliation and rhetoric surrounding some terrorist perpetrators.
This tendency is reinforced when the perpetrators are foreign and can be cast as foreign to the home culture.
The idea that religion or some particular religion is inherently prone to violence can also impede understanding
of the cautionary attitudes to violence or outright rejection of it within the religion in question.
Even when religions countenance justified violence as as we we've seen, they usually put restrictions on the justifications we can apply.
Those cautionary attitudes where they exist can be thought of them deployed against the use of religion for terrorist
purposes by other religious people or by non-religious governments have increasingly acknowledged this option,
but have often been reluctant to commit serious resources.
I'm thinking of Western governments to commit serious resources to foster the deployment and
in some cases have made their acknowledgement of the efforts seem heavily condescending,
possibly the most condescending and potentially counterproductive.
Such effort was that of Australia's former prime minister, Tony Abbott, in a national security address on February 23rd, 2015.
Abbott first accused Australian Muslim leaders of not speaking out enough against terrorism and then added,
quote, I've often heard Western leaders describe Islam a religion of peace.
I wish more Muslim leaders would say that more often and mean it unquote entirely gratuitous.
I mean, it was not only offensive and unsupported by any evidence of insincerity,
but was given to the provision of evidence about it could only impede efforts at sympathetic engagement with the
Muslim community to help combat all inclinations of terrorist activity existed in a section of that community.
Thank you.