Jos massacres: the case for secularism
Posted on Monday 8 March, 2010
Filed Under International, Religion
IF YOU are even momentarily persuaded by the crazily mendacious thesis that ‘secular fundamentalists are the new totalitarians’, reflect for a moment or two on why 500 people were slaughtered in Nigeria over the weekend.
The victims were Christians, those who hacked them to pieces with machetes were Muslims, and it’s a safe bet that none of them had even heard of Richard Dawkins. The brutality was in retaliation for an equally grisly Christian attack on Muslims earlier this year. Now run that stuff about ‘interfaith dialogue’ past me one more time.
There’s a lot more to the story than that, of course, and some of it will be said below. But only the wilfully blind will seek to airbrush the undeniable truth out of the picture; believers in Allah perpetrated the mass murder of believers in God, seemingly oblivious to the recent Indonesian high court ruling that the two are in fact the same deity.
Violent clashes between adherents of different religions, and just as much between supporters of competing creeds within the same religion, have been a regular occurrence for well over a thousand years.
All of the world’s major belief systems are culpable, to the point where none has a meaningful claim to be more pacifistic than the next. You can more or less pick any combination at random, and find a bust up.
Catholics versus Protestants, Maronites versus Shias, Sunnis versus Shias, and even three-way Catholic-Orthodox-Muslim conflicts; there are many parts of the world where theological errancy comes with a price tag attached.
Numerous responses are available to thinking people. A range of internally consistent off-the-shelf theodicies are on offer, from St Augustine to Alvin Plantinga. Marxists stress that all religious doctrines are ultimately ideological refractions of class interest.
On the other hand, mainstream liberal atheists often intellectually limit themselves to the overly-simplistic assertion that ‘religion poisons everything’.
Many on both left and right will explain what occurred in Jos by reference to local disputes over land, thanks to a system whereby Hausa Muslims are classified as settlers rather than indigenes and therefore discriminated against.
My one brief visit to Nigeria was confined to Lagos. I have no expert opinion on the specificities of the latest round of fighting, although materialist accounts obviously make the most intuitive sense.
But at the very least, religion is once again seen to be perpetuating divisions that would be sooner healed without its baleful influence complicating the Nigerian political process.
This brings me back to the tell-tale giveaway mark of totalitarian secular fundamentalists everywhere, namely our support for the separation of church and state. The less input religion has into politics, the better things are for everybody, including believers themselves.
This idea is rooted in Locke’s observations of the sometimes bloody tensions between Protestantism and Catholicism in seventeenth century Britain, and typically comes in a buy one, get one free package deal with freedom of religion. There is simply no other way forward in the multifaith society.
Those countries where the principle obtains, even as incompletely as it does in the UK, are manifestly the better for it. What happened in Jos last weekend is a timely reminder of the default setting.
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65 Responses to “Jos massacres: the case for secularism”
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SueR,
It would obviously be capitalist because super blocks only make economic sense in a globalised capitalist world!! This explains why Chavez would seek an alliance with a regime like Ahmadinejads in Iran.
Whenever Arab figures have appeared to unify Arabs, think of Nasser, the imperialist powers have sought to remove the threat, so I think the Middle East will be the most intense area of divide and rule (well lets face it already is!), this has lately taken the US’s eye somewhat off the developments in Latin America but I expect they will address that issue at some point. So what makes economic sense may not happen if the existing imperialist powers can help it. I would also include Africa in this; forget all that charity stuff for a minute, one of the most encouraging signs in recent years has been the development of institutions that promote pan African interests. Still a long long way to go of course.
Of course people like you do not see things in globalised capitalist terms but in cultural anomalies, so the problems in the Middle East are not tied to imperialism and economic imperatives but “which end of an egg goes into an egg cup”. And you will therefore rule out these super blocks developing at some point not because imperialist powers want to protect the status quo but because these barbarians can’t ever agree on anything!
Why do you call yourself ‘former’?
I know it’s bad form to actually bring up the subject discussed in the post, but is it possible that this massacre was more ethnically driven than religiously?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8555215.stm
The two aren’t counterposed in the ‘Third World’. Ethnic, religious, tribal, family, clan etc, these are the divisions of pre-industrial society. That is why Marx and Engels believed that it was only the universalizing tendency of industrial society that would give birth to a new social order. (Off thread but I would like Former Neo-Liberal to sketch out how he sees the Middle East becoming a huge powerful bloc, developing economic might etc.).
The supremacy of philosophy over religion:
Draft of a New Preface (Berlin, March 1841).
Atheism vs. Skepticism in Antiquity:
The Sceptics reduced the theoretical relation of people to things to appearance, and in practice they left everything as of old, being guided by this appearance just as much as others are guided by actuality; they merely gave it another name. Epicurus, on the other hand, was the true radical Enlightener of antiquity; he openly attacked the ancient religion, and it was from him, too, that the atheism of the Romans, insofar as it existed, was derived. For this reason, too, Lucretius praised Epicurus as the hero who was the first to overthrow the gods and trample religion underfoot; for this reason among all church fathers, from Plutarch to Luther, Epicurus has always had the reputation of being the atheist philosopher par excellence, and was called a swine; for which reason, too, Clement of Alexandria says that when Paul takes up arms against philosophy he has in mind Epicurean philosophy alone. (Stromatum, Book I [chap. XI], p. 295, Cologne edition, 1688.) Hence we see how “cunning, perfidious” and “clever” was the attitude of this open atheist to the world in directly attacking its religion, while the Stoics adapted the ancient religion in their own speculative fashion, and the Sceptics used their concept of “appearance” as the excuse for being able to accompany all their judgments with a reservatio mentalis.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03a.htm#c.1.3
SOURCE: Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich. The German Ideology (1845-6), Vol. I, Chapter III: Saint Max, section 1.3: The Ancients.
in otherbwerDs Gameboy is a disgrace. an utter fool and disgusting shithead.
“listening” to him means you are also a thick cunt (take note Osler).
Have been waiting to use this one but fuck it — will use it now….
“”Freedom of conscience”! If one desired, at this time of the Kulturkampf to remind liberalism of its old catchwords, it surely could have been done only in the following form: Everyone should be able to attend his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their noses in. But the Workers’ party ought, at any rate in this connection, to have expressed its awareness of the fact that bourgeois “freedom of conscience” is nothing but the toleration of all possible kinds of religious freedom of conscience, and that for its part it endeavours rather to liberate the conscience from the witchery of religion. But one chooses not to transgress the “bourgeois” level.
SOURCE: Marx, Karl. “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (1875), Part IV. Published abridged in Die Neue Zeit, Bd. 1, No. 18, 1890-91.
“and that for its part it endeavours rather to liberate the conscience from the witchery of religion.”
But how is this to be achieved, by screaming at someone, there is no God you idiot or by changing the material and social relations of society. I think for Marx it was the latter.
Come on Former Neo-Liberal, outline your political programme for the Middle East. You must have one, you sound so sussed on other things.
I see the emergence of ’super blocks’ coming out of economic imperatives brought about by globalised capitalism. The power of the US, China, and the EU will compel other nations to look to this model of organisation as the most advanced, successful model. So I would expect to see attempts made at developing these blocks in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa – we are already seeing tentative moves in Latin America and Africa and in the Middle East it has been tried before and firmly put back in its place. Though there have been interesting developments in the Arab league in the last decade (the observer nations etc), so the potential exists. The point is that the imperialist powers will do all they can to prevent it under the pretext of fighting clerical fascism etc (and some idiots on the left will fall for it and distort the debate with cultural anomalies). So what makes economic sense could be thwarted by those protecting the status quo.
I don’t think it’s beyond the imagination to see the Arab nations forming a unified economic block if one can imagine no interference from imperialist nations. After all Europe has centuries of bitter conflict and built up xenophobia but it has managed to develop the EU, even though there is still much protest the project goes on regardless.
I think the medium term (20 to 30 years) could be marked by struggles and battles around the formation or otherwise of these ‘super blocks’.
Is there anyone promoting this politics in the Middle East? Also, where do you put the rest of the Islamic world; ie Pakistan, Indochina? Should they form a separate bloc? What type of industries do you see a united Middle East developing?
I am not sure you should view it through an Islamic world prism. Or a Christian world prism. Or a Hindu prism or an atheist prism.
And Should they form this or that is not the issue, I am saying what they will be compelled to do or what will be the general tendency, not what they should do!! This doesn’t mean you can explain what every country will end up doing! It is a process that will be inexact especially as the imperialist nations will do all they can to influence events. As I have stated on numerous occasions what makes economic sense may not happen!! But the struggles of the future will be around it happening or it being prevented from happening!!
What type of industries really is a strange question, the EU countries haven’t changed their industries as a result of its formation but because of absolute monetarist economics, which are part of the globalisation of capital. These blocks would develop in the same way I would imagine.
Dear Neo-Liberal, you say that you want to see a capitalist Middle East that functions as a unitary bloc, I think it is a perfectly valid question to ask you a) how you see this being achieved and b) how the project would be financed. Any answers?
“Former neo liberal” strikes one as a thick cunt.
And lo and behold he is a thick cunt.
I wooD have it murdered. In it’s bed. along with it’s family.