File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2001/postcolonial.0109, message 378


From: "Margaret Trawick" <trawick-AT-clear.net.nz>
Subject: Reply to Richard Dawkins, "Religion's Misguided Missiles"
Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2001 13:18:35 +1200


Okay.  I cannot keep quiet about this anymore.

People who think that only a misguidedly "religious" person would be a
suicide bomber have to think again.  Ample empirical evidence to the
contrary exists in the form of the LTTE, with and about whom I have done
research for about six years now.  Here some things about the LTTE:  (1)
they are masters of the art of suicide-bombing; (2) very few members of the
LTTE are accepted into the elite corps of Black Tigers, men and women who
may be called upon to engage in missions in which their death is certain;
(3) all of the combatant members of the LTTE (perhaps as many as ten
thousand) are expected to be prepared to die in combat, and most,
apparently, are so prepared:  after all, this is what warfare demands; (4)
they do not consider it immoral for a person to sacrifice his or her life in
the service of a cause; (5) they recently took out half of an international
airport, including both military and civilian aircraft, with the assistance
of some of their own suicide bombers; (6) in this recent effort, they
scrupulously avoided doing physical harm to civilians; (5) and most
importantly, they are a secular organization.

There are no religious requirements for joining the LTTE.  Neither the
leaders, nor the rank-and-file of the LTTE engage in religious teaching.
They consider that everyone can and should practice the religion of their
choice. Atheists are also fine. Indeed, one strong thread of Tamil
nationalism is pointedly atheistic.  Most of the members of the LTTE are
nominally Hindu.  A few are Christian.  None of them anticipates any
heavenly reward after death.  If you ask them what they think will happen to
them after they die, they will say they don't know.  They want to be a part
of history, they say.  They want to be remembered.  One of their emblems is
a picture of footprints on the sand.  They are mostly ordinary people with
little future as civilians, who have decided that they will die anyway, and,
as they put it, "might as well die a useful death."  They do not want to
take over the world; they do not even want to destroy their one avowed
enemy - the government of Sri Lanka.  They just want to carve out an
independent state for Sri Lankan Tamils, or even not this much, just to set
things up, somehow, so that Sri Lankan Tamils are not subject to persecution
and abuse in the place of their birth.  So yes, I sympathize with them, even
though I do not condone terrorist acts, such as killing random civilians.
And I have been privileged to be able to tell them directly why I think such
acts are both morally wrong and counterproductive.  They debated with me,
and they listened to me.  And they have heard other sympathetic voices
telling them to continue their struggle if they must, but to renounce
terrorism.  And there is reason to hope they may do so.  Only demons don't
change.

The point is, whether you approve of what they do or not, these are fully
rational people who are sacrificing their lives for what Dawkins-types might
call "altruistic" reasons: in an effort to protect the lives of their kin
both near and far.

It is funny that we consider murder so commonplace as to be almost normal,
but dying in the process of killing to be psychotic.
I do not have a clue what the motivations were of the people who flew the
airliners into the World Trade Center towers.  They may have been both mad
and religiously motivated.    But you don't have to be either mad or
religiously motivated to go to certain death for some specific purpose.  You
have only to be brave, and to place little value on your own particular
life.

MT





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