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 --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005