Maybe Michael Ruse is onto something

One main problem with bias and projection is that it inclines one to believe almost anything without taking time to understand the facts.

Today in Afghanistan, the UN compound in Mazar-i-Sharif was overrun by rioters, who massacred at least a dozen, and as many as 20 people, including several UN workers. Details are still sketchy and forthcoming. Most reports mention that the mob was protesting the recent burning of a Quran by Florida pastor Terry Jones, but in a statement following the attack, UN spokesman Dan McNorton said the situation was “still confusing.” Early press reports after a catastrophe are almost always distorted and incomplete, and we still have a lot to learn about what happened today in Mazar-i-Sharif.

These sketchy details were apparently enough for Jerry Coyne to conclude, less than an hour after the first reports, that “religion” killed those slaughtered there, and that in a world without faith they would still be alive. Coyne then writes:

Can anybody attribute this faith-inflamed murder to mere xenophobia—something that would have occurred anyway had there not been faith? I think not.

Those last words may be more revealing than he means them to be. Let’s imagine, for a moment, that the United States is not the world’s sole superpower, but a small, resource-poor country with the bad fortune to be located on the doorstep of some of the world’s most strategically desirable locations. Let’s further imagine that the United States was currently playing host to the latest in a centuries-long chain of occupiers, a powerful nation, viscerally antagonistic to many of the US’s more popular social movements. It might be helpful to imagine this occupier as Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union--or the much-feared New Caliphate one hears about in certain circles.

Now imagine that, several years into this occupation, a renegade party member or cleric burns the  foundational documents of the United States as a piece of agitprop. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and perhaps “Common Sense” and some of the Federalist Papers, all of which are held by this party member or cleric and his followers to wield the most demonic influence on world affairs. Nothing much happens at first, but over time, protests are organized, at town meetings, and in union halls. Some of the rhetoric at these meetings gets heated--perhaps because of the conscious and organized agitation of American ultra-Nationalists, who want to throw off the occupation by any means necessary, or perhaps just because of a spontaneous eruption of emotion. The crowds get stirred up, someone suggests a march on a local outpost. The march turns violent. The outpost is stormed, and several civilians assisting in the occupation are killed. Not a single one of the assailants was religious.

Implausible? The fact is that we just don’t know what combination of factors contributed to today’s rampage. Perhaps without religion it would not, could not have happened. I’m very doubtful of this. But we know for sure it could not have happened if the assailants did not have a sense of outrage, or indignation, a capacity for aggression, or the ability to be moved to action by stirring rhetoric. These are neither good nor evil human qualities in themselves, but how many of us would want to be rid of them? Where are the blog posts speaking out against these dispositions?

This is not, it should be clear, to defend or excuse today’s massacre. Those civilian UN workers did not deserve to die, no matter what the rectitude of the occupation of Afghanistan (or lack thereof), no matter what the actions of a demented preacher in Gainesville (whose church has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.) It is simply to militate against an easy reduction of causes for human behavior, especially when those causes are imputed to come only form outside your own in-group. How easy to say, with Steven Weinberg, that “for good people to do bad things, that takes religion.” How hard to actually account for this causality. How do we explain the restraint of the billion or so Muslims who managed not to kill anyone in retribution for Quran burning?

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In the end, it’s not fully clear that Coyne has even worked out what he means when he talks about the baleful effect of religion and faith.  At the end of his post he invokes Anne Frank, who was also, he writes, “killed because of religion.” What could this possibly mean? Judaism was an ethnic problem to the Nazis, not a dispositional one. A “cultural jew” like Coyne would be just as vulnerable to be rounded up as the most fervent rabbi. And even if the Nazis had cared about the devotional sincerity of their prey, how is it not blaming the victim to say that religion was the cause of Frank’s death, and six million others? We can make all sorts of statements along these lines that have no ethical justification whatsoever. If there had been no Native Americans, for example, there could have been no genocide of Native Americans by Europeans. Does that, too, make them responsible for their own extermination?

There’s been a lot of righteous indignation over Michael Ruse’s recent comparison of neo-atheism to the Tea Party. Maybe on the whole the comparison is unfair. it’s certainly rash. But rushing out to blame a massacre on “religious faith” before the dust has even settled, and then implicitly blaming the victims of the holocaust for their own destruction, these are just as scurrilous as anything in the Fox News playbook. After so many instances of this kind of shallow, reactionary, sensationalist, poorly researched, and outright bigoted analysis of the relationship of religion and society, we have to ask why anyone of any reputation would want to ally themselves with its purveyors at all.

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UPDATE: Here's Juan Cole on the Mazar-i-Sharif riots:

I think Afghan intellectuals and leaders know that Terry Jones is a minor nut job. But this issue allows some of them to organize to protest the over 100,000 US troops in their country, which is really what they are objecting to.

The decision of the Obama administration to do wide-ranging counter-insurgency rather than targeted counter-terrorism in Afghanistan has left that country full of frustrations with the US heavy footprint.