The Politics of God
18th August 2007
NYT. I love the way the People of the Crust write about religion as if it were Disco, something that happens in America but with which they have only a passing acquaintance.
Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.
I’m glad that some of them are finally beginning to feel the knife at their own necks.
Understanding this difference is the most urgent intellectual and political task of the present time. But where to begin? The case of contemporary Islam is on everyone’s mind, yet is so suffused with anger and ignorance as to be paralyzing. All we hear are alien sounds, motivating unspeakable acts. If we ever hope to crack the grammar and syntax of political theology, it seems we will have to begin with ourselves.
But their heads are still up their asses.
Clue: They want to kill us. It’s not about us, it’s about them, and what we need to do to them before they do it to us. Wakey, wakey.
Read it anyway — it’s a good depiction of the sort of attitudes that will be making our job a lot harder for a long time to come.