Faith and Conflict

The unstated premise is that faith is anchored to some static reality that directs it - you could call this God. If we dispense with that premise, then a religion becomes as dynamic as events and its core beliefs will allow.

If there is no one God to anchor religion to His will, then religion either becomes entirely disassociated from reality and goes the way of so many past religions, or it responds to reality in its struggle to maintain relevance and influence.

Had history not supported Islam and Christianity they might have long gone the way of Odin and Zeuss. But the Irish Catholic/Protestant and 9/11 obscenities have not undermined the religions that spawned them. Instead they have reinforced them, for by these obscenities religion is not only responding to reality, it is directing it.

Given that any monotheistic faith is a zero-sum game (a convert to Islam is a loss to Christianity and vice versa), in that sense at least, all religions are in conflict, and no religion has much time for a pagan, which makes most of us legitimate victims of someone else's beliefs (or so some of us obviously believe).

In view of this Islam is becoming progressively more socially significant for several reasons:

1. The nations with most of the world's oil are mostly Islamic. Islam is a very wealthy religion - it can afford conflict with the nations that need its oil without fear of sanction. It can also afford to buy the weapons it hasn't the social infrastructure to manufacture.

2. America has been demonized by Islam in the Middle East. It is now an ethically legitimate target for many Muslims, not just a lunatic fringe.

3. The Bush administration's overtly Christian agenda reinforces rather than defuses the significance of national faith in national conflict.

In short, America's negative sentiment about Islam is reciprocated.

If Islam is seduced by its nascent ability to direct reality rather than follow it then we can expect faith-based conflict.

Time we got some peoples' religion out of our government and our troops back where they belong?