Twelve years ago today, near three thousand of our fellow
Americans, living, breathing, sentient beings with children and mortgages, with
lovers and dreams, were reduced to burnt dust in the rubble of the Looming
Towers. They were not killed by ignorance or poverty or because “they hate our
freedoms”. They were murdered by Faith. Faith in unseen gods, in invisible
paradises, in the ancient fairy tales of nomadic desert tribes abutting hydraulic
despotisms, weaving finely spun myths of
creation, sacrifice, redemption and eternal life. Faith caused 9/11.
Oh how easy for us, children of the West, to scoff at the
outlandish, misogynistic beliefs of the nineteen “holy warriors”, the shaving
of their body hair, the 72 virgins awaiting each assassin, the eerie willingness
of these highly educated sons of affluent families to viciously slaughter and
die for lurid storybook endings in the happily ever after.
But, were not tens of thousands burnt at the stake in just
Madrid’s main square over the course of the Holy Inquisition? Were not some
70,000 Protestant French Huguenots suddenly massacred on cue by their most
Christian neighbors on the Feast Day of St. Bartholomew in 1572? Did not all Europe’s Catholic and Protestant
armies slaughter and starve to death one third of the entire German people in
the horrible war of 1618 –1648, fought over whether the Holy Father or the Holy
Bible was inerrant, over whether Communion wafers were truly, truly the very
flesh of the Living Lord, or just a symbol of his gory sacrifice? And did not
our German cousins, in living memory, grind six million unarmed men, women and
children into wet mud in the crematoria of Central Europe because of their
peculiar pagan faith in an omniscient Fuhrer?
Chosen People, Elect of the Lord, Master Race, Party of God,
on and on, faith in fanciful tales, embellished and handed down for a hundred
generations. Faith in omnipotent Fathers and bright Forevers; the lies used by
priests, preachers and politicians, by imams and rabbis, since the first witch
doctor sought sway over his fellows in a cave at the dawn of our species.
Faith, its arrogant certainties, and its absolute moral
imperatives caused 9/11. Faith kills.
