[Mark McDonnell]

But I didn't say most religious fundamentalists don't believe in the god or gods they worship.

I said that I think most demagogues who leverage religious fundamentalism to convince believers to commit atrocities probably don't believe in the god or gods they claim to serve.

Ok, I understand your distinction, but I don't understand what evidence you're basing it on. So you do believe that the young men and women who leave their ordinary families and homes to join Isis are motivated, in some part at least, by strong religious conviction and belief in god, but you don't believe Bin Laden was or, for example, that nominal Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is? What makes you think this? Here's an extract from his wiki entry:


'In 2014, American and Iraqi intelligence analysts said that al-Baghdadi has a doctorate for Islamic studies in Quranic studies from Saddam University in Baghdad. According to a biography that circulated on extremist internet forums in July 2013, he obtained a BA, MA, and PhD in Islamic studies from the Islamic University of Baghdad. Another report says that he earned a doctorate in education from the University of Baghdad.

Character

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, contemporaries of al-Baghdadi describe him in his youth as being shy, unimpressive, a religious scholar, and a man who eschewed violence. For more than a decade, until 2004, he lived in a room attached to a small local mosque in Tobchi, a poor neighbourhood on the western fringes of Baghdad,'


He sounds like a pretty religious fellow to me. Again, what's your evidence for the notion that the leaders of violent fundamentalist religious organisations are not actually religious believers themselves?

[Julie Steiner]

I have zero direct evidence, and this ISIS-themed article (which I respect, and frequently return to) certainly disagrees with me. So I may well be wrong.

But I have repeatedly had occasion to reflect on the fact that religion and charismatic leaders with narcissistic personality disorder seem made for each other.

Religion gives narcissists the means to convince others that they are better and more special and more entitled to celebrity than most people, which is their great hunger in life. And the clearcut good-and-evil distinctions of religious rules also fit nicely with narcissists' fondness for the simplicity of black-and-white thinking--at least where other people are concerned. (Narcissists also love to be regarded as so exceptionally special that the same rules don't necessarily apply to themselves, when inconvenient.)

I grew up in the then-tiny (now population 4,000) town of Agua Dulce, California, home of an apocalyptic cult called the Alamo Christian Foundation. (No murders, but lots of underage sexual activity. Tony Alamo died in prison a few years ago.) The rest of the town didn't interact much with the group during its heyday; their usual recruitment tactic was to go to Los Angeles and pick up teen runaways and older drug addicts off the streets, and bring them back to their isolated compound for brainwashing and slave labor. The Alamos certainly did not invite the local community to join their worship services. But the rest of the town knew that in their flashy but secretive compound, something very, very odd was going on in the name of Christianity. And we often commented to each other that the billboards outside seemed designed to promote the glory of Tony Alamo and his glamorous wife Susan more than the glory of God.

I did my graduate school internship at the National Archives at San Francisco, in the Leo J. Ryan Memorial Federal Building, named for the U.S. Congress member who was shot to death by Jim Jones, founder and leader of the Peoples Temple, before the fatal drinking of the Kool-Aid by so many hundreds of Jones's followers.

(It seems relevant to this discussion that Jones himself did not drink the Kool-Aid.)

The mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate cult took place 15 miles from my current house.

And I have some more personal, firsthand experience with the showy religiosity of dangerous people, that I won't go into.

In my experience, the showier and more extreme the religiosity, the greater the narcissism, and the greater the desperation to be perceived by others as special, holy, deserving of others' unquestioning respect and trust and devotion. And also the greater the tendency of that individual to ask others to prove their loyalty through extreme demonstrations of self-sacrifice.

Did these cult leaders actually believe what they convinced their followers to believe in? I have no way of knowing. And perhaps it doesn't matter.

But the posthumously-published letters of Mother Teresa (whose religious order always struck me as having disturbing parallels with other cults of personality) famously showed, in her own words, that for most of her life, she felt that she was maintaining a hypocritical act of piety while actually feeling disconnected from God, and questioning God's very existence. Whatever one thinks of Mother Teresa, I mention her as an example of someone widely regarded as religious, who privately admitted that she had spent decades deliberately presenting an aura of great religious and spiritual fervor, without actually feeling it.

So I think it's definitely possible for other people with apparently solid faith in God, such as the leaders of religious terrorist groups, to successfully maintain similar masks.

Just as niceness is a useful social strategy, not to be confused with actual goodness, I think that adopting the appearance of religiosity is a useful social strategy, not to be confused with actual belief.

[Mark McDonnell]

Hi Julie,

Yes, I imagine knowing what's really going on inside someone else's head will always be one of the unsolveable mysteries. It's hard enough knowing what's really happening in our own! I suppose I just felt that words like 'notoriety', 'visibility' and 'attention' were insufficient to describe what these people want, as if they were messed-up, disaffected teenage school shooters. It seems they want something bigger, darker and purer. It felt like tiptoeing to not acknowledge what that was. The combination of a sincere apocalyptic religious world-view, a narcissistic personality disorder and nuclear weapons is a prospect that terrifies me. Your response here is thoughtful and fascinating, as always.

Anyway. The events are truly horrible and I've probably said enough.

[James Brancheau]

I don't see much of the relevance of whether or not a terrorist was truly devout. Whether they're just crazy, or an arm of a political agenda, or both, like in the states, makes no difference. I agree with Julie, re narcissism. But this isn't just about dictators (I'm assuming and trying to be brief), but about the individual being self-important, which is an intolerable priority in the States.

[Mark McDonnell]

But it does matter James, more than politics, because this is about belief which lasts longer and can be unshakeable. Hundreds of people praying to their god were murdered by half a dozen other people praying to theirs. And since we created those gods in the first place it's about the human imagination, which should matter to poets. After thousands of years is this the best we've imagined? It makes me very sad.

[James Brancheau]

Nah. Never mind. Too off-topic, among other things. Carry on.

[Martin Elster]

From Life, the universe and everything, according to futurist Michio Kaku:

Do you see religious fanaticism and terrorism as threats to global order in the coming decades?

The terrorism of today is temporary and is a reaction to the fact that civilisation is making a transition. Religions come and go, and the current wave of fanaticism is a reaction against modernisation. We are moving to a Type 1 civilisation [where the planet is entirely self-sufficient from energy drawn from the sun] that's scientific and tolerant. Some folk don't want that; they imagine they'll feel more comfortable in a world 1000 years before the rise of science.

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/li...20-p4zylp.html

And here is an article I found quite enlightening.

https://americanhumanist.org/what-is...humanist-view/

[Allen Tice]

Re: Mother Teresa. This reply is all off the cuff, so to speak, since I actually don’t know that much about her. However, I’ve never agreed with T S Eliot’s clever condemnation of “doing the right thing for the wrong reason”. Wasn’t it Plato who urged people to “be what they seemed to be”, which was, in this case, to be a “noble” — good — person. That is, to act well enough to match good appearances. Then again, the texts of what we have of the Analects of Confucius contain an admonition to perform like this: It is within your power to do thus and such, that is, one can and should do the right thing even if one doesn’t feel motivated to do so. It’s the doing the right thing despite feeling empty, phony, burnt-out, enraged, at odds with someone, useless, vengeful, completely hollow. Going through the right (emphasis, right) motions is far better than indulging pique or yielding to the inner reptile. (Apologies to any literate reptiles here.) Drive the bus safely, render medical aid despite the inevitable fatigue and bodily resentment creeping into your thoughts, do the right thing even when one doesn’t understand how all this secular universe we look at can mesh with anything outside. Of Course, resisting the temptation to abandon ideals that seem to lack support is a kind of stubbornness that is close to the stage acting that can mask real abandonment and abuse of the vulnerable. Some sage said one should beware of evildoers, but not always expect them to be there, or words to that effect, more or less. Drive the bus wisely.

[John Isbell]

Nicely put, Allen. Also, without seeing mother Teresa's comments in detail, I'll add that plenty of devout people have confessed to feelings of hypocrisy, emptiness and doubt, since being christlike- for Christians anyway - doesn't come easy.


Cheers,
John

[Allen Tice]

A flexible, if irreducible, amount of self-respect and self-preservation helps, whatever one is doing and however one might identify oneself. If that is misread as narcissism, a touch self-respect and self-preservation can help prevent a fall, as the saying doesn’t go.


PS. I ought to mention that the Analects item I mentioned has the particular context of how to treat a domineering, impaired, or otherwise very imperfect parent. It can have a wider application as the situation requires.