The Hard Sell

[tongodeon]

I've heard - often, from lots of different people - that atheists like Dawkins or Hitchens or the other atheist horsemen are rude, shrill, belittling, dickish, abrasive, and generally offensive. Fine, they're awful. Who's good? If they're negative examples, who in present or past history can serve as a positive example of what to do

Comments

[spiritualmonkey]

(Thought this might be a bit of a derail, but the subject of "Does religion instigate suicide terrorism" has come, so I thought it relevant.)

Dr. Robert Pape of the University of Chicago has been keeping a comprehensive database on suicide bombings, and in his analysis the major motivating factor in suicide bombing is foreign occupation, not religion.

Religion is a complicating factor in that foreign occupations that have given rise to suicide bombing campaigns almost always have a religious difference between the occupied and occupier, which allows for the occupier to be demonized in particularly effective ways.

But according to Pape, Suicide terrorism has a very distinct logic and strategic objective:[T]o compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.
The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka pioneered the suicide vest, and they are/were a largely Marxist group. But they were also drawn from the Hindu community that was in conflict with/being oppressed by the Sinhalese community, most of whom are Buddhist.

See also "What Makes Chechen Women So Dangerous?"

And before anyone asks, Pape addresses Northern Ireland and why there was no suicide bomb campaign there in the GPF interview: because the IRA got much of what it wanted through ordinary violence, so there was no strategic need to resort to suicide attacks.

[mmcirvin]

Yeah, I was actually thinking about Pape's work when I wrote that comment.