Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.2008, Page 17

in the first place.13 Even Dawkins is cautious at this point, suggesting that
religion may only be one of the factors involved.
As Robert Pape showed in his definitive account of the motivations of
such attacks, based on surveys of every known case of suicide bombing since
1980, religious belief of any kind does not appear to be either a necessary
or a sufficient condition to create suicide bombers.14 The infamous “suicide
vest”, for example, was invented by Tamil Tigers back in 1991, leading to
a large number of suicide attacks from this ethnic group. Pape’s analysis of
the evidence suggests that the fundamental motivation for suicide bombings
appears to be political, not religious - namely, the desire to force the
withdrawal of foreign forces occupying land believed to belong to an
oppressed people, who have seriously limited military resources at their
disposal.
The “New Atheism” offers a superficial explanation for suicide bombings,
designed to resonate with cultural anxieties about the heightened profile of
religion in the United States and many parts of the world. Yet it is not
a sustainable analysis, which does little to help us understand why these
bombings arise, and what can be done to prevent them. They have simply
been hijacked as part of a crude atheist apologetic, rather than taken
seriously as a cultural and social phenomenon. Happily, there are many
serious studies, particularly from an anthropological perspective (including
the important work of Scott Atran of the University of Michigan),15 which
point in more realistic and informed directions. For Atran, the solution to
suicide bombings is not the excoriation of religion, still less its suppression,
but the empowerment of religious moderates.
If there is a serious point to be made by the “New Atheism”, it is that
religion - or at least, certain forms of religion - possesses a capacity to
transcendentalise normal human conflicts and disagreements, transforming
13 Diego Gambetta (ed.), Making Sense of Suicide Missions. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005.
14 Robert A. Pape, Dying to win: the strategic logic of suicide terrorism. New York: Random House,
2005.
15 Scott Atran, “The Moral Logic and Growth of Suicide Terrorism.” The Washington Qiiarterly
29/2 (Spring 2006): 127-47.
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