Reason Over Passion? Would That It Be So
Trouble is, human beings are emotional creatures, our emotions overtake us, they are far more elemental in our reactive senses than any call to reason could possibly be. It would take a tremendous force of individual nature to circumvent our emotions, to surmount them by intelligent reasoning, and such discipline of mind and thought does not come readily to many.To those, perhaps, who are truly enlightened and careful thinkers, whose sense of morality and the fitness of things are always uppermost; those rare individuals would be labelled as being removed from the passions that assail ordinary human beings; they're categorized as being cold-natured and most of us would see that as a failing trait. But they succeed in making an important choice.
Yet most rational human beings, once their temporary passions have cooled, can become reasonable. An appeal to their sense of rationality can bring them around, at the very least, to being amenable to discussions, toward reasonable communication. Whatever motivated their original emotional reaction might still have great resonance with them, but they're also likely to be able to render reason its due place in the issue.
People tend to become emotionally reactive about those things that are most dear to us. Our opportunities for finding opposite-gender companionship. Our carefully tended reputations. Most things we hold dear, including feelings about blood ties and family members. Politics can have the effect of moving peoples' aggressive emotions. Above all, religion moves people to emotional displays of faith. And faith requires no leavening of reason.
Faith, be it in the grand sweep of a religion whose tenets require complete surrender of every facet of one's life, or a dimmer recognition owing its diminishment to the place, yet honoured, it holds in modern society where the inner need to believe without rationality that a great and good Spirit looks over all existence and to whom we owe utter allegiance, needs no intercession.
Without faith and the complete surrender to the belief of an Almighty God the vast majority of human beings on this planet would see no purpose in life. People who live through life-threatening illnesses or dread circumstances of any kind find their faith a coping mechanism to endure the unendurable and in the process, survive with their faith affirmed. People of pure faith cannot be reasoned away from this life-affirming value.
Why be surprised when the modern world which has arranged to make religion 'manageable' in a complex, technological, scientific world comes hard up against a more primitive world view more reminiscent of antiquity that ascribed all of nature's wonders, all the inexplicable events that occur, to the kindly oversight and maneuvering of an all-powerful spirit that imbues its believers with a sense of tranquility and serene sacredness.
That would not be the world of Islam, however. Although it conceivably could be, for many Muslims of good faith and gentle spirit. Yet even they are not amenable to 'reason' when it comes to their faith, nor querying, it would seem, what exists within the faith that exhorts to violence against others. Still, that violence, the constant wars, conquests, assassinations, sectarian angers of history remains in history for them.
Not so for those angry legions who read the Koran with the passion of conviction, the understanding that what pertained then, at the time of Mohammad and the writing of that sacred volume still calls for the action demanded of the faithful, still demands that Muslims of strong faith, of pride in Islam, believers of the imminence of Paradise, give themselves over to the imperative of violently militant jihad.
This is the ungovernable passion of religious faith. In Islam, a religious faith that was written at a time of wandering desert tribes and small settlements of clans, all of whom were at war with one another, all seeking to become ascendant, all despising the others, all posturing and belligerently warring in the name of territorial ambition. This was a religion tailored for belligerent Bedouin.
Passion's essence is anti-reason. It is the gut, not the soul; the primitive animal senses overturning the potential for reason. A growing coterie of violently extremist Islamists began their assembling, their onslaughts, their jihadist search for conquest in the ineffable name of Allah. They have emerged with names such as Taliban, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Fatah, Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Iran's Presidential Guard, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and many others. They are the Armies of Allah.
Within Islam they are only aberrations in the modern sense. They know and they understand and they cleave to the Koran and the Hadiths. They worship a legendary past of militant jihadism leading to territorial conquest. Their determination has great resonance in the greater Muslim world. Their religious zealotry of a revolutionary bloodlust appeals to young Muslim men searching out for an incendiary cause.
Where once the Arab language was the glue that held Islam together, and the holy texts were to be read and worshipped in that language that defined Islam, in the modern world it is holy jihad against the infidel, the unbelievers, that motivate and inspire that large and growing sub-group of Muslims who have become the serpent's head of Islam.
Their aim is to spread fear, to inspire terror in their perceived enemies. This is the emotion of anger, resentment, humiliation, not reason. Bargain, negotiate, seek to placate, to reach understanding, as rational human beings confronted by potential danger? With whom? Dedicated jihadists whose cause has become universal within their particular type of Islam?
Tribal enmity still burns brightly, now turned outward to a world whose choice has not been the righteous way of Islam, but the anti-religion corrupting influence of enlightenment.
The new prophet of Islam, al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden, points his followers toward the blessing of martyrdom. And thus will glory in the name of Islam be achieved. No sacrifice is too great. And the rewards for such sacrifice are also great. Paradise, and all it entails. The Prophet Mohammad, he points out, had martyrdom aspirations, the better to serve Allah.
"What is this status that the best of mankind wished for himself? He wished to be a martyr. He himself said: 'By Him in whose hands my life is! I would love to attack and be martyred.' This glorious Prophet who was inspired by God summarized this entire life by these words. He wished upon himself this status. Happy is one who was chosen by God as a martyr," according to bin Laden.
Peculiar that he himself and his lieutenants in this holy war have not themselves succumbed to the allure of personal martyrdom. Can the cunning of corrupting reason crept into their meticulous observance of Islam?
Labels: Religion, Terrorism, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, July 15, 2007
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