Dead Wreaths

February 10, 2011

To my neighbors with their Christmas Wreaths still on the front door….”I feel ya!”….

Too harried to get the chores done…

Too exhausted to remember the Holidays just days past….

Too locked into the present crisis to bother…

Or…..could you still be waiting for Santa?

Basking in the echoes of Carols?

Still kneeling in adoration at the manger of Bethlehem?

In counter cultural rebellion do you insist that Christmas is a yearlong intention to worship the incarnate divinity?

As the wreaths degrade to dust, their plastic gathering grime, and their colors fading, will they sentinel your fortress until the Visa is paid off?

I, an agent of suburban angst, a long time disciple of bourgeois capitulation, I salute you!    Whatever the motivation…sloth, neglect or statement …I am the fool who prides himself by putting Christmas away, neat and tidy, boxes labeled, a few days after New Year.

A pride as empty and decayed as a wreath long brown.

Egypt and the Birth of Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda and the eventual atrocities of 9/11 were born in the jail cells of Egypt, according to Lawrence Wright, author of his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage, 2006).

 In the 1950’s and 60’s Sayyid Qutb was imprisoned and tortured in Egyptian prisons for writing and organizing against Gamal Abdul Nassar’s post-World War II government.  Qutb founded what would become the Muslim Brotherhood and argued that the modern values of secularism, tolerance, rationality, democracy, subjectivity, individualism, mixing of the genders and materialism was infecting Islam through the agency of colonialism (Wright p 28). He envisioned an Egypt governed by Sharia, Islamic law.  Qutb would apply an obscure Islamic concept of takfir or “excommunication” to justify and encourage violent resistance against the Muslims supporting the regime of Nassar which Qutb insisted betrayed the faith.  (Wright p. 34)  Qutb was hanged a martyr to his cause in 1966.

“Takfir”, considered a heresy by most Muslims, evolved out of the concentration camps in Egypt to its current form to fuel the suicidal violence of modern extremists in direct contradiction to The Koran which forbids violence against another Muslim, non-combatants and women and children. (Wright pp. 142-43, in confusing contrast to many citations justifying war and violence against the non-believer, also note that the Koran strictly forbids suicide (Surah 4:29), prohibits the killing of innocent non-combatants (Surah 2:190-192) and advocates compassion towards non-hostile non-believers (Surah 60:8)) 

Ayman Al-Zawahiri was one of the thousands educated, middle-class Egyptians who adopted the writings and philosophy of Qutb  as a result, in part, of their frustration with the brutality, corruption and privileges of the ruling class of Egyptian secularists.  A leader in a cell of the Muslim Brotherhood he would be swept up in the aftermath of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s assignation by elements of the Brotherhood in 1981, although he had no direct involvement in the killing.

One line of thinking proposes that American’s tragedy on September 11 was born in the prisons of Egypt….torture created an appetite for revenge….the main target of the prisoners’ wrath was the secular Egyptian government, but a powerful current of anger was also directed toward the West, which they saw as enabling force behind the repressive regime.   They held the West responsible for corrupting and humiliating Islamic society.  Indeed, the theme of humiliation, which is the essence of torture, is important to understanding the radical Islamists’ rage.  Egypt’s prisons became a factory for producing militants whose need for retribution, they called it justice, was all consuming. (Wright p. 61) 

It would be Al-Zawahiri  in partnership with Osama bin Laden who would conceive of and organize the bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi Kenya, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen and  the 9/11 attacks on mainline USA.    

When our Presidents Bush and Obama insist that we are not at war with Islam they are right.  Religion may have given Al-Qaeda and the extremist Jihadists the philosophical framework to justify their violence, after much theological manipulation.   But Islam is not the enemy.  Social class, economic and political oppression and the corruption of autocracy, which we now see confronted in the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen, are the ground out of which such violence has grown.  

Not that that offers any excuse.

There is no excuse for terrorism, even in the name of retribution, even in the name of victimization and especially in the name of God.

"Washington has been very anxious about what's happening here, but it shouldn't be. It should be happy. This will reduce terrorism. When people have their voice, they don’t need to explode themselves."

--Mohammed Fouad, an Egyptian software engineer. (The Washington Post, 2/2/11)

What to do about atheists?

The parishioner looked shocked when I recommended "my favorite atheists".   We were speaking of the hypocrisy so evident in church life when the subject came up. 

Since 9/11 there have been a number of best-selling books from atheist authors reflecting on the power of religion to do harm.  

That violence by religious institutions and individuals of all persuasions has been done in the "name of God" is evident throughout history and continues today.  Flying airplanes into buildings, the perpetuators committing suicide and killing thousands of innocents in the process, can only be justified by a gross theological manipulation of the tenants of Islam.1   Yet such thinking, even when held by a small minority, has been the occasion for many others to question the value and purpose of religion itself.  

Unfortunately, we don't have to look far for other examples; clergy sexual abuse of children, the religious justifications for segregation and violence  based on ethnic, gender and sexual orientation differences, the public face of North American Christianity as represented by those willing to attribute blame for hurricanes and earthquakes on those they don't like.  Terrible things have been done and said in the "name of God".   Few can deny that.  Since 9/11 it has been grist for the mill of atheism.

Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have been the most popular of these authors selling millions of books and generating scores of rebuttals in print.  Harris' A Letter to a Christian Nation (Vintage, 2008) and Karen Armstrong's The Case for God (Anchor, 2010) would be my two favorite examples of this debate.

Is it shocking to learn that a Christian pastor has a favorite atheist author?   It doesn't mean that I agree with or am thrown into doubt and confusion by such writing.  Neither should we be afraid to listen and learn from other points of view.  After 35 years of pastoral ministry, during which God's existence and relevance have been constantly questioned by those I seek to serve, it is comforting to address a rational argument for atheism when it is so often presented in the context of pain.

The spouse of the shooting victim, the teenager diagnosed with cancer, the returning soldier from a tour of what is worst about humanity, all cry out "how can there be a God when there is so much evil in the world....how can a God of love allow such atrocities....where is God now that I feel so alone..."?  Such moments are rarely times for academic discussion!  At such moments all one can do is to listen and embrace with compassion those on the journey though grief.   As a pastor many times my first concern is the heart, the head will come later.

Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation is short, articulate and thought provoking.  I'll take that any day over a parent burying a child who has wrapped himself and a car full of friends around a tree, crying out "....where was your God when Bobby needed him!...."

Such agony is different than atheism per se.  Ironically, it assumes a powerful divinity which for some twisted reason has chosen not to act benevolently or has chosen to "allow" tragedy for pedagogy or punishment.  "The god in control of all events" has been worshipped since the beginning and remains a popular deity in a variety of religious traditions, including my own. In times of tragedy we seem programmed to project our blame or rationalizations onto this deity.

Any god that would cause or allow a 9/11 should be rejected and denied.  In part because such a god is incongruent with the Divinity found in scripture that watches Adam and Eve choose to eat the fruit (Genesis 2-3); the God that does everything it Its power through the witness of the Hebrew prophets to warn the 'chosen people' from their apostasy as they hurtle towards self-destruction as a nation; because that same God hangs incarnate butchered on a Roman cross.

The power of the Judeo-Christian God is the creative force of transformation, the lure to that which is best and possible in each moment, not in divine control or coercion.  God shares the journey with us.  God doesn't dictate it.

There is an ironic comfort suggesting that "God has a plan" for each and every moment however terrible it might be, which may be one reason that "the god in control of all events" remains a popular idol even today.  The notion of "free will"...the doctrine suggesting that in each and every moment the choice is always our....gives little comfort and lots of frustration in the face of broken reality to those who would be faithful.  Yet if "determinism" is our stance then we either deny the reality of evil or we worship a deity that would inflict 9/11s on innocent people. 

"The god in control of all events"?  Is that the God Jesus prays to in the garden of Gethsemane asking three times to take away the "cup of crucifixion" and in the end chooses his fate? (Matthew 26:36-46)  If God determines each moment why would Jesus need to ask?  Why would Jesus need to choose?

What to do about atheists?  People of faith don't need to be afraid to read them or listen to their derision.   The atheists poke at the hypocrisy of religion and its history of harm with insight and righteous indignation....as we all should.   We may have something to learn in the process.

Far more significant for the faithful is the self-imposed agnosticism born of disappointment, betrayal and tragedy for such isolates us from each other and the heart.  The old preaching punch line may be trite but it’s still true; "If God seems far away…guess who moved?"

1          for example the Koran strictly forbids suicide (Surah 4:29), prohibits the killing of innocent non-combatants (Surah 2:190