The battle with the Islamic fundamentalist extremists can never be won peacefully. Their goal is not peace. Their goal is to convert the entire world to their fundamentalist version of Islamic beliefs.  When a terrorist was asked in court what the United States could do to pacify the terrorists, the demands were simple: abandon Israel, abandon the Arabian Peninsula, and not get in the way of their efforts to spread their version of what constitutes Islamic faith across the entire world. What makes them so dangerous and so powerful is the intermingling of government with religious faith that has become common in the Middle East.

Until September 11th, the problem of the Islamic fundamentalist extremists seemed far away. As we were reminded just a couple of days later on the 700 Club television show, the fundamentalist extremists are not just from the Middle East.  On the show, Pat Robertson asked Jerry Falwell his reaction to the terrorist attack:

"The ACLU's got to take a lot of blame for this...throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle...all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'"

What Falwell is inferring is that the terrorists were acting as agents of the Lord, that they were doing God’s work because He hates feminists, homosexuals, and anyone else who does not adhere to a strict, conservative interpretation of holy texts. Osama bin Laden, leaders of the Taliban, and leaders of other Islamic terrorist organizations could not agree more.

Afghanistan is one of the most repressive, violent, and vicious places on the planet. Were their God a Christian God and those people came to power here, people like Falwell might consider it a paradise on Earth. They do not allow abortion, they kill homosexuals, they murder women for even implied acts of adultery, they kill pagans,  or feminism, or sexual freedom, or a secular society. 

While we are not saying that Falwell, or Robertson, would personally commit mass murder, they have the same basic faith in the absolute rightness of their beliefs and that they should apply to everyone that Osama bin laden, the Taliban and other extremists have. That moral absolutism, combined with a militant belief that God blesses their actions, inspires others to commit acts of violence.

The anti-abortion rhetoric of some of the extremist fundamentalist has inspired a number of people to murder abortion providers. The murderers of gays find encouragement for their actions in the statements of homophobic Jewish conservative fundamentalist Laura Schlesinger, with her calling homosexuals “biological errors”,  and the insane violent rantings of Christian fundamentalist hate monger Rev. Fred Phelps, who showed up to disrupt the Mathew Shepard funeral with signs saying “God hates Fags”. It is not a huge step from this to calling for a jihad.

In fact, it has been said many times that there is a cultural war in the United States pitting the secular against the religious. The Bush administration has proposed plans to begin tearing down the wall of separation between church and state, by giving government charitable funds directly to religious groups.  Religious groups have become directly involved in setting the agenda for our school’s sex education courses. We have an Attorney General who does not even believe in the separation of church and state.

If we have learned anything from the terrorist attack, it is that state sponsored religion becomes simply too powerful and too dangerous. By keeping the two spheres separate, neither one becomes powerful enough to completely dominate the other. Mix them together, though, and great buildings fall, and individual liberty and all that this country stands for perishes.
 
 

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