Alon Levy vs. The Culture of Death
5th September 2006
by gordo
Pat Robertson seeks souls for his fundamentalist Culture of Death
The recent release of two Fox News journalists who pretended to convert to Islam prompeted a fundamentalist response that was as chilling as it was wrong. Unsurprisingly, the fundamentalist response was that the journalists should have died rather than convert falsely or beg for their lives.
This prompted Alon Levy wrote an excellent essay on an aspect of fanaticism that’s rarely discussed: at bottom, most fanatical movements are death cults:
One of the distinguishing characteristics of fanatics, be them fundamentalists of any religion, patriots of any country, or even communists, is their reckless hatred of life. Life is degenerate. Life is about improving people’s lives rather than destroying them while promising heaven, or a heaven on Earth.
While humanists work hard at building strong, nurturant societies, fanatics nib at the edges, telling people that if only they live their lives according to a few Spartan rules, everything will be great. Usually they’re con artists looking for money; occasionally, they believe what they say, and we get a cult, a religion, or a radical movement.
Bin Laden once said that the difference between Islam and the West is that Islam had a culture of death whereas the West had a culture of life. Of course when Bin Laden said it, humanists and Western fanatics alike both were horrified and held it as the best example of how pernicious it was.
It’s in fact the best example of how there is no real difference between the extremists of Islam and those of Christianity or the West, take your pick.
After exposing the diseased thought at the heart of fundamentalism and other extremist movements, Levy offers a cure for cultures in which fanatical movements have taken hold. The essay is well worth reading in its entirety.