Eating Involves Killing -- No Matter What

In discussing a recent press statement by PETA about fur Wesley Smith here brought up the rarely discussed deaths of animals during harvesting. As he points out:

Plant agriculture results each year in the mass slaughter of countless animals, including rabbits, gophers, mice, birds, snakes, and other field creatures. These animals are killed during harvesting, and in the various mechanized farming processes that produce wheat, corn, rice, soybeans, and other staples of vegan diets. And that doesn’t include the countless rats and mice poisoned in grain elevators, or the animals that die from loss of habitat cleared for agricultural use. . . . Field animals may flee in panic as the great rumbling harvest combines approach, only to be shredded to bits within their merciless blades; they may be burned to death when field leavings are burned; they may be poisoned by pesticides; they may die from predation when their plant cover has been removed.

One might think this is just some conservative tu quoque argument, or else an artifact of awful, inhuman, industrialized factory farming. But actually the idea of grain agriculture as an animal holocaust is a fixed part of Buddhist belief, at least. In a recent study of Tibetan nomads, who lived off of slaughtering animals, the author Rinzin Thargyal notes:

Most of [his nomad informants] thought that farmers were bigger sinners than themselves as nomads, because the farmers killed countless worms and other living beings in the process of ploughing and sowing their fields. Nomads did not take too many lives and the preference for killing bovines was that one single animal could provide enough meat for many people over a longer period, thus involving much less total life-taking overall (p. 182).

And don't think the slaughtering the nomads did was all that humane:

Suffocating the animal was the standard form of killing. The animal was first hobbled and then felled down on the ground, then a rope was tied around the mouth very tightly. The whole process took about half an hour, after which the eyes of the animal became bluish, indicating a lack of oxygen (p. 87).

And the offspring of ox-yak crossbreeds were starved to death:

All tole or zomo calves were starved when very young [i.e. the people took all the milk and let the calves starve]. My informants hesitated to impart this piece of information to me initially, but they gradually admitted that they sometimes had to resort to what was a sinful act in Buddhist terms in order to survive as they did. Since only a few households kept zomo, most of them could avoid committing this form of killing (p. 83).

Even so, the killings involved in agriculture play a major role in the Buddhist view of the world. Here is a great analysis (from this book) based on field-work in Ladakh:

. . . Monks were discouraged from agricultural labor, and particularly the production of staple crops such as barley and peas. Both monks and laity agreed that such work was digpa (a term often glossed as 'sinful,' but more accurately implying an action which causes negative karma), since it killed many insects and worms, as did any digging or plowing. Normatively, involvement in agricultural activity was expected to decrease as a monk entered more senior ranks . . . Most agreed that it would be out of the question for the head monk to involve himself in any act of agricultural production, with some laity feeling that he should not even enter the fields of the village during the later summer months (p. 70).

Of course the other side of monastic renunciation is social reproduction (i.e. marriage and heterosexual relations). As Mills shows, plowing and sex are both seen as creating wealth (plowing by creating seeds, and sex by creating laborers for the farm). The householder is the wealth creator, producing both the grain to feed the monks, but also the future monks themselves. The practice of farming and sex are necessary to the survival of the monastic community, but the two are separated strictly by rules that separate the two in separate but complementary roles.

Not to speak of the viewpoint of the Manicheans whose founder Mani had a vision of plants suffering from the knife . . .

Like all world-changers, vegetarians are convinced that with a few simple adjustments, a life without inflicting harm on anyone are within our grasp. I have my doubts. Maybe it is because I sometimes feel uneasy swatting mosquitoes or crushing ants in my house. (And then I do it anyway and feel uncomfortable.) And when I have planted a plant, I have a deep-seated reluctance to kill it; especially if it seems to have a strong desire to live, despite frequent blows.

Maybe I'm just nuts, but I also have a feeling that the permission granted men and animals to eat plants worldwide in Genesis 1:29-30, and for Adam to eat Eden's plants in 2:16, and the extension to animals (including creeping things like worms and insects) of Gen. 9:2-3 was not just pro forma, that without God's specific permission it really would be wrong to eat plants. After all He made them and they are also our fellow creation. Do they actually belong to us?

(It's also worth noting that Genesis 1:29-30 and 2:16 are not saying the same thing. One gives all the plants of all the world to all men and animals. The other gives the plants of Eden to Adam alone. If you don't just assume, well, eating plants is always OK anywhere anyway, then that's a pretty big difference. Only by Genesis 3:23 does Adam come into a relation with the plants outside Eden; in Gen. 2:15 he only cared for the plants in Eden. Assuming that caring for is connected to eating, this places the universal permission to eat after the expulsion from Eden. This is grist for my mill that the blessings of Genesis 1:28-30, and the description of the world as "very good" in v. 31 are properly read as describing the situation after the expulsion from Eden, not before.)

One final thought in an incoherent post: as people out to change the world, vegetarians share the key characteristic of moral reformers and activists of all causes: that with a few changes, we can all lead sinless lives -- if we really want to. I appreciate the simplicity and purity of the reformers' zeal, I really do. But somehow I just can't share it. Somehow to me the idea that we are stuck in a world in which we cannot help but sin -- ethical fatalism, the idea that we are not in charge of whether we are good people or not -- seems a lot truer. (Of course moral reformers might say that's because I'm complicit in all sorts of evil I don't want to end, because I benefit from it. Or maybe I'm just passive. I suppose that might be true too.)

Actually Existing Complementarianism

Imagine someone who said to you: "I used to believe that premarital sex was just wrong. Then my daughter started dating and got pregnant. Since then our family has been completely overturned, and my Christian life devastated. As a result of all these troubles, I've realized all that stuff about premarital sex being against God's plan for families is just wrong." If you are like me, you'd think the logic was a bit strange. Isn't the trouble that follows from breaking the law you used to believe in normally seen as confirmation of the law's justice? I mean when violating some rule makes for unhappiness all around, we conclude that the rule might make sense. But if the person saying the opposite seems otherwise intelligent, we might assume that there is something else there, some hidden assumption going unexpressed, that makes the logic make sense. And if scores of other people agreed with the person when he said that, we might conclude that these hidden assumptions are actually widely shared. And that would be so even if those assumptions contradict the explicit theology of those persons.

I am thinking about the iMonk's recent post on his agony attendant upon his wife, Denise, becoming a Catholic (he's a Southern Baptist pastor). I would link to it, but it seems to have been removed by him from his site. I don't want to talk about the personalities and rights and wrongs of it all, but as I remember the post, it did have something of the shape: "I used to believe in a man's spiritual leadership in the home; my wife has rejected my spiritual leadership; my life and family are now in complete chaos; so I realize how wrong I was ever to believe in a man's spiritual leadership in the home." Now since this makes no sense at all logically and since the iMonk is certainly an intelligent person, it's clear that there are some hidden assumptions going unexpressed. And I am going to tell you what they are, and why they are there. And I'll start off by saying that those hidden assumptions are not his, but his quite accurate understanding of the sub-text of what "complementarianism"* means in churches that practice it.

Now, in theory "complementarianism" means something like this: "God has given to men a duty to exercise leadership (especially religious leadership) in the home and in the church." Corollaries include the idea that violation of this cause trouble, and so on. Let's call this "theoretical complementarianism."

But that is not all that "complementarianism" means, and not even the main part. It is certainly not the proposition that the iMonk saw completely shattered by his last year as his wife prepared to convert to Catholicism. Rather what was shattered is a quite different proposition: "When men exercise spiritual leadership in the home and church, women will inevitably welcome and follow this leadership." This would have the corollary that "If women deny male headship in church or home, it is all the fault of the men over them." You could also phrase it as "When men exercise spiritual leadership in the home and church, God hears their prayers and makes those who should follow, do so." Practically the result is the same: where men lead rightly women do, in fact and practice, follow. Let's call this proposition "actually existing complementarianism."

Now this would certainly be shattered by the iMonk's experience. He thought he was a good husband and good Baptist pastor -- and now his wife is rejecting his spiritual headship by becoming Catholic. So he now has two alternatives: 1) continue to accept actually existing "complementarianism" (as opposed to the theoretical version in the paragraph above) and take the blame as the bad husband and bad pastor whose failures drove his wife into Catholicism, and prevented God from responding to his desperate prayers; or 2) reject actually existing complementarianism. Now if theoretical complementarianism has been firmly enough linked to actually existing complementarianism, then rejecting the second will mean rejecting the first.

Now, what is the relationship between these two propositions? It certainly isn't some kind of logical corollary. Let's take an analogy: "God had ordained civil authorities as enforcers of the law and all citizens should obey" and "If civil authorities properly enforce the law, all citizens will obey" are independent propositions. None thinks the second follows from the first as some kind of automatic corollary. Likewise, the idea that good parents, for example, never get grief from teenage kids is not part of usual Christian teaching. So how did the Southern Baptist Church, and other churches teaching the same, get from one to the other in the case of husbands and wives?

Even stranger is that "actually existing complementarianism," despite being taught in Christian churches, seems to contradict Christian teachings about human nature. For example, original sin. How can we believe that an original sinner pastor/husband could ever exercise leadership well enough that "actually existing complementarianism" could be anything other than a purely theoretical issue? And how can we believe that even if the pastor/husband is perfect, an original sinner wife/congregant would inevitably welcome this leadership? I mean, does the Bible really teach that when prophets and priests lead in God's way that people always and inevitably follow? In fact, "actually existing complementarianism" is simply an assertion that both men and women can and will fulfill the law of theoretical complementarianism.

Actually existing complementarianism looks very much like Mencius; you know, the Confucian philosopher who argued that human nature is inherently good. Mencius was asked how a prince should get the common people to observe proper ritual. The answer? Just lead and the people will inevitably follow:

The prince said again to Ran Yu, 'Hitherto, I have not given myself to the pursuit of learning, but have found my pleasure in horsemanship and sword-exercise, and now I don't come up to the wishes of my aged relatives and the officers. I am afraid I may not be able to discharge my duty in the great business that I have entered on; do you again consult Mencius for me.'

On this, Ran Yu went again to Zou, and consulted Mencius. Mencius said, 'It is so, but he may not seek a remedy in others, but only in himself. Confucius said, "When a prince dies, his successor entrusts the administration to the prime minister. He sips the congee. His face is of a deep black. He approaches the place of mourning, and weeps. Of all the officers and inferior ministers there is not one who will presume not to join in the lamentation, he setting them this example. What the superior loves, his inferiors will be found to love exceedingly. The relation between superiors and inferiors is like that between the wind and grass. The grass must bend when the wind blows upon it." The business depends on the prince.'

Ran Yu returned with this answer to his commission, and the prince said, 'It is so. The matter does indeed depend on me.'

So for five months he dwelt in the shed, without issuing an order or a caution. All the officers and his relatives said, 'He may be said to understand the ceremonies.' When the time of interment arrived, they came from all quarters of the State to witness it. Those who had come from other States to condole with him, were greatly pleased with the deep dejection of his countenance and the mournfulness of his wailing and weeping.

Now Mencius believed firmly in the goodness of human nature and the naturalness of Confucian ethics. And there is something in this that responds to our usual moral intuitions. If the government is good, people will obey -- generally and as a rule. But conservative Presbyterians and Baptists believe just as firmly in original sin and the unattainability of the Christian ethic. So how did this teaching of actually existing complementarianism get established?

Certainly it is not particularly traditional. I have read quite widely in the pre-20th century Christian tradition, and while theoretical complementarianism is virtually universal in it, the actually existing kind seems nowhere to be found. In other words, a model of family life is set out, but there is no real expectation that just because the husband follows it the wife will -- or the other way around. In general if you act well, the other person in the marriage will frequently respond, but there's nothing inevitable about and nothing shocking when he or she doesn't reciprocate. So why is it so important to insist in conservative Christian churches that traditional sex roles is entirely up to the pastor/husband, and that he alone, simply by personal rectification, can inevitably make them welcomed in his household?

Several reasons, I think. One important one is because of the dynamics of the church teaching situation. Most teaching that takes place in Christian churches in a market environment is men teaching women. When a male pastor teaches actually existing complementarianism, he is doing several things: 1) assuring the women in his audience that they will not be, and cannot be, compelled to submit to their husband's leadership; it's purely voluntary. 2) He is building up his own sense of righteousness and manliness. Look at it this way: actually existing complementarianism has as its corollary that any man to whom women submit is exercising leadership properly (OK, it's not exactly a strict logical inference, but it's close enough for real life.) If I as a Southern Baptist pastor tell my mostly female congregation that they should submit to male headship in the family and church -- but only when the man's leadership is godly --, and they prefer my preaching to that of the Methodist church with a woman pastor down the road or to their own good-for-nothing husbands, well then, then my leadership must be godly than theirs. And godly in a specifically male way.

To a certain degree, then, "actually existing complementarianism" is a way of throwing down the gauntlet to other men: if you are a real man, your wife will welcome your leadership, and if she doesn't -- well then, you mustn't be a real man. Now if the iMonk was raised in this kind of environment it's easy to see why his wife becoming Catholic was a shattering humiliation. He could either live with the humiliation or rip up the whole game. No wonder he chose the second.

But this sort of real man one-ups-manship has been going on for a long time, and actually existing complementarianism is a new thing. So there must be something new in the situation to account for it. Here's the new thing: complementarianism has become an "ethnic" marker, a marker that separates the people of God from outsiders. And it is the distinctive feature of such marker-laws that they have to be attainable. Think of it this way, if not eating pork is the mark of a Jew as one of the people of God, then not eating pork has to be a fulfillable command. If somehow it's not possible to not pork, then all kinds of people who want to be Jews will be turned from Jews to gentiles against their will. And if your life is built around your religious community, that's pretty upsetting.

But the use of marital relations as a marker of being part of the people of God is actually pretty new. In 1858, liberal Episcopalians and evangelical Baptists all had pretty much the same view of family ethics. In 1958, differences were there, but with at a fairly high level of abstraction. But today, views on "complementarianism" vs. "egalitarianism" have becoming major denominational distinctives. If "complementarianism" defines the Southern Baptists, then "complementarianism," (like teetotalling, but unlike loving your neighbor, which all denominations try to do and all fail at perfecting) has to be do-able. Otherwise you won't have any credible "witness." If you are a member of, to chose a different example, a conservative PCA church, and want to remain so, having a good "complementarian" marriage, is as important as not eating pork as is to remaining an Orthodox Jew in good standing. (OK, I exaggerate a bit -- but only a bit.)

Now I can't think of anything less well-suited to be a dividing line between the clean and the unclean than marital relations. An insider/outsider marker should be: 1) easily documented, one way or the other; 2) clear-cut at any point whether you are living up to it or not; 3) Not connected to personality. Otherwise you are saying only one personality type is allowed in this denomination, which is going to drive vast numbers of growing children out of your body each generation; 4) individually determined, so that whether you adhere or not is under your own control, not someone else's. Now, you might point out that kosher rules are set by the family; if a wife refuses to keep a kosher kitchen, the Orthodox Jewish husband's stuck. But in this case, Jewish law allows and would even encourage divorce of a spouse who refuses to comply with membership codes. But in Christian churches, divorce is not explicitly recognized as an option (although in reality it plays an important under the table role in border-maintenance). But what you have in "complementarian" churches is a marker of cleanliness that is hard to check, dependent on endless subtle shades of interaction, determined by the interaction of two distinctive individual personalities, and in the end, out of the control of either partner. This can't help but cause anxiety.

(It is also true that explicitly liberal churches who place emphasis on being progressive have the mirror image problem, giving you the widespread figure of the bossy husband and mousy wife in a UU or Episcopalian church desperately denying that their family order is traditional patriarchy. But since liberal churches are in step with the wider society, are in fact the wider society at prayer, ideological consistency lacks the peculiar imperatives of border maintenance. If you admitted you act like a patriarch, despite believing in "a woman's right to chose", you'd just be a jerk, and not a social outcast.)

In this situation you need desperately to avoid the suggestion that justification by this particular Law is out of your hands. You have to believe that "complementarian" marriages are clearly and easily distinguished from "egalitarian" ones. That conscious belief and will, not the myriad shades of in-born personality types built by each person's unique nature and nurture, determines your interaction with your spouse. That husbands as leaders and wives as followers can indeed be close to sinless enough for actually existing complementarianism to apply.

To admit that these beliefs are obviously false, and would sound as strange and contrived in 1858 as they do today, is hard to bear. (Think of it this way -- have you ever read any good literature built on these principles? I thought not. And if it can't make a good novel, it probably can't be lived out in real life.)

But anything else leads to the dreaded condition of ethical fatalism, the believe that whether or not you are a good person and a member in good standing in the church is out of your hands. And that dreaded condition was what giving your life over to Christ was supposed to get you out of.

So my conclusion is, that "actually existing complementarianism" is created not by traditional Christian doctrine ("theoretical complementarianism") itself, but by that doctrine in interaction with a particular sociological situation: gathered congregations in a religious market in a society with serious conflict over marital ideals . Since those sociological features aren't going away, so too actually existing complementarianism isn't going to go away any time soon. But as you could probably tell, I believe it is overall pretty destructive. That is, however, not because traditional Christian teaching on the family is wrong, but rather because this good Law is being misused. I tend to agree with the biologists that people are mammals, and that means that when males are actually in the pack they generally lead it, and that females have a natural connection with child-raising*. People are overall happier and children are overall better raised where our heritage as a particular sort of mammalian creatures is worked with and not fought against. But daily interaction between husband and wife is just not something that can be legislated. If churches want border-markers between "complementarianism" and "egalitarianism" let them use nice and simple devices that are suited for the purpose, such as wives taking their husband's family name, or including "obey" in wedding vows -- do it once, in public, and then you can forget about it and get on with trying to be a good husband and father, wife and mother, without letting -isms get in the way. That's the approach of conservative liturgical churches and while it is less effective at challenging the broader society, it breeds fewer shattered and bitter opponents like the iMonk.

UPDATE: Here it is in black and white, as another comment of Michael Spencer's troubles.

*I must say, the sheer ugliness of this word is something of a tip-off to the absurdity of some of the views associated with it. It reminds me of what Disraeli once said of "conservatism" back when that new word replaced good old "Tory": "It sounds like something made by a pastry chef."
**Spotted hyenas, where females lead the pack, also have pseudo-male genitalia and aggressive temperaments due to an embyonic bath of testosterone. They are the mammalian exception that proves the rule (more here).

Iraq and the Reality of Moral Fatalism

What's the hardest thing to capture in writing history? The way people were feeling back in the time before some big event, when they didn't know the big event was coming up. It's hard enough for us to remember it ourselves. I have to remind myself how I felt in the 1980s, or the 1990s, or in the days after 2001.

I just finished a book on the causes of the English civil war, by Conrad Russel. What he emphasizes is that in 1639, no one would have predicted that the tensions between the Laud's party and the party of godly Reformation would have lead to a civil war. No one wanted it, no one could have conceived it happening, no one could look at how the small minority of Laudians, the rather larger but still minority of hotter Protestants, and the neutral majority all got along in their daily lives and say, "This is a country on the brink of civil war." And yet it happened, due to political decision and lacks of decisions, most of the really important ones being those in regard to Scottish and Irish affairs, not English at all.

I'm reminded of this by a few recent pieces on Iraq. One was a week in review piece in the New York Times by Sabrina Tavernise "It Has Unraveled So Quickly" (I'm including the author and title so that if the link goes dead you can google it):

Never having covered a civil war before, I learned about it together with my Iraqi friends. It is a bit like watching a slow-motion train wreck. Broken bodies fly past. Faces freeze in one's memory in the moments before impact. Passengers grab handles and doorframes that simply tear off or uselessly collapse.

I learned how much violence changes people, and how trust is chipped away, leaving society a thin layer of moth-eaten fabric that tears easily. It has unraveled so quickly. A year ago, my interviews were peppered with phrases like "Iraqis are all brothers." The subjects would get angry when you asked their sect. Now some of them introduce themselves that way.

I met Raad Jassim, a 38-year-old Shiite refugee, in a largely empty house, recently owned by Sunnis, where he now lives in western Baghdad. He moved there in the fall, after Sunni militants killed his brother and his nephew and confiscated his large chicken farm north of Baghdad. He had lived with Sunnis his whole life, but after what happened, a hatred spread through him like a disease.

"The word Sunni, it hurts me," he said, sitting on the floor in a bare room, his 7-year-old boy on his lap. "All that I have lost came from this word. I try to avoid mixing with them."

"A volcano of revenge" has built up inside him, he said. "I want to rip them up with my teeth."

In another measure of just how much things have changed, Mr. Jassim's Shiite neighborhood is relatively safe. The area is now largely free of Sunnis, after Shiite militias swept it last year, and it runs smoothly on a complex network of relationships among the local militias, the police and a powerful local council. His street is dotted with fruit stands. Boys in uniforms roughhouse. Men sit in teahouses sipping from tiny glass cups.

Just to the south, the Sunni neighborhood of Dawoodi is ghostly at almost any time of day. Wide boulevards trimmed with palm trees used to connect luxury homes. Now giant piles of trash go uncollected in the median.

And yet, as Amir Taheri points out, ethno-national mobilization is still in its infancy in Iraq. He compares it to Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe where he did reporting in the 1990s. And in Eastern Europe, as one Hungarianist once said in a seminar, every issue, if you dig down deep enough, turns into a ethnonational issue.

Unlike the unraveling Yugoslavia of the '90s, sectarianism hasn't consumed Iraq at the grass-root level. Grandmothers don't say special prayers, asking God to destroy the rival sect. Poets don't write sectarian verse. Artists don't portray members of other sects as devils incarnate. Not one of the gangsters who destroyed the golden-domed shrine in Samarra was Iraqi.

Anyone closely familiar with the situation, rather than making judgments from thousands of miles away, would know of countless cases where Sunnis and Shiites protected one another against the violence of sectarian terrorist groups. In Anbar province, where Arab Sunnis are more than 95 percent of the population, several Shiite pockets owe their survival to the protection of local tribes. In some cases, Sunni tribes have fought al Qaeda terrorists to prevent the massacre of Shiites.

Indeed, most Iraqi tribes include both Sunni and Shiite members. There are also tens of thousands of mixed families of Sunnis and Shiites, especially in Baghdad and Basra.

In many cases, the fight is between rival militias belonging to the same religious sect. Sadr's Mahdi Army, a hodgepodge of armed groups often controlled by Iran, has clashed with Abdul-Aziz Hakim's Badr Brigade, another Shiite militia partly under Iranian control.

Iraqi and U.S. troops killed hundreds of militiamen this week in a battle near Najaf. Most of those killed were Shiite followers of a charlatan who claimed to be the Last Imam. But, according to Iraqi authorities, those killed or captured also included Sunni terrorists, some from Sudan and Algeria.

Sectarian violence has displaced many Iraqis, perhaps more than a million. There have also been instances of ethnic cleansing, through the forcible expulsion of families and clans. But even such cases cannot be imputed to religious sectarianism.

Consider the Sunni families forced out of their homes in Basra and Baghdad by Shiite death-squads: In almost all cases, the death squads belong to a single group: the Sadrists, who seek to pose as the most effective defenders of Shiism against a mythical Sunni threat.

In Kirkuk, the Kurds are forcing out Shiite and Sunni Arabs - but the motives are not religious, but ethnic. In the same city, the Turkmen, both Sunnis and Shiites, act together on the basis not of religious affiliations but of ethnic origin.

There is no doubt that there is a war in Iraq. It is important to know what kind of a war this is.

If it is a civil war, we should identify the two camps and decide which to support. If it is a sectarian war, the only way to end it is either by geographical separation (as was the case with Croatia and Serbia) or through massive foreign occupation, as in Bosnia.

What is happening in Iraq, however, is neither a civil nor a sectarian war (although elements of both exist within the broader context). This war is a political one . . . .

He's right, far righter than the smug and arrogant outsiders who say "We gave them freedom and look what they've done with it." Nothing drives me up the wall like the assumption that "we" are rational and "they" are irrational. Viewed in the mass: all people are rational; all of them have common sense. What is the purpose of pretending otherwise? To maintain the delusion that we are in charge of our own destinies morally, to avoid the truth that we don't have control over whether we are good people or bad.

Mencius said, "In good years the children of the people are most of them good, while in bad years the most of them abandon themselves to evil. It is not owing to any difference of their natural powers conferred by Heaven that they are thus different. The abandonment is owing to the circumstance through which they allow their minds to be ensnared and drowned in evil (VI.A.7) .

This is the truth! Imagine a Muslim historian of the seventeenth century who wrote: "The English Civil War broke out because the English were childish and irrational." What an idiot he would be. To say the Iraqis are fighting now because they are childish and irrational is to be a similar sort of idiot.

Remember 2003? Remember reading how when Iraqis interviewed would get angry if the foreign reporter asked "Sunni or Shiite?" I remember reading that -- Sabrina Tavernise did not make that up. The civil war in Iraq didn't just spring up -- it was being delicately and carefully nursed for over three years by ambitious political forces. Three years is a long time -- as Amir Taheri pointed out, the civil war planners had to overcome tremendous resistance to the taboo on using violence against your neighbors who worship a bit differently, just as happened in England in 1640.

All so true, but I can't get much hope from it. Political civil wars have ways of consuming the political center and creating politically defined sects, just as much as any other civil war. And unfortunately, it seems Amir Taheri is suffering under the delusion that somehow "religious wars" are different from "ethnic" or "political" wars (probably because religious wars are "irrational" and political wars are "rational" -- there's that meaningless distinction again!) Walker Connor in Ethnonationalism shows how saying that Northern Ireland is a religious conflict, South Africa a racial one, and Malaysia a language one, and then trying to decide which type of conflict is more fundamental because "race is more fundamental" or "religion generates more conflict," etc., is profoundly misleading. No -- all of them are struggles of teams, and the teams simply happened to be marked by different characteristics. A small minority of Sunni Arabs and a small minority of Shiites may be motivated by specifically religious concerns, but for most it is the imperative of group membership and group hurt. And those hurts are being inflicted by the seeing men in this struggle, as they strive to make the blind see things their way. But do these seeing men know that they are digging their own graves?

So what am I saying? I guess it comes down to this: I don't care what you think about the invasion/ situation/ war/ whatever of Iraq. I don't care which group of political leaders you hate the most for it. Call it a criminal act. Call it a liberation that went sour. Hate Bush and Blair for it. Hate the Baathists and al Qaeda in Iraq for it. Hate Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army for it. But please don't blame the tormented people of Iraq for the fact that they will, if they have to, fight for survival. Don't put that fight into some little box where irrational people do irrational things. Don't stroke your own delusional sense of moral superiority by saying that "Well if a car bomb killed my kids one week and then another car bomb killed some neighbors of mine a week, I would never sink so low as to support a sectarian militia merely to get some kind of security." Don't even think that if you did say that, you would be superior.