9/11 confirmed worst fears about religion

I don’t think the 9/11 attacks taught us anything we didn’t already know about religion. It has long been obvious--even to the deeply religious--that religious fanaticism is an extremely dangerous deranger of otherwise sane and goodhearted people. The deeply religious don’t worry nearly enough about the implications of this, but they know it as surely as I do, and are often quite terrified--and rightly so--by the more extreme members of their own religions. But you didn’t have to be particularly religious to overreact-in some cases, disgracefully-to the horror.

The attacks sent an unprecedented shock wave through our society. We all lived for days or even weeks on the very edge of panic. What if this was just the beginning of a series of terrible events, plunging us into chaos? For instance, what if the mass media, and the telephone system, and the Internet, were somehow shut down by the next act of terror? We were suddenly confronted by the shocking prospect that the high-tech security blanket under which we conduct our daily lives might be vulnerable. Unlike less fortunate people elsewhere in the world, we were used to such a high level of comfort and safety that we overreacted. As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely to do something really stupid and self-destructive. We managed to avoid utter calamity in the wake of 9/11 but in our spasms of defensiveness we did do ourselves some serious harm, which will take a concerted effort to undo: We let our fears override our allegiance to the very principles of freedom and justice that were under attack. We acquiesced in the creation of a vast and unaccountable “homeland security” establishment that may well have prevented further attacks (for now) but that in itself takes us farther away from our ideal of a free society than any of our enemies would have dreamed possible. Designed to be impenetrable by our enemies, it will be extremely hard to dismantle. (Ironically, we liberals may find ourselves adopting a slogan from the radical conservatives: Starve the beast!)

We mustn’t lose sight of what we have lost. And as we try to return to our first principles and restore the rule of law and accountability, we need to reflect on what we have learned: we survived this, and we can survive worse if it ever happens. The key is keeping panic at bay, and measuring our reactions with all the patience and open-mindedness we can muster. In short, we need to recover the courage we celebrate in our heroes, and in particular, the courage to tolerate, for the sake of a free society, a level of risk we hardly ever imagined in the past.

More On Faith and 9/11:

Desmond Tutu: Our post-9/11 failures

Dalai Lama: Yearning for co-existence

Dan Dennett: Confirming our fears

Tony Blair: Remaking the world after 9/11

Sam Harris: 9/11 demands intellectual honesty

Thomas Monson: Rebuilding our souls

T.D. Jakes: Spirituality after the attack

Feisal Abdul Rauf: Radical Islam on its way out

Donald Wuerl: Peace begins internally

Katharine Jefferts Schori: Live the memorial

Mark Driscoll: Death and the hope of resurrection

Karen Armstrong: Unite through compassion

Deepak Chopra: Divided hearts, divided world

Yasir Qadhi: Americans still don’t know Islam

Daniel Dennett  | Sep 10, 2011 10:15 AM