Killing and Convincing Terrorists
Using religion.

Mr. Clegg is general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity. CEO filed an amicus brief supporting the plaintiff in the Adarand case.
December 13, 2001 9:00 a.m.

f God tells A that he must kill B , and B knows that A will follow God's commands, then there are two things that B can do. He can try to stop A by, for instance, killing him first. Or B can try to persuade A that he has misinterpreted God, or at least that there is a real possibility that he has misinterpreted God, and that the consequences of killing someone by mistake will be severe, in this world and the next.

It won't do to tell A that he ought to disobey God. It may well be the case that a world in which religious zealots aren't killing people is a more pleasant world than one in which they are. And some religious zealots may be crazy and all may "overvalue" religious imperatives, as psychiatrist Paul R. McHugh has written in The Weekly Standard. But if you believe in God, and eternal life, and God has told you that you will suffer eternally if you don't do something and will be rewarded eternally if you do, then why should A put the interests of this world above God's and, besides that, his own? Abraham, after all, was prepared to kill his own son because God told him to.

Incidentally, some argue that events like those of September 11's show that the world would be better off without religion, because religions always produce people who kill in the name of God. But religions also produce people who do great good in the name of God, and religions also dissuade others from much wrongdoing. Moreover, the atheists of the last century murdered a lot more people than believers did.

So we are in Afghanistan, rightly trying to kill all the A's before they kill us first. If we do so ruthlessly enough, perhaps it will make terrorism so counterproductive to the terrorists' own aims that they will reconsider whether this really is a course that God intends them to pursue.

But we B's also have to give some thought to other means of persuading the A's that they are wrong in thinking that God wants us to be killed.

Western governments have a nuanced relationship to revealed religious truth. On the one hand, they have deep Judeo-Christian roots. Their principal duties involve protecting citizens from those who would commit sins like murder, rape, and theft. It is unlikely that our governments would look the same way if they had not been created by believers.

On the other hand, our governments allow people to seek religious truth and worship independently. While individually there is nothing wrong with seeking the one religious truth and following it once you think you've found it, collectively we acknowledge that different people take different paths. I may be quite certain that Jesus is the Son of God, but at the same time I can also be quite certain that God has no objection to my supporting a government that allows people to conclude that Jesus is not the Son of God.

There are two non-mutually-exclusive ways one might come to this counterintuitive conclusion. One is by acknowledging that the nature of God cannot be definitively and objectively known, at least not now, and so people ought to be allowed to pursue different paths to Him. We allow individual inquiry as the best method for ascertaining truth in other intellectual endeavors, and so we should for theology. The other way is itself theological: a belief that God wants the path toward him to be sought and chosen, not dictated and forced, for that is the only way goodness can be gained.

So how can we persuade non-Westerners of various stripes — including, in particular, many Muslims — that they individually, and their governments, too, ought to tolerate non-belief? It can best be done by other Muslims, who can show that God does not want non-believers murdered or persecuted. They must speak out.

But there is a role for non-Muslims, too, by pointing out that reasonable people can conclude that, in fact, Mohammed was not God's prophet. Of course, such scholarship and argument will infuriate some Muslims, and it is nowadays politically incorrect — and thus offensive to many non-Muslims — to challenge the factual underpinnings of any faith. But we can respect other faiths and still critique them. Christianity and Islam hinge on the veracity of Jesus and Mohammed, respectively, and believers ought to be willing to demonstrate and defend as historical fact what they did and who they said they were if Christianity and Islam are to be taken seriously.

And for many A's or potential A's, we have no choice. If they cannot be dissuaded from their interpretation of Mohammed's words to mean that God wants all the B's to be killed, then — if there is strong evidence that Mohammed does not speak for God and so his words can be safely ignored — it is foolish for the B's not to point this out.