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Islamic State, “The Book of Mormon,” and the Quest for Meaning in a Secular Age

The message of the musical The Book of Mormon, writes Ross Douthat, is a very conventional one: religious people would be happier if they shed their beliefs in hellfire and other superstitions, and focused exclusively on the key moral messages of their creeds. But there will always be those left dissatisfied with the resulting secular humanism. It is to a subset of such people that ideologies like Islamic State (IS) appeal:

The deep reality . . . (a reality not unlike the one that’s playing itself out on certain college campuses right now) is that many human beings, especially perhaps young human beings, still crave a transcendent purpose, even in a society that tells them they don’t really need one to live a comfortable, fulfilling life. And more than that, many people experience both a kind of liberation and a kind of joy in submission to these purposes, even—as is the case with IS—when that submission involves accepting forms of violence and cruelty that rightly shock the conscience of the world. . . .

[I]f the West’s official alternative to IS is the full Belgium (basically good food + bureaucracy + euthanasia), if Western society seems like it’s closed most of the paths that human beings have traditionally followed to find transcendence, if Western culture loses the ability even to imagine the joy that comes with full commitment, and not just the remissive joy of sloughing commitments off—well, then we’re going to be supplying at least some recruits to groups like IS for a very long to come.

Read more at New York Times

More about: ISIS, Mormonism, Musical theater, Religion & Holidays, Secularism

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic