Up@dawn 2.0

Thursday, July 3, 2014

Faith, freedom, & dishonesty

at the 9/11 Memorial/Museum.
The "last night" letter of the terrorists is posted on a wall, but without any English translation. And so the deeper truth that religious fanaticism was the whole of their horrible cause--that, in the last-night letter God is cited a hundred and twenty-one times--is elided... They did not hate us for our freedom, they hated us for our lack of [their form of] faith... Their godliness does not exhaust the meanings of religion, any more than Pol Pot's atheism exhausts the meanings of doubt. But is is a central fact of the occasion, not illuminated by being ignored.
 Adam Gopnik: Visiting the 9/11 Memorial and Museum : The New Yorker