I lost my faith in mainstream religion when I was 11 in 1969.
This article is a little naive. I think this is a pretty good article when you realize that it was written by young teens for teens. The whole finding other Spirituality means you turn from God is a little unnerving. I just thought it was cool to see younger people being aware of these types of issues.
L
Have the Youth Lost Faith?
Why are some young people turning their back on God and the religion they were born into? Young reporters from Headliners investigate why a growing number of young people seem to be losing faith.
Headliners reportersLondon is possibly the most multi-cultural city in the world with millions of people from different cultures, races and religions living next door to each other. But young people here still have different views on religion, and for some it’s become a cause for concern. There seems to be a growing number of young people, our friends included, who are converting from one religion to another, or at least thinking about it.
Sarah, 18, from Croydon is one young person who has already started moving in the opposite direction to God: “I don’t believe in God and there are many, many reasons why. I used to be a Catholic and I lost faith when I was 14. At that time I was such a strong Catholic. And then suddenly the more I was learning about it the more I didn’t like it. I remember reading passages from the Bible that were full of really disturbing stuff. One passage I read was one of the most revolting things you will ever read about incest between a father and daughter. I would go to church and listen to the readings but I didn’t like what the priest was saying. It felt wrong in my heart. It was almost offending me to be there in his presence. So, that’s when I started thinking about other religions.”
She says her family, who are very strict Catholics, didn’t support her decision. “I told my mum I was changing to Wiccan and was reading books on the subject to find out more. My mum wouldn’t speak to me for a very long time and she banned me from reading books about it. She got a priest to come to my house and she was crying and crying.”
Wiccan is a magical tradition, which contains aspects of ceremonial magic and ritual, spirituality and mysticism and those who believe in it celebrate the changing seasons, the phases and power of the Moon and Sun, and a Goddess and God. We never knew there was a religion like this and we all thought at first that it meant Sarah was a Goth and believed in the devil. But she was just a normal teenager just like us, she dressed the same and acted the same.
Not all young people who have questioned their religion have had such a difficult time with their families. James, 16, is a friend of Sarah’s and says “my family is pretty open minded about stuff. We all realise that we have the right as individuals to believe in what we want and it’s never really come up as a strong topic.”
He told us how he started questioning his faith. “I was a fairly strong Christian and believed in the Bible stories. And then I grew up and became a bit more independent. I had some experiences as well which kind of changed me and made me look into spiritualism. I ended up completely disowning Christianity and changing from being a strong Christian into a Spiritualist but eventually that also faded out. I am still not sure what to believe in but I do believe there are ghosts and things like that.”
14-year old Yosieph says he believes in God but would think about changing his religion, “I have been brought up in a Catholic atmosphere but I doubt my religion because things in the world are never peaceful and if God existed he would make it a better place. I don’t agree with the Catholic way and I would think about changing my religion. The last time I went to mass my parents forced me, and this isn’t right because I like to make my own decisions and be independent. I think young people change religions because they are influenced by their peers or because they don’t think their religion is all it’s cracked up to be.”
So, if young people are turning against God, what are they turning to? Sarah says she’s got different beliefs and hasn’t settled on anything in particular yet. “I have changed my faith about four or five times. I like to think I am a mixture of four things; part Roman Catholic, part Wiccan, and part Spiritualist and the last part of me is Absurdist. Spiritualist is when you believe in ghosts and Absurdist is my own theory on what God is.”
We asked Sarah why she believed in so many different things and she says it’s because she is still confused. “I doubt the whole thing. Whatever I have put faith into hasn’t worked out for me and that is why I have been searching through different religions for something that feels true to me. I shouldn’t do it but I am picking the best bits out of each one and making up a whole new religion. I’ll just keep changing until I find something I strongly believe in. Next year I’ll probably find a fifth one to add to my collection. Who knows?”
And what about James? “I will eventually start believing in something, I hope. I don’t think I am going to completely flip and go for something completely different, I just think I will develop.”
We always hope that our friends will support us but both Sarah and James had a difficult time getting their friends to accept their new beliefs. “My old friends were strong Christians and when I started wearing pentagrams, which is the Wiccan sign, we had a huge argument in the Biology classroom and my friend was saying ‘Why don’t you believe in God?’ That was a huge thing. But my new friends in college accept it,” says Sarah.
“I had a really close friend and we’d always talk about religion and she’d try to, in a way, in her words, ’save me’ and bring me back to Christianity. She couldn’t do it so I ended up losing her as a best friend. It was upsetting for me.”
We were surprised when we met Sarah because we knew she believed in wiccan-or-witch/">Wicca and we thought she would be wearing all black. She wasn’t what we thought she was going to be. It shows that you should never judge a person before you have met them.
But not all young people want to change their religion. Bana, 12, from London, says “I believe in God because I am a Christian and I don’t doubt my religion because my family is Christian and I was brought up like that. I believe that God created the world. I would not change my religion, even if my friends did, because I like to make my own decisions. Some young people who want to change their religion don’t realise that other people might be happy with the religion they are born into.”
And Amon, 10, agrees: “I believe in Christianity and I have no doubts about it. But I think I would be happy with whatever religion I was born into. But I think some religions cause problems, because sometimes people from one religion are racist against people from another religion.”
It seems there is great conflict in the minds of some young people who want to or have changed religions, as it can completely change your lifestyle and your relationship with your family and friends. One idea could be for councils or youth groups to run courses for young people who need to know the truth about their religion and others. Otherwise the youth of this generation might grow up in a time of great religious confusion. Whatever happens we must all remember that whether you’ve changed religions or whether you haven’t it is always important to respect other religions and not to stereotype people.
I found this interesting. It seems that some people belive that freedom of religion means only their religion. Don’t they get on your nerves. I get real tired of them.
Loki
Wiccan symbol at Nativity scene damaged by vehicle
7:27 AM EST, December 11, 2007
OLEAN, N.Y. - Police are investigating vandalism aimed at a symbol of the Wiccan religion set up next to a Nativity scene in front of city hall.
Officials in this city 60 miles south of Buffalo say someone in a pickup truck backed over the Wiccan pentacle around 10:15 p.m. Monday, then sped off.
The pentacle, a pentagram within a circle, was placed last weekend near the Nativity scene Olean Mayor David Carucci allowed to be set up outside city hall last month.
Some Olean residents complained that placing the Nativity scene on government property raised issues over the separation of church and state. Carucci responded by allowing members of other faiths to display their symbols on city property during special times of celebration.
The pentacle was then set up by April Garlow, a Wiccan.
California recently outlawed plastic bags. I learned that this was a great idea because few of us understand the environmental problem presented by plastic bags. I have shared the California law with many around here including friends and grocery store clerks. For the most part I get stares of disbelief, some questioning my sanity probably afraid that I am one of those environmental kooks you read about.
I found this blog Save Our Planet One Bag at a Time . The writers of this blog explain things much better than I ever hoped to, possibly due to my poor communication skills.
If we want to save oil, doing something about this problem will help. I don’t know if the price of gas will go down (gas prices are high for those who have not noticed) but it can’t hurt. The more bags we don’t use the longer gas will be around and that must be a positive thing (maybe, maybe not?).
Bottom line is that dependence on oil and oil products keeps our country in the Middle East and keeps us neck deep in Middle East politics. I am pretty sure that this is not a good thing.
Using recyclable bags might actually be a good thing. It can’t hurt. The only problem is that it is inconvenient and most of us don’t like a little inconvenience. I know I don’t.
I have not made a move yet or taken any action in my personal life about this problem. I was ignorant till California passed their law and I saw it in the news. It takes me a while to jump on a bandwagon. I have visited large urban areas (Denver, Chicago, Minneapolis etc) and have heard talk about the bag problem but thought what the hell” it probably has nothing to do with Alabama and besides people will think I am an idiot if I go to the store with my own bags. It is much easier to take an environmental stand when it is popular. Standing alone can be very scary. I must pick my battles wisely. Who knows what the future will bring?
The dead zone this year coming from the Mississippi River is amazingly large. The dead zone is an area in the Gulf that has no oxygen due to the nitrate run offs from the fertilizer used in large farming. If you have never heard about the dead zone I would look it up for a good fright (the real horrors of this world are not in the movies). Nothing lives in the dead zone, absolutly nothing due to the fact that life needs oxygen to live unless it is silicone based. The dead zone increases every year and will continue to grow untill we stop using nitrogen fertilizers.
I was reading The Slow Cook Blog about nitrogen fertilizers that are killing our soil. The bitch about this is that this unnatural fertilizer is not unnecessary for healthy crops. Crop rotation and natural fertilizers work very well. The problem is that if you rape the soil you have greater profits in the short run but minimizes production and profit in the long run.
Farmers are getting smarter and waking up to these environmental problems. I hope to see the trend continuing.
Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition, recently warned Orlando, Florida, that it was courting natural disaster by allowing gay pride flags to be flown along its streets. “A condition like this will bring about … earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor,” he said, apparently referring to his belief that the presence of openly gay people incurs divine wrath and that God acts through geological and meteorological events to destroy municipalities that permit gay people the same civil liberties as others. (Robertson also warned Orlando about terrorist bombs, suggesting the possibility that God may also employ terrorists.)
Before Pat and his Christian cronies get too carried away promulgating the idea that people who displease God prompt natural disasters, they should take a hard look at the data. Take tornadoes. Every state (except Alaska) has them - some only one or two a year, dozens in others. Gay people are in every state (even Alaska). According to Pat’s hypothesis, there should be more gay people in states that have more tornadoes. But are there? Nope. In fact, there’s no correlation at all between the number of gay folks (as estimated by the number of gay political organizations, support groups, bookstores, radio programs, and circuit parties) and the annual tornado count (r = .04, p = .78 for you statisticians). So much for the “God hates gays” theory.
God seems almost neutral on the subject of sexual orientation. I say “almost” because if we look at the density of gay groups relative to the population as a whole, there is a small but statistically significant (p < .05) correlation with the occurrence of tornadoes. And it’s a negative correlation (r = -.28). For those of you who haven’t used statistics since 1973, that means that a high concentration of gay organizations actually protects against tornadoes. A state with the population of, say, Alabama could avert two tornadoes a year merely by doubling the number of gay organizations in the state. (Tough choice for Alabama’s civil defense strategists.)
Although God may not care about sexual orientation, the same cannot be said for religious affiliation. If the underlying tenet of Pat’s postulate is true - that God wipes out offensive folks via natural disasters - then perhaps we can find some evidence of who’s on God’s hit list. Jews are off the hook here: there’s no correlation between numbers of Jews and frequency of tornadoes. Ditto for Catholics. But when it comes to Protestants, there’s a highly significant correlation of .71.
This means that fully half the state-to-state variation in tornado frequency can be accounted for by the presence of Protestants. And the chance that this association is merely coincidental is only one in 10,000. Protestants, of course, come in many flavors-we were able to find statistics for Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, and Other. Lutherans don’t seem to be a problem-no correlation with tornadoes. There’s a modest correlation (r = .52, p = .0001) between Methodists and tornadoes.
But Baptists and Others share the prize: both groups show a definite correlation with tornado frequency (r = .68, p = .0001). This means that Texas could cut its average of 139 tornadoes per year in half by sending a few hundred thousand Baptists elsewhere (Alaska maybe?).
What, you are probably asking yourself, about gay Protestants? An examination of the numbers of gay religious groups (mostly Protestant) reveals no significant relationship with tornadoes. Perhaps even Protestants are less repugnant to God if they’re gay. And that brings up another point - the futility of trying to save the world by getting gay people to accept Jesus. It looks from our numbers like encouraging Protestants to be gay could more effectively reduce the frequency of natural disasters.
Gay people have been falsely blamed for disasters ever since Sodom was destroyed by fire and brimstone (we have been unable to find any statistics on disasters involving brimstone). According to a reliable source, the destruction of Sodom was indeed an act of God (see Genesis 19:13) and was perpetrated because the citizens thereof were, according to the same source (see Ezekiel 16:49-50), “arrogant, overfed and unconcerned [and] did not help the poor and needy” - not because they were gay. Now Pat would have us believe that gays are the cause of tornadoes (as well as earthquakes, meteors, and even terrorist bombs) in utter disregard for evidence showing that Baptists are much more likely to cause them.
I say “Kudos!” to Orlando. Despite Robertson’s warning that Orlando is “right in the way of some serious hurricanes” (hardly a revelation), note that it was not struck by the very destructive Hurricane Andrew a few years ago. And amid the recent conflagrations (that’s fires) in central Florida, which occurred just after Pat sounded his alarm, Orlando was spared. Keep those flags waving!
As any statistician will tell you, of course, correlation doesn’t prove causation. Protestants causing tornadoes by angering God isn’t the only explanation for these data. It could be that Baptists and Other Protestants purposely flock to states that have lots of tornadoes (no, we haven’t checked for a correlation between IQ and religious affiliation). But if Pat and his Christian crew insist that natural disasters are brought on by people who offend God, let the data show who those people are.
President Ford waited till he was dead to attack President Bush. President Carter decided to get Bush before his death. He slammed him good. Then of course President Bush had to slam President Carter.
It is about timer that soldiers fighting for our religious freedom are able to participate in that freedon when they are killed fighting for that freedom.
Filed under: Misc., National — Ethereal Light @ 10:06 am
NEW YORK - A public school teacher was arrested today at John F. Kennedy International Airport as he attempted to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square, a slide rule and a calculator. At a morning press conference, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-Gebra movement.
He did not identify the man, who has been charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.
“Al-gebra is a problem for us,” Gonzales said. “They desire solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in search of absolute values. They use secret code names like, “x” and “y” and refer to themselves as “unknowns,” but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. The organization has been recruiting people from all walks of life, particularly the young ones in high schools. If they fail to recruit them in high school, they eventually get them in college.”
As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, “There are 3 sides to every triangle.”
When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, “If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, he would have given us more fingers and toes.”
Filed under: Misc., National — Ethereal Light @ 6:28 pm
No matter your faith, beliefs or politics, this video is disturbing to watch and provides a good topic for discussion.
After viewing it, what are you thinking? Is it a fair comparison? Does it only represent the extremists? Or does is it a good reminder to always consider how our actions and faith effect others?
I have never been crazy about George Bush. I have always questioned his sanity and his leadership abilities. I have noticed with everyone else that it seems to be getting worse. I don’t know if this article is true or not but it does offer an explanation.
Why Bush Can’t Talk: It’s not the drugs, and it’s not senility.
Bush’s press conferences and unscripted remarks are so painfully bad, it spurs the question: what is his PROBLEM?
People have remarked that he wasn’t that way when he was the Governor of Texas, and therefore theorize that he has deteriorated due to premature senility or a lifetime of drug use.
I think the reason George Bush stumbles, ends sentences midway through to jump to another thought, rattles off non-sequiturs, and makes up words, is that George Bush is breaking under the strain of lying almost all the time about almost everything.
I think it’s because lying is hard work, and he’s trying to hold several different false scenarios in his head while not blurting out what he’s really being told behind closed doors.
Bush looks like a person stumbling over the easiest things, but in fact, he’s not a person unable to relate simple facts. He’s a person trying hard to NOT relate simple facts. He’s a person trying to avoid the pitfalls of saying what’s on his mind, and trying to keep his stories straight.
As I lawyer, I see people trying to construct false scenarios all the time. But you don’t remember lies the way you remember truth. It’s easier to remember, e.g., how fast you were driving than it is to remember the exact lie you told the police officer about how fast you were driving. People who lie have to put a lot of energy into keeping their lies consistent with each other and, well, consistent with undeniable facts.
My grand theory is that Bush’s entire presidency, from the beginnings of his campaign until now, is based on his taking public stances that at least obscures goals and positions shared secretly. He and his Roves have always accepted that the majority of the country wouldn’t want him if they knew the promises he made to the right wing christians and the rich, if they knew the actual effect of his tax cuts, if they knew the evidence behind environmental damage, and on and on. Now, he’s hiding the entire foreign policy fiasco(s), who is being held by him incognito, who is being spied upon, what he knew before 9/11, and on and on and on.
If you had so much to hide, you too would only use canned speeches, carefully vetted by speechwriters who don’t know the real story anyway, to keep it all straight, and you would stumble and hem and haw in all other circumstances.
Which explains why his problem wasn’t so evident as Texas Governor. Bush’s brand of crony capitalism and piestic christianism went down well in Austin, at least for a governor with no real constitutional authority: Bush only had to repackage himself for the national race, essentially submerge his real persona and his real ideas and his real goals and pretend to a compassionate, not-asshole conservativism.
You know how they tell you, on a date, just be yourself? And how you think, no, I don’t want her to meet that guy just yet? Well, Bush and Rove have been saying that for six years, and Bush has been schizo, trying to send signals and winks and nods to his fundamentalist christians and send money to his corporate sponsors while slinging a load of bull at the nation. Add to that all the bodies he has to keep buried, and you’ve got a guy who is in a state of flop sweat every time he has to open his mouth in public.
Bush isn’t senile, or drug addled. He’s a lying asshole. And it’s hard work. Only truly gifted and intelligent sociopaths like Rove and Cheney can rattle it off. Bush can’t. The Rest of the Story.
1) Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.
2) Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
3) Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven’t adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.
4) Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can’t marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.
5) Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Brittany Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.
6) Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn’t be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren’t full yet, and the world needs more children.
7) Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in America.
9) Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.
10) Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
Danielle George - All Headline News Staff Reporter
Washington, D.C. (AHN) - As the perception of President Bush’s ability to lead the country continues to shift, his approval rating hits a new low.
According to CNN news, out of 1,012 adult Americans only 32 percent approve of Bush’s performance, 60 percent said they disapprove and 8 percent said they do not know.
According to the report, It was one of four conducted within the past 10 days that have yielded similar results: a Pew Center poll carried out April 7-16 gave Bush a 35 percent approval rating; a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll carried out last Tuesday and Wednesday gave him a 33 percent approval rating; and an American Research Group poll carried out Tuesday through Friday gave him a 34 percent approval rating.
More and more peolpe are questioning our actions in Iraq. Loki
dead, why I was wrong about Iraq
A melancholic mea culpa
A few weeks ago, a small moment – a little line of text – underlined for me how far life in Iraq has slumped. As I was reading a story, the ticker-tape on the BBC News website casually stated: ‘Car bomb in Baghdad; 50 dead.’ There were no accompanying details. When these Iraqi suicide-massacres started to happen in Iraq, I would nervously call my friends out in Baghdad and Basra and Hilla to make sure they were okay. But I soon realised this was antagonising them, driving every bomb further into their skulls – should they store a standard text ‘No, not killed in suicide bomb today’ message and send it out three times a day? So I swallowed hard, waited, and the next day, I looked through all the newspapers for details. Nobody mentioned it. Suicide-slaughters the size of 7/7 are now so common they don’t even bleed into News in Brief.
So after three years and at least 150,000 Iraqi corpses, can those of us who supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein for the Iraqis’ sake still claim it was worth it? (I am assuming the people who bought the obviously fictitious arguments about WMD are already hanging their heads in shame). George Packer, a recalcitrant Iraq-based journalist who tentatively supported the invasion, summarises the situation in the country today: “Most people aren’t free to speak their minds, belong to a certain group, wear what they want, or even walk down the street without risking their lives.” In many regions – including the British controlled South – power has been effectively ceded to fascist militias who “take over schools and hospitals, intimidate the staffs, assaulted unveiled women, set up kangaroo sharia courts that issue death sentences, repeatedly try to seize control of the holy shrines, run criminal gangs, firebomb liquor stores, and are often drunk themselves. Their tactics are those of fascist bullies.”
So when people ask if I think I was wrong, I think about the Iraqi friend – hiding, terrified, in his own house – who said to me this week, “Every day you delete another name from your mobile, because they’ve been killed. By the Americans or the jihadists or the militias – usually you never find out which.” I think of the people trapped in the siege of a civilian city, Fallujah, where amidst homes and schools the Americans indiscriminately used a banned chemical weapon – white phosphorous – that burns through skin and bone. (The Americans say they told civilians to leave the city, so anybody left behind was a suspected jihadi – an evacuation procedure so successful they later used it in New Orleans.). I think of the raw numbers: on the largest estimate – from the Human Rights Centre in Khadimiya – Saddam was killing 70,000 people a year. The occupation and the jihadists have topped that, and the violence is getting worse. And I think – yes, I was wrong. Terribly wrong.
The lamest defence I could offer – one used by many supporters of the war as they slam into reverse gear – is that I still support the principle of invasion, it’s just the Bush administration screwed it up. But as one anti-war friend snapped at me when I mooted this argument, “Yeah, who would ever have thought that supporting George Bush in the illegal invasion of an Arab country would go wrong?” She’s right: the truth is that there was no pure Platonic ideal of The Perfect Invasion to support, no abstract idea we lent our names to. There was only Bush, with his cluster bombs, depleted uranium, IMF-ed up economic model, bogus rationale and unmistakable stench of petrol, offering his war, his way. (Expecting Tony Blair to use his influence was, it is now clear, a delusion, as he refuses to even frontally condemn the American torture camp at Guantanomo Bay).
The evidence should have been clear to me all along: the Bush administration would produce disaster. Let’s look at the major mistakes-cum-crimes. Who would have thought they would unleash widespread torture, with over 10,000 people disappearing without trial into Iraq’s secret prisons? Anybody who followed the record of the very same people – from Rumsfeld to Negroponte – in Central America in the 1980s. Who would have thought they would use chemical weapons? Anybody who looked up Bush’s stance on chemical weapons treaties (he uses them for toilet paper) or checked Rumsfeld’s record of flogging them to tyrants. Who would have thought they would impose shock therapy mass privatisation on the Iraqi economy, sending unemployment soaring to 60 percent – a guarantee of ethnic strife? Anybody who followed the record of the US towards Russia, Argentina, and East Asia. Who could have known that they would cancel all reconstruction funds, when electricity and water supplies are still below even Saddam’s standards? Anybody who looked at their domestic policies.
The Bush administration was primarily motivated by a desire to secure strategic access to one of the world’s major sources of oil. The 9/11 massacres by Saudi hijackers had reminded them that their favourite client-state – the one run by the torturing House of Saud – was vulnerable to an internal Islamist revolution that would snatch the oil-wells from Haliburton hands. They needed an alternative source of Middle East oil, fast. I obviously found this rationale disgusting, but I deluded myself into thinking it was possible to ride this beast to a better Iraq. Reeling from a visit to Saddam’s Iraq, I knew that Iraqis didn’t care why their dictator was deposed, they just wanted it done, now. As I thought of the ethnically cleansed Marsh Arabs I had met, reduced to living in a mud hut in the desert, I thought that whatever happens, however it occurs, it will be better. In that immediate rush, I – like most Iraqis – failed to see that the Bush administration’s warped motives would lead to a warped occupation. A war for oil would mean that as Baghdad was looted, troops would be sent to guard the oil ministry, not the hospitals – a bleak harbinger of things to come.
But it is easy for me to repent at leisure. Just as the opponents of the war would never have faced Saddam’s torture chambers, I am not hiding in my home, rocking and clutching a Kalashnikov. Millions of Iraqis are, and many thousands more did not live to see even that future because of the arguments of people like me.
And so, after the melancholic mea culpas from almost everyone but Blair and Bush, what? Iyaad Allawi – the man the Americans tried to impose as Prime Minister until a massive programme of peaceful civil disobedience spearheaded by the Ayatollah Sistani made elections unavoidable – says a low-level civil war has already begun. There has been a worrying trend among some right-wing commentators to blame the Iraqis: we though you guys would be a Czechoslovakia, but if you insist on being a Yugoslavia, fine. There have even been evil whispers that Iraq “needs a Saddam” to hold it together. But this is not a grassroots civil war a la Rwanda or the Lebanon, where neighbour hacks to pieces neighbour. It is a top-down civil war, fought by a minority of militias, all of whom (apart from the jihadi-Zarquawi crowd, who are a very small minority) claim to fight in the name of keeping Iraq together. Until 2003, over 20 percent of Iraqi marriages were across the Sunni-Shia divide – is husband now going to turn on wife, and mother on son?
It is very hard to see a solution, but I believe the threads of one are visible. The polls show that most of these violent militias draw their support from the fact that they oppose the foreign troops, not from the fact that they massacre fellow-Iraqis. So the best way to drain their support – and dampen the inertia towards civil war – is to withdraw the troops now. Iraqis can see this very clearly: a poll recently conducted by the Ministry of Defence (hardly an anti-war source) found that 80 percent of Iraqis want out “immediately” so they can deal with the remaining jihadists and anti-democratic fundamentalists themselves. (In a revealing mirror-image, a Zogby poll of US troops in Iraq found that 72 percent believe the occupation should end within the year. This will soon be a surreal war where the unwilling occupy the unwilling.)
Yes, there is a danger that withdrawal will create a power vacuum exploited by militias, but that is the reality on the ground already. It is unquestionably time to leave Iraq – but will the Bush administration surrender Iraq’s oil, after spending $200bn to grab it, just because the Iraqi people and their own troops want them to?
POSTSCRIPT: There’s been a collosal response to this article and I’m still picking through the e-mails. Over fifty from Iraqis, of which some mournfully agree, although this e-mail was more typical:
“Your article in the Independent today, 20/3/2006, was really disappointing to all of your admirers. You let them down. You changed your mind and switched from pro-war to join the anti-war campaigners, means that you gave in bowed to the aggressors. So instead of blaming the terrorists for this mass killing in Iraq at the hand of the terrorists, you put the blame on Bush and Blair for liberating Iraqi people from the worst dictator in history. If your new stance is right, then it was wrong to stand up against Hitler in the WW II, because that war caused humanity 55 million casualties. So it was better not oppose the Axis sates. Is that fair? Is this is the justice that we are looking for? If the tyrants were left to do as they like because of the possible revenge from their followers, then our glob will be place for the tyrants only and the whole planet population will be living like sheep.
Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in America.