Currents of Faith: Open and Unfolding Reflections

Whitehead told us more than once that it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.  He added that truth adds to interest.  I would add that interest adds to the importance of the question whether the proposition is true.

I have long believed that the war on terror is more about American and British politics than about security.  It has been based on lies (if you doubt that please read David Griffin’s latest book, published with great courage by Westminster John Knox calling for Christians to respond to the truth of what happened on 9/11) and it has been manipulated with lies into justification for wars.  Terror has been kept alive by false rumors of plots and by raising and lowering the level of terror alerts according to political need.  

Let me hasten to say there are a great many terrorists in the world.  Some are private citizens.  Some are Muslim.  Some are motivated by distortions of traditional Islamic teaching.  Some may be motivated by hatred of freedom and democracy. Occasionally the conspiracy theories promoted by the U.S. government may be true.  

But we know that most of the terror in the world is caused by governments.  The United States calls it “shock and awe.”  It uses torture to terrorize individuals and the threat of atomic bombs to terrorize governments.  This gets a great deal of support from Christians who believe that the End is at hand.  And we know that many of the conspiracy theories promoted by the U.S. government have been false.

I have been predicting that if the Republicans see themselves as in danger of losing control of Congress in November, we can expect more terrorist threats and attacks in the months before the election.  So when in August the newspapers are full of Muslim plots and threats to our security, in this Kafkaesque world, what should I believe?  Perhaps the stories fed to the media by the British and American governments are completely accurate and straightforward.  Perhaps the fact that these stories are likely to shore up political support for the current administrations in both countries is irrelevant and, for once, politics plays no role.

Am I the only skeptic?