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Editorial, A Plague on All Your Houses (of Worship)
Walter A. Davis  I’m leaving town tomorrow and will be away for 8 days without access to email. The occasion: a joyous one—my son’s wedding. But I’m also sorry to be gone at this time because I think there’s a good chance that the actions unfolding in the Middle East will one day be seen as the start of World War III. And so I want to leave all of you with a “cautionary tale” of sorts as we ponder that possibility. And with it of course the idea that Israel is merely a stalking horse for the U.S. and the current actions a prelude to a joint strike on Iran. And then we’ll have the perfect storm—the three religious fanaticism will have come together in a conflagration that will engulf the world. (The vast death drive that defines religion will have found its objective correlative, but that is a thesis I’ve developed elsewhere and do not have time to develop further today.) There are other reasons, to be sure, for what is happening. Perhaps the best explanation sees religion as peripheral to causes rooted in the economic contradictions of capitalist accumulation, as in Arrighi’s masterful The Long Twentieth Century. Religion however remains the magnet that pulls everything together in a way that makes fanatical irrationality the peremptory force.
When Khomeini announced his fatwah against Salman Rushdie for the blasphemies of his wonderful comic novel The Satanic Verses, my first shocked response was the question: doesn’t the media realize that it is being used to advertise a hit? My second act of naivete was a decision I made the next day, which I assumed many other teachers would make. Namely, I added Rushdie’s novel to a course I was then teaching on Thomas Pynchon. Sure, the pretext for doing so—Rushdie as a clear case of Pynchon’s influence—was slight, as I assumed would be the pretext in courses in many other disciplines throughout the country where teachers would see the same action as a necessary response to Khomeini’s assault on freedom of speech and artistic liberty. (There were, to be sure, the usual complaints registered by PEN authors in a special page in The New York Times, but the situation seemed to me to call for more than such convenient sentiments.) I may be wrong, but as far as I was able to learn later my action was an isolated one in the United States. I say this sadly given my own beliefs about what the University should be. Now comes the interesting part. On my campus the reaction to my action on the part of Islamic students and many Professors of Near Eastern studies was not what the media have indoctrinated us to believe they would be. I received no death threats and felt no need for protection. Often Islamic students approached me to argue their case against my action and I appeared at two Public Forums that they organized where we engaged in spirited and often heated debate. The surprising reactions came from another quarter. In the course of a long interview in the school paper I made the following comment: “I wish someone would do for Christianity what Rushdie has done for Islam; namely, expose it, satirically, for the fanaticism and fear that defines it.” Well, within a day a steady stream of irate letters from Christians on campus denouncing me for going too far, for abusing my position as a Professor, and calling for the termination of my employment. Unfortunately, this frenzy persisted for the remainder of the school year, sadly at the expense of the defense of Salman Rushdie and through that defense a call for an end to censorship by believers of all thoughts that offend their desire to remain safely ensconced in the temples they’ve erected to their fear. Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche since 9-11
By Walter A. Davis
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I didn’t know it at the time, but I was experiencing a first wave of what has now become a dogma on most campuses and in Amerika at large. Thou shalt not criticize religion! And so students are protected form the one thing that they most need to learn in college perhaps. Namely, the neurotic and psychotic roots of religious belief and the massive fear that is the only real root of their steadfast refusal to question all their pathetic little religious beliefs. Because by insisting that this remain beyond the pale of criticism what is really defended against interrogation are all the psychological needs and fears that are the only real basis for religion. Yes, that’s right, if we had psychological courage we would have long since gotten rid of religion. Sam Harris develops this argument in a severely reductive quasi-Darwinian way. What’s really needed is a complete psychoanalysis of religion and through that an understanding of the religious psyche that would go far deeper and further than Harris. But one suspects we won’t have the time for that. And that it wouldn’t do any good anyway. Those who base their lives on religion are children, prisoners of infantile needs—and thus already quite willing to exterminate anyone who challenges the fragile basis of the regressive “identity” they possess. Without their religion they would indeed be nothing—because being nothing is what led them to and now sustains the hysteria and paranoia that disguises itself as religion. Why do you believe in God and all the rest of it? Because you’re afraid of death. Because you can’t conceive of your precious little existence not being immortal? Because you’re afraid of the dark? Because you can’t think on your own but need group acceptance and the hysteric collective affirmations of group psychology? Because otherwise we’d have no basis for ethics? Because the world would be just too dark for you without this belief? All of the above and more—and more’s the pity that you cling to all these needs and refuse the responsibilities of an adult existence. I say it to all believers, to Bill Moyers too and all those who think they can purify religion, marginalize the nonsense and save “the good stuff.” It is time that we purge ourselves. The fanatical stuff is not the perversion of religion. Religion is the perversion. The fanatical stuff merely reveals the flight from existence and contingency that informs the desire for religion. And so, at this late date, if we end up with a World War brought about to defend this infantile nonsense, then all those who believe owe the rest of us a sincere apology. There is only one reason for religion. One if afraid of something, something about life one fears and refuses to deal with as an adult. Religion delivers one from oneself. And into the need to compel others to share one’s fears so that they become something holy and all bow down together before the altar of a shared cowardice. And the need to impose it on others. The horror of the present world situation should not blind us to the infantile nature of all the participants. The thing that most people are most proud of—their religion—should be the primary cause of their shame.
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