Amar was a lifelong friend of Karim’s. Three months earlier, Amar and his older brother, Jafaar, had been riding in the van of a friend, Sayeed, when a group of gunmen hailed them. Amar recognized them as Mahdi Army men, and assumed that they were coming to say hello. As Sayeed braked, the car was riddled with gunfire. Amar crouched as low as he could, as the Mahdi Army men emptied their Kalashnikovs. He was unhurt, but Jafaar and Sayeed were dead.

That night, Amar told Karim that, at the morgue, he had sworn over his brother’s body to take revenge. He had vowed to kill a hundred Mahdi men—ten for each of Jafaar’s fingers. His mother, Um Jafaar, supported him, and begged Karim to help her son. He agreed.

Their first concern was to make sure that the Mahdi militiamen didn’t suspect them. During Jafaar’s funeral procession, they shouted angry denunciations of a Sunni tribe that lived nearby. Word soon spread that Jafaar’s family and friends blamed the Sunnis for his death.

Karim and Amar also decided that it would be easier to carry out the killings if they won the Americans’ trust. Karim went to a nearby U.S. military base, and spoke to a captain. “I told the captain, ‘You help me, I help you. I love my country, my neighbors. The Mahdi have killed many of my friends, and American soldiers, too. I want to coöperate.’ ” Karim gave the captain the names of two of the men who had killed Jafaar. The captain said that, if they were detained, Karim would get some money. He refused: “If I take it, it makes me a spy, and I am a gentleman, not a spy.’ ”

Karim put the captain in touch with Amar, who directed American soldiers to the houses where the two gunmen were staying. The operation was a success. “They found many guns and pistols,” Karim said. “They took them, investigated, and they were convinced about what they were—killers. One was young, fifteen or sixteen, and had killed five or six people. He was just starting out. He is now in Bucca”—a U.S. prison camp in southern Iraq.

“Then the killing started,” Karim told me. Their first victim was the father of the younger gunman. When I asked him whether the father had anything to do with Jafaar’s killing, he looked nonplussed, and said no, but that the man had been an intelligence officer under Saddam, and had probably killed people, too. (In Iraq’s tribal vendettas, male relatives are often seen as legitimate targets.) The father was now working as a taxi-driver. Karim told Amar’s sister to wave him down as he left his house, and ask to be dropped off at a warehouse on the outskirts of a Sunni district. “Amar and I followed,” he said. “She got out, and crossed the street. I told Amar, ‘Do it now.’ ”

Amar drove in front of the taxi-driver, cutting him off. “Amar got out of the car and he shot him in the face. I had put five dumdums and four normal bullets in the gun, a SIG Sauer. One dumdum is enough to kill one man. I told him to shoot only four and keep some back, just in case, but he shot them all.” (Afterward, according to Karim, Amar apologized. “He said, ‘I couldn’t help it. I became crazy.”)

Next, they went to a Sunni sheikh whom Karim knew, whose brother was in the insurgency. The brother and his men kidnapped six Mahdi militiamen, including four who had been in the group that killed Jafaar. They took them to a house in Mansour, a Sunni district, where Karim and Amar met them. “They were tied up and their heads were covered. Amar beat them too much—not me,” Karim said. “We were pretending to be Sunni mujahideen. We told them, ‘If you tell the truth we release you, but if not we will kill you.’ Of course, this was not the truth.”

The men said that Sayeed had been their target; Jafaar just happened to be in the car. “They said they had killed Sayeed because he was a member of Badr”—the military wing of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a major rival of the Mahdi Army—“and worked with Americans. But this is not true. They killed him because he was rich and didn’t respect the Mahdi Army. They were jealous.”

Karim told me that he left before the interrogation was over, and didn’t talk to Amar until the next day. “When I saw him, he kissed me. He said, ‘I left three bodies near the train track, and two in Canal Street, to be taken to the morgue.’

“I said, ‘No. 6, where is he?’ Amar said, ‘The sheikh’s brother took him, because he thinks he killed his cousin.’ ”

The killing continued. After fifteen days, they went to Um Jafaar, Amar’s mother. “I told her who was dead and who was in jail. She was very happy,” Karim said. “Then she said, ‘Do you want me to be completely comforted?’ ” Um Jafaar asked them to bring her parts of the dead men’s bodies. Amar did what she asked.

“One man, he cut off his ear when he was still alive,” Karim said. “But I swear that Amar has never killed anyone who was innocent.”

Karim said that Amar had killed eighteen or twenty men. “After a while, I told Amar to stop this. My wife, also, was angry with me. I didn’t like to do this, either, but we had to. We had to kill these guys, because they were killing too many people. When some of them were killed, my neighbors celebrated—sometimes even the Mahdi Army guys did.”

Karim mentioned the American captain with whom Amar worked. “Amar is a friend of the captain, but he doesn’t know about this.” He added, “Amar was friends of the Mahdi—real friends. I have to be honest with you. If not for Jafaar’s killing, he still would be.”

Amar told Karim that he would not stop killing until he reached his goal of a hundred victims. “He is hungry for killing now,” Karim said. “Sometimes I think maybe he has gone a little crazy.”

PINR is only willing to say that Iran is playing a role in the country, not to accuse them of supplying particular groups or particular weapons. Those are beyond their ‘open-source’ capacities. The point is that:

“Iran is likely supporting the various friendly Shi’a groups in Iraq. Most Iraqi Shi’a factions — such as S.C.I.R.I. and Moqtada al-Sadr’s group — are probably accepting assistance from Iran since, even if they wish to remain independent of Tehran, they are willing to accept assistance at least until they gain power. Other Shi’a groups — such as S.C.I.R.I., which runs the Badr Corps/Brigade — spent years in exile in Iran when Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist establishment was in power. Iran’s goal is to have one of these actors take and maintain power in Iraq, so that it can eliminate what has traditionally been a hostile Sunni Arab state.”

The second report is the truly interesting one. In the US, we’ve gotten so bogged down in questions of cowardice and bravery that we’ve stopped evaluating the goals of the continued occupation. Given the increasing likelihood of a strategic withdrawal, those interested in foreign policy must begin to evaluate the opportunities the region will supply without such a strong American presence. It’s not the WWII model, with complete capitulation and a long occupation: victory and defeat are rarely as absolute as we’ve begun to think of them. Instead, we’ll continue to attempt to balance Iranian influence in the region while furthering American interests in the oil available there. We can continue to do that from the safety of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait.

“The bottom line is that withdrawing the majority of U.S. forces from Iraq will not necessarily be a disaster for U.S. interests. The failure to achieve the original mission in Iraq has already occurred, and the United States has already suffered a significant loss of its interests. Withdrawing troops from the country may not make matters much worse. Instead, upon withdrawal the United States can begin to pursue operations more in line with its capabilities, using technology to eliminate potential Islamist threats and using its overt and covert elements to work toward a stable government in Baghdad.”

So long as we remain the occupying power, it will be impossible to differentiate freedom fighters from terrorists. When we leave, the only militants remaining will be sectarians and the hard-core jihadists. Nor will this spell an immediate victory for Iran… in truth, we may benefit Iranian interests more by remaining than by leaving, since we are distracted and bleeding capital, while they can sit back and manipulate events from relative safety.

The question PINR resolutely resists asking and answering is whether its ethical to leave Iraq now that we’ve destroyed the regime. I don’t relish the kind of ethnic cleansing and we may see; on the other hand, we don’t seem able to stop it and it continues even today, with almost 150,000 American troops caught up in the conflict. I hold out a little hope of a partition-type solution, but until there’s a Commander-in-Chief in office who’s willing to consider that possibility, the options are stay and perpetuate the violence or go and observe it from afar. In such a situation, it’s clear our responsibility is to reduce the solidarity that militants are currently experiencing against the invading Western power. It’s always possible they’ll settle on a political solution themselves.

The debate isn’t over yet, and Sullivan’s most recent post raises the fundamental issue: can there be a unique form of truth specific to theology? If reasonable people disagree about the truths of this particular discipline, the knowledge of the deity, does it make sense to exclude certain factions in that debate from the public sphere? This is the meat of it:

We both accept that there may well be a higher truth beyond empirical inquiry or proof. I respect your opinions in this matter, and feel informed by them. You regard my opinions as inadmissible in public debate, ludicrous, a form of lying, and irrational. Yes, you are being intolerant. More, actually. The entire point of your book is intolerance. Where I respect your position, you refuse to respect mine.

What are these higher truths that Sullivan is talking about?

You rely in your books on a lot of historical facts to buttress your empirical case. But these facts are not true – and could never be proven true – by the scientific method that is your benchmark. Similarly, mathematics can achieve a proof that has no interaction with the physical world. It may even be the closest to divine truth that human beings can achieve. But it is still logically separate from empirically verified truth, from historical truth, and even from the realm of human consciousness that includes aesthetic truth, the truths we find in contemplation of art or of nature.

He’s talking about the difference in scientific and historical rules of evidence, and he’s right: mathematics, science, and history have different ‘normative assumptions.’ The normative assumptions of scientific discourse are simply the propositions one must assume in order to engage in that sort of research: not, “The sky is blue,” but rather, “True propositions require empirical evidence or logical coherence.” The latter claims can of course be reduced to former semantically, but claims like the latter definitely occupy a different position in our discourse. They are claims about how to make claims true, and while there is some philosophical debate over whether these meta-claims are actually propositional, or instead practical, they’re certainly not all equal. How do you ‘prove’ the rules of evidence? How do we ‘prove’ that “1 + 1 = 2″ is truer than, say, “1 + 1 = velveteen giggles in a lugubrious snood”? The answer is, we don’t. Instead, we merely require all entrants into rational debate to sign on to the rules of evidence; and if they don’t, we make fun of them as crackpots.

You can see Sullivan thinking: “Ah, now I’ve got him!” By the normative assumptions of historical research, Poland did not invade Germany in 1933, and by the normative assumptions of theological research, sacred texts and natural law are viable guides to theological knowledge. Yet mathematics and science and history all submit their claims to each other for approval: it’s possible to discredit historians who do bad math in calculating, say, ancient Egyptian populations or the death tolls in the Spanish-American war. The same should go for theological truths, which is constantly submitted to formal logicians and found to be wanting. From that perspective, every doctrinal proposition (Mohammed is Allah’s prophet, Mary was a virgin, Abraham had a covenant with the creator, etc.) fails to satisfy the standards of truth for those sorts of claims. Often, they’re not even consistent with themselves, let alone each other!

The key here, of course, is that theological truths are simply logical truths, and their claim to ontology (having to do with Being or the status of existence) is provably false. Perhaps Harris will point out the mistake of confusing Being with a being… perhaps not. I’d love to see them debate Heidegger’s accusation that Catholic theology fails to account for the ontological difference. He argued that the very best defenses of theology (the ones that give up on doctrine, mostly) start by assuming that God is a thing, an entity that exists. However, they proceed by ascribing to God the status of Being-itself: they assume that all beings ‘refer’ to him as beings. The scholastics always want to say that God is both all that exists in the way that it exists, and also the creator of all that is, but not that God is his own creator. This is self-contradictory in a manner that religious people like to claim is profound, but there’s an easy out that some theologians take: God isn’t an entity, he’s only a verb. That’s fine, as is the conclusion that the only divine thing is existence-in-its-entirety (the universe.) But that’s pantheism, and most of the world’s religions couldn’t survive as pantheisms. Once you’ve begun playing with the basic presuppositions of the Big Three Monotheisms, you’re going to get yourself excommunicated… or called a crackpot.

I don’t blame the pope for excommunicating Galileo. I mean, the best arguments of theologians make me want to shout: “Poppycock!” which is sort of like torturing someone to force them to recant. That’s the very best of them, though: the phenomenologists and metaphysicians toiling away at their dual commitment to faith and reason. Andrew Sullivan doesn’t stand a chance.

Still, it’s exciting to watch these debates happen publicly; they make me feel like the public sphere is still running smoothly. It makes me wish for more smart, thoughtful, wrong people like Andrew Sullivan, just so we could all have the opportunity that Harris is currently enjoying….

UPDATE: It’s come to my attention that Sam Harris may be a bit of a crackpot, himself. Nothing in those links denigrates the good arguments he’s made so far, but it’s a disappointment. Madmen and sociopaths who proclaim that the sky is blue have not thereby disproven that fact, and in the same way, the fact that a pro-torture, pro-xenoglossia guy doesn’t believe in God doesn’t make God suddenly appear. Still, it’s a bit disappointing to have an (apparent) loon in your corner. I’d much rather have the company of a smart conservative deist than a wacko spiritualist “atheist.”

Check out his Inventions Wish List to get started.

The simple truth is that such accumulation of earthly power is ruinous because it takes the eyes of good Christians “off the prize”. Perhaps you wonder what gives me the right to say what is good or bad for Christianity when so many religious leaders would disagree. Because Christianity is the religious faith of another guy named Stephen who told the same thing to religious leaders overly concerned with their earthly privileges: Because Christianity is the faith of Jesus, who cleared out the temple of money-changers. Because Christianity is the faith where a voice said to Peter, “Do not call unclean what I have made clean”. Because Christianity is the faith where one man hammered 99 complaints on a door when the power of the church had lead it astray.

That’s my friend Steven Maloney over at Cows and Graveyards.

Frankly, one of the great sources of Pentecostalism’s appeal is that it’s a kind of para-medicine. One of the chief factors in the life of the poor today is a constant, chronic crisis of health and medicine. This is partially a result of the World Bank’s Structural Adjustment Programs in the 1980s, which devastated public health and access to medicine in so many countries. But Pentecostalism offers faith healing, which is a major attraction – and it’s not entirely bogus. When it comes to things like addictive behavior, Pentecostalism probably has as good a track record curing alcoholism, neuroses, and obsessions as anything else. That’s a huge part of its appeal. Pentecostalism is a kind of spiritual health delivery system.

Davis is a marxist, and most of his analyses are wonderfully creative elaborations of marxian structuralism. Here, I think he hits the thing exactly, which is why I believe there’s still life left in the structuralist carcass. Certainly, the sense of a peripheral health system to address the most basic needs of an underserved population has some of the obvious flaws of all structural analyses: which are the ‘basic’ needs, how powerful are ‘belief systems’ in treating those needs? Yet we can’t help but admit that the lives of the indigent are not so crushing as to make them impossible. There will always be enough food and shelter so that they can go back to work the next day. When there’s not, this is evidence of a crisis which is destructive to the productive cycle of late-capitalism. Yet in the global economic order, this subsistence regimen is incapable of dealing with the predictable but non-daily demands of grinding work.

Many working-class fathers (my grandparents among them) found enough extra cash for a monthly or a weekly binge. Many poor mothers suffer from mental illnesses whose treatments, even for the richest people, involve reflection, medication, and the attention of an expensive expert, and may still be untreatable after all that. Faith-healing and pastoral counseling goes to the root of the problem, and attempts to mobilize the subject against her worst habits. As Davis argues, the improvement in the quality of life of the poor is substantial.

Moreover, this self-discipline is tremendously efficient: for a small tithe, the poor can receive a measure of relief, scaled to their community. Yet as Foucault has pointed out, these disciplinary techniques must be worked out amongst the middle and upper classes. The experimentation around theology, staging, and efficacy all happens in the pentacostal mega-churches of the US Bible Belt, from which it is exported to the more fertile ground of the southern hemisphere. The American middle class finds faith comforting and useful for many of the same reasons as the poor, but the institutions we develop are easily cast off when they become unsatisfying. The global South accepts our cast-offs in this, as in all other things. Yet they also make them uniquely their own.

Just as Catholicism’s liberation theology has been a progressive force in much of Latin America, I predict that Pentacostalism will not long be satisfied with the status quo. Catholicism’s hierarchical design has resisted dictatorial regimes in favor of a growing middle-class, an educated aristocracy. Most marixists admit this is a step in the right direction for countries like Venezuela, Ecuador, or Brazil. Pentacostalism’s personality cults suggests that the political movements that emerge from this “spiritual health delivery system” will have a fascistic tinge, focused on the sovereign healer, his spectacular faith, and his connection to God.

Pentacostalism doesn’t even have the American fundamentalist’s faith that the sacred texts are democratically available to all for literal interpretation. Instead, power and prestige are distributed based on perceived faith, and faith is demonstrated by stunts and miracles. The first political leaders to emerge from this movement will have the force of fanaticism behind them. I do not imagine that this bodes well for the poor men and women seeking a bit of comfort from their dark existence.

In On The Trinity, things become more complicated. Augustine begins by supplying a hierarchy that places the contemplative faculty above the will, and argues that the faculty “to judge of these corporeal things according to incorporeal and eternal reasons” such as ratio and shape, is “part of the higher reason.” Judgment, subsumed under contemplation, nonetheless provides the bridge by which contemplation accesses the corporeal. Augustine takes up this bridging through a sexual metaphor, identifying men and women with the faculties of contemplation and will, and noting that they “embrace” and become “one flesh” in the fashion of marriage and intercourse. Yet this sexing of the spirit’s relationship to the corporeal and the problem of action raises the problem of evil and temptation. Sex is supposed to be bad, right?

Augustine embraces this problem, and supplies a typology whereby all temptation can be read allegorically in the story of Eve’s temptation of Adam with the fruit of knowledge. While earlier in the text he appeared to assign the will the role of fulfilling contemplation’s commands, in order to mirror patriarchal dominance, this story forces him to rearticulate the relationship. So while it seems to his fellow Christians that contemplation and judgment are uniquely or archetypically masculine, he refuses to relegate men to passivity when their role in society shows that they should be assigned to an active principle.

This results in a then-progressive assignment of rational capacity to women. Augustine denies that contemplation and prayer are impossible for women, which will trouble the Catholic Church for centuries before it decides on the priest/nun distinction. In order to supply the requisite inadequacy in women, (for no progressive egalitarian can really stomach a loss of his own cherished superiority) Augustine charges them with a lack of moral turpitude. Females, he suggests, lack sufficient willfulness to resist temptation.

Yet what women might lack in will and power is offset by a corresponding lack of judgment and reasonableness in men. The will may command as a man would have commanded a woman, but the will can only command actions based on the options supplied by contemplation. In the household metaphor, the man stays comfortably ensconced within the home, while the woman goes out into the world and gathers provisions (sense data and perceptions). After her return, the feminine contemplation supplies a choice to the masculine will. However, this choice is something like a menu of options: “Potato chips or a salad?” Yet there remains the problem that some part of the mind must correctly discern that this is a decision that has a correct answer. The question is really: “Junk food or a healthy meal?” But is this capacity for discernment a feminine or a masculine trait? Who best understands the choice: “Sin or virtue?”

In responding to the claim that it is the senses that tempt the mind, and that therefore women are wholly corporeal and spiritually inadequate to salvation, Augustine invokes a trinity, assigning the senses the role of the serpent that tempted Eve. Here, the woman (reason) receives a tempting offer for an extra-marital affair (pleasure), and must decide to stay true to her husband (the will) or to revel in temptation (the senses). Every sin and every act of faith follows this model. In this formulation, again, the contemplative faculty is cast as Eve, in that the received sensory impressions that provide the serpent’s temptations are mediated by contemplation (in the form of judgment) before they proceed to tempt the will to act or remain chaste.

Augustine reaches the conclusion that there is and must be a “rational wedlock of contemplation and action,” which opposes the “hidden wedlock” (adultery) of sin. (OT, XII, 12) But how is the woman to decide between her secret lover and her lawful partner? Augustine calls the answer knowledge, “scientia,” which for Augustine is the practical side of wisdom, “sapientia.” If wisdom discerns the eternal law, than knowledge tells us what it means. Sapience gives us access to the rule, while science is the application of those rules to cases. This will come to be called judgment.

The result is a series of trinities, wherein the second term mediates between the first and third, and seems always to be feminine: perception-reason-will becomes reason-judgment-will. In the first case, the sexual binary makes woman the mediator: the judge who tempts the will. But in the second case, it is still the woman who chooses the lover over the husband or vice versa. Augustine gives up on the sexuation of the mind at this point, refusing to sex knowledge and wisdom, though he might easily have assigned men a superior cacacity for intellection of the divine here by supplying women with mere cleverness for worldly matters.

As the sexual metaphors breaks down, Augustine also points up the inevitable problem of subsuming judgment wholly under the mind’s other faculties. He had begun with identifying judgment with contemplation as such, but he runs into the problem of expansion: contemplation must contemplate itself at times. We must occasionally take our thoughts and think about them. Without a separate capacity, this seems likely to result in a sort of infinite undecidability. Judgment and contemplation cannot be simply utilized by the will, nor discerned by reason, but must actually act distinct from them, based both on experience and the courage of character or moral luck that allows a person to found her judgments of those experiences correctly.

Michael Sandel, (yes, that Sandel) while working on the presidential Council on Bioethics, wrung this statement from expert witness John M. Opitz, MD:

Sandel: “…[W]hat percent of fertilized eggs fail to implant or are otherwise lost?”
Opitz: “Estimates range all the way from 60 percent to 80 percent of the very earliest stages, cleavage stages, for example, that are lost.“

Hmmm…. so, in 2003, there were about 4 million babies born in the United States. Given the most conservative estimate of 60% lost before parturition, that means that 6 million embryos were destroyed by natural causes. This is convenient, as it is the most popular estimate for Jewish deaths during the Shoah (Holocaust). Since I’ve previously railed against the equation of abortion with genocide, this seems apropos.

If I can find some global population statistics that chart total human population throughout history, I’m thinking of putting up a running total: Abortions: God v. Man. This would be especially interesting given plague and disaster death rates, plus historical v. current infant mortality rates. Sadly, I’m not a statistician, I’m a philosopher, so I’ll continue to depend on the experts. The CDC recorded 857,000 abortions in 2000, so, to keep the numbers round, let’s say 1 million.

For 2003:
Humans: 1 million
God: 6 million

I would argue that any God worthy of invocation (i.e., an intelligent designer, deist or participatory) would not design a system with such a lousy success rate if this deity were concerned primarily with the survival of all embryos. Thus, God is objectively not pro-life. If you believe in predestination or election, then all conceivable omnipotent and omniscient creator-Gods must be understood as pro-choice (not ours, though) and pro-death.