Bin Laden Dead?

Initial reports say that bin Laden has been killed by a u.s. air strike.

I’d be interested to know what the rationale was for killing him rather than capturing him for trial, given that his death doesn’t make much sense as a war aim (i.e., it’s not going to have much appreciable effect on al-Qaeda’s effectiveness, given that terrorism is driven by political situations, not by individual evil masterminds). I’d also like to know who else was killed in the strike, and in particular how many noncombatants.

No tears for bin Laden here, but I predict we’ll be in for a ghoulish firestorm of vindictive celebration for the next few days. I wonder how many self-professed Christians will recall the injunction to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.”

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35 Responses to Bin Laden Dead?

  1. mstob May 1, 2011 at 10:36 pm #

    Roderick, don’t you understand?!

    We’ve Won! The war is over!

  2. Sergio Méndez May 1, 2011 at 10:54 pm #

    Prediction fullfiled…as many people are celebrating outside the white house.

  3. MRDA May 1, 2011 at 11:12 pm #

    What’s to say he was killed/died anytime close to recent?

  4. Roderick May 1, 2011 at 11:22 pm #

    Good piece by Anthony Gregory here.

  5. Pyrrho May 1, 2011 at 11:23 pm #

    Rod, the injunction to love your neighbour does not mean you are supposed to emotionally love them, nor to leave yourself vulnerable to exploitation. It means to treat your neighbors appropriatley as humans, such as feeding POWs and not butchering people who surrender, etc. It does not entail being nice and friendly and whatnot.

    Not to mention that the Bible is super contradictory on this. The Jesus in Revelation and some parts of the Gospels is clearly a deity of Apocalypticism and the Near Eastern Combat Myth, and as much as it annoys libertarian Christians this Jesus fits in perfectly well with the Righteous Crusader mentality.

    There is no singular Jesus in the Bible, he’s a mix of Apocalyptic, Messianic, Gnostic, Stoic and Cynic elements. Appeals to the Bible directed at Christians are therefor pretty vain or rhetorical, since anything can be supported by the Bible.

    • Roderick May 2, 2011 at 2:12 am #

      the injunction to love your neighbour does not mean you are supposed to emotionally love them

      Whatever it means, it’s incompatible with jubilant glorying in their deaths.

      • MBH May 2, 2011 at 5:14 am #

        Agreed. A trial would have been the real victory. Unfortunately, in America, right-wing media outlets create shit-storms over applying the legal system in cases where right-wingers can’t see how the Space of Reasons will reveal all that needs to be revealed.

        Good article here by Al Jazeera.

      • Pyrrho May 2, 2011 at 6:04 am #

        Perhaps, but this could also be an injunction of perfection. We have a right to wrath, but it is not a good idea.

        • Roderick May 2, 2011 at 11:55 am #

          The notion of “counsels of perfection” that are supererogatory is hard to square with the command “be ye therefore perfect.”

  6. Pyrrho May 1, 2011 at 11:27 pm #

    Leviticus 19: “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against a fellow Israelite, but love your neighbor as yourself.” is the source of Jesus’ quote, and when properly translated does not have the Universalist/pacifist connotation that many so seek after. Nowhere in the Bible does it ever say that God or Jesus love everyone, and there are some people he hates (Esau, for example). This liberal hippy-dippy Jesus is a frickin’ fantasy. Even the closest to it, the Cynic Jesus, still has the impatience of Diogenes for fools and he ‘sets his teeth in rascals’.

    • Roderick May 2, 2011 at 2:18 am #

      Nowhere in the Bible does it ever say that God or Jesus love everyone

      Actually it does. It also says the opposite. Because it was written by a lot of different people with different views and for different contexts.

      when properly translated does not have the Universalist/pacifist connotation that many so seek after

      I don’t know about pacifism, but it’s hard to avoid universalist conclusions from the injunction to love one’s neighbour (combined with the apparent moral of the Good Samaritan parable that we should treat everybody as neighbours) and to love one’s enemies.

      • Pyrrho May 2, 2011 at 6:02 am #

        I am going to say again, it does not say he loves everyone. It says he loves his people, which excludes unrepentant sinners.

        As regards the Good Samaritan tale, what it is meant to instruct is that it is not the formal or ritual pietism that matters but personal piety; and this is almost certainly from the Cynic tradition of guffawing at the people who play at being god-fearing but are cads in their own lives; just as the Epistles show when it talks of the righteous pagans who do not know the law but still behave well as contrasted to the learned scribes who know the law but break it anyways. It is also a kind of ‘physician, heal thyself” and a ‘board and mote’ story, which are themselves in line with the Cynic worldview.

        • Roderick May 2, 2011 at 12:15 pm #

          I am going to say again, it does not say he loves everyone. It says he loves his people, which excludes unrepentant sinners.

          Well, here’s what’s actually attributed to Jesus:

          Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: FOR he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye THEREFORE perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. (Matthew 5: 43-48)

          This is a clear injunction that we should love even “enemies” and the “evil,” which sure sounds like it includes unrepentant sinners. And I think the “for” and “therefore” make it clear that the reason given for the claim that we should do so is that God does so.

          As regards the Good Samaritan tale, what it is meant to instruct is that it is not the formal or ritual pietism that matters but personal piety

          Well, what it says it’s meant to teach is the answer to the question “who is my neighbour?”

        • MBH May 2, 2011 at 2:46 pm #

          And even if Jesus, as a teacher of the Torah, wasn’t claiming to be manifesting HaShem (the father), he would have been claiming, by or with the father, to manifest Adonai — a concept equal to Robert Pirsig’s notion of Quality. Quality is that which is prior to the division between subject and object. A concept that necessarily manifests as compassion or, at least, constant capacity for and vigilance through verstehen.

          If that doesn’t do anything for you, think of it the way Roderick treats Wittgenstein’s treatment of Frege’s third realm: it’s a priori inner/outer, mind/matter — meaning that those divisions aren’t real to begin with. So any “belief” that one cannot perfectly love one’s neighbor as oneself is illusion. Even if the neighbor has darker skin or a different prayer book or different sexual orientation or different body parts or, well, sins frequently.

        • Roderick May 2, 2011 at 4:21 pm #

          Thanks for the help, I guess, though I confess I am, as often, unsure what you’re saying!

        • MBH May 2, 2011 at 5:45 pm #

          I suspect we just use different first-level analogues. So it seems like different languages. Have you ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?

        • MBH May 2, 2011 at 6:21 pm #

          Names of God.

        • Roderick May 2, 2011 at 6:29 pm #

          Have you ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?

          No.

          Names of God.

          I know what Adonai and HaShem mean. I don’t understand how you use them in your post.

        • MBH May 2, 2011 at 7:14 pm #

          JC says the only way to F is through JC. If JC were the manifestation of F, then he would instead say: the only way to F is to (not ‘through’) me. He’s saying he’s a bridge. I take F — HaShem (the name) — to be language itself (consider how Frege calls propositions “complex names”, well, the name would be something like all the propositions). But in a world of subjects and objects, one can’t conceive of all the propositions (even if they’re infinite) because one can’t even get a sense of them as such. To do so, one has to take on a certain perspective (Wittgenstein in TLP calls it one’s environment as a limited whole). But that makes perception itself polycentric, meaning: the proposition itself acts as the sense organ: words are like skin and propositions are like bones. And from that perspective, reasons for action are independent of one’s ego (similar to how Nagel thinks about it). That perspective is perfect compassion. So JC devotes his agency to embodying that perspective (the Holy Spirit — perfect compassion — Adonai). W. says in PI 98: “[…] where there is sense there must be perfect order.” So the idea that JC asks something impossible of us is a mis-“understanding” of the injunction. It’s something we’re easily capable of over time so long as one practices looking at the world through Adonai. Better?

        • MBH May 2, 2011 at 7:18 pm #

          I actually expand the Body of Christ metaphor here if anyone finds it helpful.

        • Roderick May 2, 2011 at 8:39 pm #

          I didn’t follow all of that. But I suspect I think something broadly similar; see here, here, here.

        • MBH May 2, 2011 at 9:19 pm #

          Before I read these, I should note that I probably read them when you wrote them. Those pieces (along with your lectures) immeasurably helped shape my thoughts here. I was ready to give up theism until I found this line of thinking.

        • MBH May 5, 2011 at 12:43 am #

          I need to amend my take on which Hebrew names of God that Jesus uses. The father is likely Elohim: the plural name of God that creates man. The Midrash thinks of Elohim as truth, peace, righteousness, and love. I stick with Adonai as the Holy Spirit. And I think of Jesus as an embodiment of HaShem — a bridge between language and arete.

          I also believe all this to be well within the bounds of theological logicism.

  7. Jan May 1, 2011 at 11:46 pm #

    If all they are saying is true, it was probably a firefight and there was no possibility of a capture.

    • Gray Woodland May 2, 2011 at 1:05 am #

      Or if there was such a possibility, it might have cost lives to make it happen, which wouldn’t make sense from any standpoint. If there is one single killing in the War on Everything that ought to have happened, this is pretty much the one.

      I am considerably less sanguine about its being allowed to do any good, for instance by declaring victory in the War on Everything and going presently home.

  8. Thomassabo May 2, 2011 at 10:00 am #

    I infer.Americans will may be more attacks by terrorist ,special who oversea .

  9. Roderick May 3, 2011 at 10:27 am #

    New info (or disinfo, or who knows what) about the bin Laden killing.

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