Deluded Dawkins - The Case of the Suicide Bombers

In "The God Delusion", Dawkins asks:

 

Why did these cricket-loving young men do it? Unlike their Palestinian counterparts, or their kamikaze counterparts in Japan, or their Tamil Tiger counterparts in Sri Lanka, these human bombs had no expectation that their bereaved families would be lionized, looked after or supported on martyrs' pensions. On the contrary, their relatives in some cases had to go into hiding. One of the men wantonly widowed his pregnant wife and orphaned his toddler. The action of these four young men has been nothing short of a disaster not just for themselves and their victims, but for their families and for the whole Muslim community in Britain, which now faces a backlash. Only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people.

 

Note the rhetorical trick of the last sentence, which tries to argue that if we have excluded every other option, only religion could produce such an effect. Actually, I'm not really sure that the Palestinian bombers, or the Basque seperatists, or the Japanese pilots on suicide missions (for the honour of their country) had at the front of their minds that their families would be looked after or lionised; that may have been known to be the case, but surely was of marginal import - a comfort, but not a necessary one. Or does Dawkins seriously think that if that was not the case, they would have said "no!"?

 

February 12, 1894. Emile Henry set a bomb in Café Terminus, killing one and injuring twenty. During his trial, he declares: "There is no innocent bourgeois".

 

September 16, 1920. The Wall Street bombing kills 38 and wounds 400 in Manhattan's Financial District. Anarchists associated with Luigi Galleani are widely believed responsible although the crime remains officially unsolved.

 

What have these in common with Georges Sorel's "Reflections on Violence" (1908), which remains a controversial text to this day. It unashamedly advocates the use of violence as a means of putting an end to the corrupt politics of bourgeois democracy and of bringing down capitalism.

 

They have to do with the "deed of propoganda" advocated by some branches of the anarchist movement. They are not religious motivations, but ideological ones. Contrary to Dawkins, history shows that ideology is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people.