Are fundamentalists rational?

First of two posts I have been working on on the topic of religion and how our understanding of religion and religious liberty relates to radical Islam in today's context.

Shortly after it came out I read this piece What ISIS really wants  by Graeme Wood in the Atlantic.  It was the first piece I had read on ISIS that felt like a thorough effort to understand what the group was about and what motivated them.  Nearly all of the writing and news coverage about ISIS I have encountered before and since takes little time to try and understand ISIS, but seems assume that ISIS is either 'just another terror group that hates America and the West' or 'just another group of thugs and warlords twisting a religion to their own nefarious ends'.  I don't think either of those two explanations are adequate.  Several months ago I read The Way of the Strangers , also by Graeme Wood and in many ways an expansion of his Atlantic article,  I found the book fascinating and I would highly recommend that you read it.

One of my major take aways from the book was how rational the behavior of people within ISIS is.  I realize that probably sounds odd, so let me expand.

We all have a 'woldview'; a conscious and unconscious mashup of our education, social interactions, and unique experience that frames the way that we think about life and the world.  For argument's sake, imagine that your framework has three facts at its core, that Allah is God Omnipotent, that Mohammed was his prophet, and that the Quran consists of the literal and inerrant words of Allah.  To those of us who are not Muslim, these three things seem like wild leaps of faith.  It is more comfortable to explain the actions of an ISIS suicide bomber or executioner as simply deranged if we imagine that they are 'religious fanatics' completely devoid of the ability to reason, but it is not reflective of reality to act as if basic worldview shaping beliefs like these are simply chosen off of a menu of options after rational debate.  The process by which we come to foundational beliefs like these is messy, evolutionary, and often transparent to us as it happens.  Of course we are capable of rationally assessing our beliefs.  Of course we are capable of changing based on experience or the assimilation of new information, but if we are honest there are probably things that we believe that we have never truly questioned or subjected to rational assessment.  If you grew up in the USA, you probably place a high value on the rights of the individual, and you probably believe that the right of the government to govern flows from the consent of the governed.  Did you come by this belief by sitting down one day in your adult life and weighing the merits of this part of your worldview against one that included the divine right of kings?  

 So if we grant that certain beliefs can be present in our worldview without undergoing a strict assessment of their rationality, we see how someone might build an internal system of beliefs that is entirely consistent, rational and logical within itself, although it is based on a foundation that might be completely irrational.  If you believe those three fundamental ideas about Islam, there are a whole list of behaviors that are perfectly logical and consistent within that framework that are pretty incomprehensible to those of us who do not have those facts at the core of our framework.  If you believe that those things are truth, fact, like gravity, then it is feasible to build an understanding of the world where the actions of ISIS are not only justified, but good and right.

Let me be clear here, I believe ISIS is evil.  I'm perfectly at peace with the fact that the work I do every day directly enables the delivery of US bombs to ISIS positions in Iraq and Syria.

My discussion of the 'rationality' of a worldview like that of ISIS is not an attempt to legitimize it, but to understand it more thoroughly in order to effectively combat it.  Inadequate understandings of an enemy and what motivates them can only lead to policies and decisions that are ineffective at best and massively harmful at worst.  US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 is full of examples of this.

All that to say, the first major conclusion I took from Wood's writing was that ISIS is an inherently religious movement, one that is animated by the belief that what they do they do because it is right in the eyes of their god.  That understanding should be given adequate weight in the formation of US policy and strategy.            

The second thing that struck me as I read this book was the similarity between the arguments, language, and hermeneutics (props if you don't have to google that word;) that the ISIS scholars Wood writes about used, and those I grew up immersed in.

Pause to breathe, I am not saying that my rural american christian Church of Christ upbringing is the same as being brought up in the faith that motivates ISIS, but I am saying that there are certain ideas, concepts, ways of looking at scripture (the Bible or Quran as the case may be) that were almost indistinguishable between the two.

Religion has a tremendous power to motivate, as history bears out, and that power is subtle.  We just discussed how certain beliefs can enter a worldview without strict scrutiny, and with that context I think the motivating power of 'fundamentalist' religious movements (like ISIS in this case) comes not from their tendency to forsake reason, but their seeming eagerness to embrace simplicity, reason, and logic in their interpretation of their faith.

Here is the specific concept that struck me as most similar between the ideology that I was brought up in and that that Wood describes from ISIS scholars.  The simple idea that scripture is literal, it is the word of god, it means what it says, and it does not require complex, nuanced interpretation.

A common phrase in the tradition I grew up in was 'the Bible requires no interpretation'.  While I now believe that assertion to be laughable for a number of reasons, there is something extremely attractive about an understanding that is this straight forward.  If god says 'stone the adulterer' in scripture, then it means that if I want to do his will, I should stone adulterers.  I don't need to create a system of increasingly ambiguous interpretations by which I turn the literal meaning into something different and more culturally palatable.  This simple approach to scripture was the crux of what I found so similar between the religion that Wood describes and the one that I was raised in.  I think even a completely non religious person can understand and appreciate the attraction of a system that says, it doesn't matter what other people think, it doesn't matter what is appropriate, what is culturally acceptable, this is the RIGHT thing, this is TRUE, do it this way.  A simple understanding of scripture feels honest, it feels genuine, it feels empowering.

So what do you believe that you haven't assessed rationally?  Is it worth our effort to diligently and continually scrutinize everything we believe?  Is 'human reason' an adequate tool to decide what to believe?