The difficult task of moving the minds of zealotry By ROBYN E. BLUMNER <mailto:blumner@sptimes.com>
(c) St. Petersburg Times, published October 28, 2001 I don't remember the grade I was in when I first learned about the Salem witch trials or the Spanish Inquisition. But I do remember at the time thinking how incomprehensible those chapters in human history were.

How could anyone with a rational mind believe that a neighbor is a witch, conjuring evil? How could anyone, and especially the most educated elite of the medieval Catholic Church, believe that heresy, or not strictly adhering to Catholic doctrine, is a crime worthy of torture and death?

From my vantage, growing up in the America of the 1970s, the superstition, religious fervor and mass ignorance that pervaded 15th century Spain and 17th century Massachusetts were inconceivable. Why, I wondered, couldn't they see how wrong they were?

Since then, I have been personally exposed to modern brutality in the name of religion: in Kano, Nigeria, where Muslims want Shariah, their harsh brand of religious law, as the law of the land, which has led Christians and Muslims to slaughter each other; in China, where even the Bishop of Shanghi, a man who spent 27 years in prison for practicing Catholicism, believes members of the Falun Gong religious sect deserve to be persecuted.

Through these experiences, I have come to learn that mankind is rarely able to see beyond his own place and time.

I say that as we look to the Muslim world of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Indonesia -- 1.15-billion strong -- with questions about why so many people in those regions hate us with such zeal that they celebrated after our deaths at the hands of murderers who bore their religious stripe. Why does their interpretation of Islam include our demise, with the label "infidel" carrying an intrinsic threat of violence? Do they really believe that because we don't live like them, think like them, or share their religious views or cultural values that we must forfeit life?

And if that is so, then how do we get them to see beyond their own place and time? How do we move a mind?

I should have an answer for that. After all, it's my job to move minds. I struggle with it every day. To have any chance of getting a reader to come around to my point of view, I know I have to present a compelling argument based on sound reasoning that connects to him or her in some real-life way.

Yet, even when appealing to people with similar interests, concerns and life experiences to my own, victories are rare. In places like Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Afghanistan -- which are cloistered and isolated, where boys grow up being taught in madrasas, or religious schools, to see their lives in starkly religious terms, where martyrdom is a ticket to paradise and violence against non-followers is a sacred tenet -- the job is a thousand-fold more difficult.

Still, it is not impossible to move the minds of people blinded by religious zealotry. In the wonderful series Evolution on PBS, documentarians spent time at Wheaton College, a conservative Christian college in Illinois, talking to students in the natural sciences. Many came from families that embraced biblical literalism -- you know, a six-day Earth and Adam and Eve.

But at Wheaton, they were studying geology, archaeology, biology and genetics -- disciplines that all pointed to a 4-billion-year-old planet and the validity of Darwin's natural selection. While it was a struggle, a number of the students interviewed couldn't help but be swayed by the rationality of science.

"You're a scientist, the evidence is before you, and you want to say, "Well, then this goes completely against my whole upbringing,' " geology student Nathan Baird told producers. "That's a struggle I've gone through this year."

John Philip Jenkins, professor of history and religious studies at Penn State, who is an expert on religious cults, said trying to alter the perception of cult followers or fundamentalists in the United States is different than doing so in isolated societies where no alternative perspectives are available.

People in closed societies "come to define their ideas from other members of that group and get their punishment and reward from following the values of the group," said Jenkins. He believes the only way to change the premises on which these societies operate is to alter the culture: "In Palestine, you have tens of thousands of people prepared to give up their lives in a suicide attack. . . . It's not irrational, it's held out as a model to other people to imitate it. You know if you are a suicide bomber you will be a major figure and your picture will be on posters and you will go to paradise.

"If you want to do anything about this, you have to change the culture."

Our State Department is finally coming to this realization. Recently, before the House International Relations Committee, Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Charlotte Beers spoke of launching a Middle East Radio Network to expose Arab nations to American values. She said it's part of "The battle for the 11-year-old mind."

We know there is no way we can stop all the anthrax or all the terrorists from crossing our borders, but maybe there is a way to keep the next crop of suicide bombers from being sown. It's just a matter of moving a mind.

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