Well, I didn't think my question was a loaded one. Of course the most fundamentalist religionists will ignore what's right in front of them, but there's still a very statistically significant portion of people who would lose their faith. Anyone who wants to is welcome to answer, but the discussion seems to have moved on.
I think that, to gain a bit more perspective, we should engage in yet another hypothetical exercise; I find them to be most helpful as a general rule. One thing that no one here likes is fundamentalist Islam. Hell, no one outside of fundamentalist Islam actually likes it or even believes in a single damn thing it has to say. Despite the moral terrorism many Christian factions often engage in, threats of physical violence against "infidels" in this day and age are almost exclusively the domain of the Jihadists, and this must take precedence. Since this is a thread about defeating religion, why not conduct an exercise where the opponent is the most visible symbol of religious oppression, and see what we learn? What are we to do to defeat radical Islam?
Republican foreign policy so far hasn't seemed to have done a very good job. It's inflamed racial and religious tensions, wasted billions of dollars, and has very little gain to show for it. At this point, only something as monumental as the capture of Osama bin Laden would provide a redeeming factor. However, the Democratic approach -- sitting at home and doing nothing -- isn't likely to have any effect, either. It is the goal of radical Islam to literally conquer the world; though it take a hundred years, they will eventually bring the conflict to the doorsteps of civilized nations in force if they are not stopped overseas. I use the term "civilized nations" with full knowledge of the implication that Muslim theocracies are necessarily barbaric, because it's a
prima facie case of "wow, did you figure that out all by yourself?" A Christian theocracy would be similarly barbaric, but despite the continued attacks on the separation of church and state by fundamentalist factions, we don't have one of those at present. So, are we to enter into a second Cold War with the terrorists that could last another fifty or a hundred years? Are we to engage in World War III on religious grounds? Neither possibility is particularly appealing, and it's relatively clear that there's no magic pill you can take for this ailment. We're long past the diplomatic stage with these people; they don't want diplomacy, or peace, or cooperation. They want war.
Another possibility is to cut their funding, but that means kidnapping or assassinating private citizens of other countries where the U.S. has no jurisdiction, and that isn't going to go over well for a country that proclaims itself the land of the free. It also means invading some other countries and wasting more money, which is basically what Republicans want to do. There's also the problem of weak-willed European nations such as France, Italy, and Germany that give in to terrorists' cash demands in return for the exchange of hostages; a week ago, France, Italy, and Germany were revealed to have paid a combined total of $45 million for the release of hostages. It's admirable, and necessary, to care what happens to your people, but the fact is that paying ransom is pointless and only serves to fund the terrorists. If you don't pay the ransom, the hostages get killed. If you do pay the ransom, the hostages are (usually) released, but they keep on kidnapping your civilians because they know you'll pay.
There's also another, much more confrontational option; pull a Babylon 5 and break off from everyone else, daring the world to fuck with us. Such a maneuver would certainly justify our military expenditures, but would put us at odds with damn near everyone, as if we weren't already. We have the military infrastructure to pull it off, but that isn't enough of a justification. We need global trade to sustain ourselves, and unlike us, Captain Sheridan had the benefit of an excellent writer to guide his path in that regard. Also, he came back from the dead, again unlike us. The American government has no such luck, and with Bush in charge, it actually has negative amounts of that kind of luck. Nations who pay ransom to terrorists can be considered enemy collaborators; you know how many civilians can be killed with $45 million? A bloody awful lot, that's how many.
Some closing thoughts: The Church was once nothing less than a terrorist organization in its own right, save that it was, thanks to its Roman benefactors, far more powerful than the Jihad. Eventually, though, it was defeated and practices physical terrorism no longer. Its quota of moral terrorism has also been reduced, via the fragmentation of Christianity thanks to the Protestant Reformation. I wonder if such a thing is possible with regards to the Jihadists; might there be an Islamic Reformation? A mighty lot of Muslims are sick of having
this happen to them.
