THE WISDOM FUND: News & Views
October 19, 2007
davidraygriffin.com

9/11 and Nationalist Faith: How Faith Can Be Illuminating or Blinding

by David Ray Griffin

It is often said that Christian faith is the dominant form of faith in America. It is also often said that faith is a bad thing, which prevents religious people from determining the answers to various vital questions on the basis of the relevant evidence. Faith, in other words, is regarded as not simply blind, but blinding.

The truth about America, however, is more complex. Another kind of faith, radically different from Christian faith, is actually the dominant faith in our country. Even within the church, Christian faith tends to subordinate to this other form of faith. With regard to certain truths, moreover, this other form of faith is blinding, while Christian faith at its best is illuminating.

One of these truths is the truth about 9/11. "The evidence that 9/11 was an inside job," I said at the outset of my book Debunking 9/11 Debunking, "is overwhelming. Most people who examine this evidence with an open mind find it convincing." The only real problem is to get people to examine this evidence, at least with, in Richard Falk's phrase, "even just a 30-percent open mind."

Why is it so difficult for many people, including journalists, seriously to examine the evidence? There are many reasons, especially when we are talking about journalists. But one of those reasons, probably the main one, I will suggest, is the blinding power of the dominant faith of Americans.

I will then suggest that Christian faith at its best opens us to the truth about 9/11 by allowing us to look at the evidence without flinching. Christian faith is not necessary, of course: Many members of the 9/11 Truth Movement are not Christians. But it can help, partly because it contains warnings against the kind of faith that makes it difficult for many Americans, and especially for America as such, to see the truth about 9/11.

The Truth about 9/11: A False-Flag Attack

What is this truth? It is, as I already suggested, that 9/11 was an inside job, orchestrated by forces within our own government. It was a false-flag attack, with evidence planted to make it appear to have been planned and carried out by Arab Muslims. The expression "false-flag attack" originally referred to operations in which the attackers, perhaps in ships, literally showed the flag of an enemy country, so that it would be blamed. But the expression has come to be used for any attack made to appear to be the work of some country or group other than that to which the attackers themselves belong.

Imperial powers have regularly staged such attacks when they wanted a pretext to go to war.

. . . Many Americans have a kind of faith that blinds them to the truth about 9/11. This faith also prevents this evidence from being discussed in the mainstream media. What is this faith?

I am drawing here from an essay, unpublished at this time, by Christian theologian John Cobb. Pointing out that people generally presuppose "the vision of reality" of the society in which they grow up, he says: "We may call [this] largely unconscious underlying and overarching view of the world, as well as the more conscious beliefs in which it is expressed, 'a faith.'" "For a thousand years prior to the Renaissance," Cobb adds, "the 'faith' of the great majority of Europeans was Christian." In the modern world, however,

"one's loyalty and one's identity [came to be] defined by geography rather than religion. . . . Virtue was redefined as patriotism. . . Saints were replaced by national heroes. The stories of one's nation took over from the Christian story in education and in public functions. . . . [B]eing a Christian became optional. Public debates pro and con Christianity are fully acceptable. But . . . [t]here is no public debate about national loyalty. In short the dominant "faith" of most people in the modern world has been nationalist." . . .

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[David Ray Griffin is Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Theology, Emeritus, Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, where he remains a co-director of the Center for Process Studies.

He has published (as author or editor) 34 books, primarily in theology, philosophy, and philosophy of religion, with special emphases on the problem of evil and the relation between science and religion.

Seven of his books deal with 9/11: The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (2004), The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (2005), Christian Faith and the Truth about 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action (2006), 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (2006, co-edited with Peter Dale Scott), Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory (2007), and 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press, and The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Expose (2008).

This lecture was delivered October 19, 2007, at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado.]

"What Really Happened on September 11, 2001," The Wisdom Fund

[Justice comes through truth and the purpose of truth is justice.

Based on fard 'ain, when people start worshipping the state, such as in the oxymoronic concept of the "Islamic state", or the NeoCon concept that stability trumps truth and human rights, then I think it is everyone's personal responsibility to speak the truth as one sees it and let the chips fall where they may.

The head of the National Security Council, Dick Allen, who at one time was one of my closest friends, said that to pursue anything other than the power of America and whatever would contribute to it was treasonous. This perfectly represented the false god of nationalism that Professor David Ray Griffin exposed in his brilliant essay, "911 and Nationalist Faith: How Faith Can be Illuminating or Blinding: A Theological Analysis".

Muslims have a special responsibility to "out" false gods, especially in this most polytheistic period of human history, but so does everyone else, whether the issue is false flag operations to justify unilateral preemption or false paradigms in economics, such as the currently reigning false concepts of money and banking, which are causing the escalating wealth gap that eventually, unless its structural causes are exposed, must destroy all civilization on earth perhaps for centuries to come.-- Robert D. Crane, March 23, 2011]

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