9/11 and the American Empire: How Should Religious People Respond?

9/11 and the American Empire:
How Should Religious People Respond?
An Address by David Ray Griffin

Distribution via the Unanswered Questions Wire
http://www.unansweredquestions.org/ .

Table of Contents

1. Religious People
2. American Empire: Divergent Views
3. 9/11: Four Interpretations
4. 9/11 and the American Empire
5. Evidence for Foreknowledge by US Officials
6. Evidence that US Officials Planned and Executed the Attacks
Fully Facing the Truth about the American Empire
How Should Religious People Respond?

Notes

[Note: This lecture was delivered at the University of Wisconsin at Madison on April 18, 2005, and first broadcast by C-Span2 (BookTV) on April 30. Although this text does not correspond exactly to the lecture as orally delivered, all the differences are trivial except that, of course, the oral presentation had to get along without footnotes.
- David Ray Griffin]

I will begin by unpacking the key terms in the title of my talk: “9/11,” “American empire,” and “religious people,” beginning with the last one.


1. Religious People


Although I am a Christian theologian, I am in this talk addressing religious people in general. I am doing so because I believe that religious people should respond to 9/11 and the American empire in a particular way because of moral principles of their religious traditions that are common to all the historic religious traditions.[1] I have in mind principles such as:

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors’ oil.
Thou shalt not murder thy neighbors in order to steal their oil.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbors, accusing them of illicitly harboring weapons of mass destruction, in order to justify killing them in order to steal their oil.

This language is, of course, language that we associate with the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But the same basic ideas can be found in other religious traditions.
I turn now to “American empire,” which has been a highly contentious term.