Boston Globe : War's sacred toll

LAST WEEK, explosions once again tore through the great Askariya mosque in Samarra, one of the Shi'ite faith's most revered shrines. Its massive golden dome had been destroyed by bombs last year, and now its proud golden minarets are gone. Dozens of mosques, Sunni as well as Shi'ite, have been targeted in the sectarian violence. These deliberate provocations initiate cycles of attack and revenge, aiming at a broader collapse of moral order that will finally drive the American occupiers out of Iraq, fully discrediting those who embraced them.

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When war sets loose the impulse to hurt and to destroy, what matters most to an enemy moves to the center of the target.

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In the 20th century, the Nazi war against the Jews began with the Kristallnacht attacks on synagogues in 1938. General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, wanted the first atomic bomb used against Kyoto, a city of shrines and temples, exactly because it was the religious capital of Japan. (When Secretary of War Henry Stimson removed Kyoto from the target list because of its sacred character, he could imagine the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as virtuous.) The genocidal violence of the Khmer Rouge included the trashing of Angkor Wat, one of the most magnificent temple complexes in the world. And the arrival of a new kind of Islamic extremism was announced by nothing more powerfully than the Taliban's destruction of the two Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001.

What is going on here? These attacks are against more than places and structures. Religion is a mode of meaning, but religious meaning is more than a set of ideas. God is present in the world as meaning is present in words and symbols, and that intimate connection between the divine and its expression, including the architecture and design of sacred buildings, enables believers to experience the touch of God on earth. However much religious impulses can be complicit in violence, that ineffable and precious touch is the absolute opposite of war. Human beings can never kill each other without killing God.