“Primum non nocere.” Doctors know the ancient rule, “First, do no harm,” and that ought to be the moral foundation for interventions in other states and societies. The American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq was an unnecessary procedure, ill considered and ill conceived, with disastrous results. One problem, Saddam Hussein, was eliminated. Countless new and dangerous afflictions were created.

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I recently attended a lecture by senior members of the Indonesian police about a network of terrorists who called themselves Muslims. Among the Power Point slides presented were mug shots of suicide bombers taken after the fact. Their explosive belts destroyed their bodies but left their heads intact, and the face of each was frozen at the moment of death with an expression of surprise, as if they had just seen or experienced something that really was quite unexpected. Did they behold the gates of Paradise, as they were taught they would by the people who recruited and instructed them in an aberrant version of Islam? Or did they glimpse the depths of hell as they stole away the lives of innocents in their campaign of horror? Where are the souls of those bombers now?

Surely they are nowhere, in the physical sense of a celestial or subterranean locale. If we are talking about a literal cartography of the cosmos, then, no, I certainly do not believe in heaven or hell. Nor, for that matter, do I believe that the word “now” has much relevance. Eternity is not something you check on your watch. If those self-executed murderers’ spirits endured in any way, they were beyond the measurement of present or future time.

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