Religion
In reply to the discussion: Do 9/11, San Bernardino and Nice illustrate a problem with Islamic theology? [View all]whatthehey
(3,660 posts)No I think we need to separate the apologists from the doers. We rarely hear from actual shoot/bomb/kill terrorists. Instead we hear from spokespeople and propagandists behind the scenes. When the people who actually pull triggers and plant bombs speak, or when we backtrack from the social media or relatives' statements, a lot of what gives the apologists here and elsewhere in the Guilty White Left some semblance of cover for their absurd "religion had nothing to do with this" lie is that we find people who have little and incoherent understanding of their faith (same for Christians and Muslims. Robert Dear gave no religious arguments for why God wanted him to save baby parts any more than the ISIS prisoners in this article can explain Islamic arguments, which are very easy to find as you say, for what they do https://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/). They don't follow even basic doctrine (he drank booze so he can't be a Muslim!) and are not especially pious or devoted.
But, as again the article explains better than I, these people really are religious and really see themselves fighting for a specific interpretation of Islam. They just don't understand it, can't explain it and don't follow it themselves for the most part. Even the people who recruit and radicalize them but don't get their hands dirty aren't much better (what was that quite high-ranking fundamentalist cleric with the killed Pakistani model doing drinking with her, an unrelated female, in daylight during Ramadan?) The people we hear giving anything approaching reasonable, even what qualifies as such in the fantasy world of theology, explanations for why God hates gays/wants infidels killed/ thinks killing a doctor is more virtuous than aborting a blastocyst are never involved in terrorism themselves. They are the apologists for it, but the people who actually do it are simply seeing religion in basic tribal I'm right they are not exclusionary terms.
I mean really with all the multifarious examples of religiously-inspired terrorism in the last few decades, most but not all Islamic, I'm having a very tough time thinking of any actual perpetrator who either could later explain, or had earlier set the stage for, their own actions in any kind of reasonably cogent theological construct. And no I'm not limiting that to dense 70,000 word deconstructions of Barthes or an encyclopaedic commentary on hadith; I'd settle for "I killed them because scripture says X and it justifies the taking of life because God thinks Y is more important than Z, as we can see in story A".