Evil people do violent things, such as break things and kill people. Having said that, it's only ever newsworthy these days when American things are broken and their citizens killed. That seems to get everybody's attention, especially in an election year. And make no mistake about it, this is only getting the attention it is because the United States is in a year that ends with an even number.
If you want to know the great secret behind Islamism, I'll give it to you. By and large, these people are from the poorest, most repressive countries on the planet. More importantly, their populations are more often than not riddled with illiteracy. I'm actually surprised that so many other people are surprised that so many people in such a condition are consumed with religious fundamentalism.
Impoverished illiterates not infrequently conflate their religion with their manhood. In cases where stupid people find their manhood insulted, they not infrequently respond with furious violence. If you don't believe me, I suggest that you go down to your neighborhood tavern and find the biggest, dumbest-looking drunken lout you can find and tell him that you'd be more likely to sexually sate his female companion than he is. Be sure to count your teeth afterward.
Religious fundamentalism works pretty much the same way, only with explosives. And those of you who believe that such sociology is operative only in the Muslim world must have missed much of the recent past in Northern Ireland, where bombs were used to settle religious differences with some regularity.
If anything, the Jihadis are most honest people in this debate. Say what what you will about them, but they actually are acting out the dictates of their Holy Book. If you even skim through it, you'll very easily find religious justification for almost everything that they do. They might be murderous, sociopathic and wrong, but they aren't dishonest.
As a matter of fact, there isn't much in the Koan than isn't also in the Old Testament of the Bible, which is the foundation of both Judaism and Christianity. We just, for the most part, think that we got past it. If you believe the Bible to be the infallible Word of God, you have little choice but to believe that we've been terrible disciples, as is evidenced by the continued existence of Red Lobster and divorces that don't often result in stoning when said divorce is contested.
Mitt Romney is the first Mormon nominee for president. As recently as yesterday, he was pretending that his family were "refugees" from Mexico. However, he declined to tell you how they wound up south of the border in the first place.
The Church of Latter Day Saints were, under the tenants of their religion, polygamists who congregated mostly in Utah. Unfortunately, a condition of Utah's admission to the Union was the renunciation of polygamy. The LDS leadership then told their flock that God, in a remarkable example of serendipity, had changed his mind about multiple wives.
Mormon fundamentalists, including the Romney family, weren't buying it fled to Mexico where they could practice their religion, free of persecution, as was supposed to be their right under the First Amendment. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 forced the Mormons out and made George Romney, the future governor of Michigan and Mitt's dad, one of those who "are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it."
I only bring that up because the Romney family actually believed what their religion said was fundamentally true and wouldn't accept the accommodation their Church made with an expansionist government and were willing to sacrifice their homes to abide by it. It was only when circumstances presented them no other viable option that the Romneys renounced that central tenant of their faith.
Liberals (and not a small number of conservatives) want to excuse Muslim extremism because "the Enlightenment passed them by." Because of that, they say, we should shield them from anything that offends their religious sensibilities. This, of course, should be done in the name of pluralism.
This proves that modern liberals missed the entire point of the Enlightenment, which was to foster free speech and the exercise of reason at the expense of religion. Were it not so, we wouldn't enjoy neat things like astronomy today. Liberals are more than happy to stifle free speech and the quest for logical discourse in the name of keeping illiterate mysticists seven time zones away happy. The only problem is that the Enlightenment wasn't supposed to be "sensitive." The religious authorities at the time sure didn't think it was.
The simple fact of the matter is that they're never going to happy with us. They're upset by virtue of us being tin their lands at all, with our lust for their oil, love of their apostate strongman governments and refusal to stop shoving Nicki Minaj's tits in their face. Liberals want to turn back the Enlightenment for us because large parts of the Muslim world refuses to look into it themselves.
What is endlessly infuriating is Western social conservatives, who love to inflame Islamic radicals without recognizing that they believe in many of the same things. They'll put up images of Muhammad mere years after picketing The Last Temptation Of Christ with blatantly anti-Semitic placards directed at MCA's then-Chairman Lew Wasserman.
There's no end to the federal laws and constitutional amendments that social conservatives want passed based entirely on "biblical principles." Abortion, gay marriage, dancing in public. For all I know, if these people don't cotton to it and they want a law against it, goddammit! Why? Because Jesus wanted it that way!
It wouldn't bother me so much if religious types that wanted to pass legislation based on their theocratic beliefs if they were at least honest enough to read the full biblical prohibitions, which with uncanny frequency end with the phrase "punishment of death."
And there's no end to God's prohibitions that we've "grown out of;" such as working on the Sabbath, eating shellfish, or killing our children for dissing us. Human sacrifice, slavery and sex trafficking all things that are explicitly condoned in the Bible as well. There's absolutely no evidence behind creationism, but "Enlightened" types want its teaching mandated in public schools.
By the way, there's nothing more amusing than critiques about religious fervour from a group that suffered a snake-handling death as recently as this past May.
We're demanding that the Muslim world, which is largely poor, illiterate and politically oppressed to "embrace the Enlightenment" when three-quarters of the people who are supposedly the beneficiaries of it won't embrace it themselves.
At least the jihadis are honest about it.
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