esrosedotblog

So now it is ISIS.

Like mushrooms, poisonous ones, the muslim fundamentalists continue to sprout up.

I think that some of this stuff is cover for just crazy sociopaths who find fertile ground to connect with others like them. The fertile ground is the supremely fucked up middle east. They will come if you build it. And the Brits, Israel and its US friends have built it. A perfect incubator for acting out rage.

It is not without reason that they revolt and terrorize. We and our allies have made a fair fuckup of that part of the world.

Here is another take on the question of the fundamentalist.

Isis Is a Disgrace to True Fundamentalism

This guy is a Muslim fundamentalist. He is as appalled at the whole scene as I am.

His point is that these guys are not really serious about their religious beliefs. If they were they would realize that terror is not a tenet of Mohammed. They would be reined in by their daily spiritual practices.

And so on.

It is an interesting dilemma that we have not had to face here. Yes. There are nut cases who seize upon religion to do violence and perpetrate awful acts but not at this scale. They are quickly shown to be radical outliers or psychopaths. At least sociopaths. Almost all religions that I know of are built on the notion of restoring social order. Community. A body of belief.

The other factor here is political. Many of these people are stoked up by closet politicals who use the religious thing as a tool for manipulating support. Iran is full of these bastards.

Finally, there is the element of fundamentalist belief itself. A non-reductive adherence to literal readings of so called religious texts. The christians have this in abundance. The word of god in a paper book that has been so distorted and skewed around over the centuries that it really cannot be seriously considered as, even, literature.

Spoiler alert. I once took a course in the bible as literature in college and lasted two weeks. Sure, some Psalms and all that. But the rest? Tough going.

So I don't know. This all comes late in my life.

At the end of WWII we were not so naive as to believe that the world was "cleansed" of evil. In fact it had saturated itself in evil with the War.

For many years, world communism, was the enemy. A mask for the unfought battles and unresolved issues of the War. Superpowers. But then all that has fallen away and we are left with the new/old paradigms. Living breathing collections of people who have a grudge or a bent toward homicide mostly unleashed. At least with the Russkies we faced an organized threat that could be grappled with. That you could talk to.

Not here in the land of fundamentalism. They would all be at each other's throats the second the infidels were defeated. Eternal hatred.

Labels: christists, Middle east, muslims and arabs