Quote Originally Posted by Monty92 View Post
That's fine, but I'm still confused by your position. Perhaps you can help me out if we take things step by step. So, am I right in saying that you believe:

1) That those who commit suicidal terrorist attacks must be mentally ill, since “no-one can possibly believe all that sh*t and be prepared to kill for it”. So the only explanation for their actions must be a chemical imbalance in their brains that led them to seek out a cause to justify their pre-disposition for murderous crime – and that cause happened to be religion. In other words, if religion hadn’t turned these people into murderous criminals, something else would have.

2) When it comes to people who live in societies still based around religious dogma, religiously-inspired fanaticism can be explained by the environment they were brought up in, rather than mental illness.

Anything I've misrepresented about your view here?
I think my general point is that it is absurd to blame the entire religion for the actions of a tiny group of people who have been indoctrinated with a medieval interpretation of that religion’s very worst imperatives. And that you could apply the same to any religion if you look at a different period of history.

I don’t think it is fair to say that all these people are mentally ill but I do suspect that there is something seriously wrong with them. On the journey from curious young man finding out about Islam on his computer to standing outside a large event with a nailbomb in a rucksack there are a million points of departure, a thousand different avenues to go down. The fact that very, very few get this far suggests that it isn’t something that appeals to those with a semblance of balance in their lives. And thank god…. These forms of terrorism are a piece of piss to pull off. If there were a million muslims just itching to get over here and hire a van we would be scraping bodies off the pavements every hour. We aren’t, because there isn’t….. because despite the best efforts of radical clerics, one handed beardy ****s and a load of would-be gangstas in Toyotas rolling through the desert with a childish flag the prospect of blowing yourself up in order to kill a few teenage pop fans still seems to appeals to very, very few people, even among the ardent believers.

So no, your two points are not really a fair summation, if for no other reason than you contrast 1) where the subject is a murderer with 2) where he or she is simply a religious fanatic. Of course, in 2, it is not mental to believe what you were taught growing up and what everything in your environment tells you. Maybe that includes butchering people but if it is all you have ever known……. **** knows, maybe it is a perfectly sane and rational response. Neither of us would know, would we.

The original point was whether Islam itself is to blame for this, whether the religion itself is the inevitable root cause of all these events. I don’t think it is.