Islamist Jihad, Absolutism And The Justification Of Slaughter As God's Will

Alan: Among the pathologically oppositional, revenge is the fundamental reaction to perceived insult... or just garden-variety cultural differences.

Everyone must be identical to The True Believer.

The universal imposition of one unvarying identity is the only ground on which "true believers" can be confident that their own brittle identity has worth.

To insure that true believers' fragile sense-of-self is reflected in -- and confirmed by -- the identical belief system of everyone else, ethnic cleansing and genocide are justified as God's Will.

The rationale for monstrosity is no longer "the devil made me do it" but "God made me do it."

Since God is planning infidels' damnation this very moment, why not get an early start?

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"You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image 

when it turns out God hates all the same people you do."
Tom Weston S. J.

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"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice.  The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization.  We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal.  Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good.  The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”  

"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton

More Merton Quotes

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/04/merton-best-imposed-as-norm-becomes.html

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"American Conservatives And Oppositional Defiant Disorder"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/arrested-development-american.html