Discussion: Islamic State Beheads Syrian Scholar Who Spent Life Guarding Ancient Artifacts

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Discussion for article #239557

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Barbarians, plain and simple. How they can call themselves religious is beyond my ken.

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What is it about being religious and barbarous that sound incompatible? Looking through history, barbarism seems to be religion’s main characteristic to me. Hell, it’s right in the Bible and the Quran.

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I agree that religion has been an impetus for all sorts of egregious behavior over the centuries. But most of the religious people I know are tolerant and generous and are not engaging in beheadings and torture. The fundamentalist forms of religion tend to be the ones that foment violence and anger, because they insist they have the only interpretation of the religion and that everyone else must share it. Further, this brand of Islam that ISIS preaches labels all sorts of brutalization and murder as religiously favored, including raping infidels. This is most definitely not a main characteristic of most religions or religious people.

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I think religion simply potentiates what is there.
If someone is kind, compassionate, they might gravitate towards a faith based on kindness, like the Quakers.
If someone is authoritarian and mean spirited they might gravitate towards an authoritarian religion like (in my opinion) the Southern Baptists. One is drawn to the Book of John, the other to Revelations.

Religion can be a vehicle for kindness to a kind person, or offer cover for cruelty for a cruel person, with equal facility and equal ‘scriptural’ justification.

Of course this pertains to a society where one has choices.
In a society like Islamic State, cruelty rises to the top.

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“Where ignorant armies clash by night”.

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I know it’s not enough to put our citizens in harms way, but to a certain extent, when they do these things they are waging a war on all of humanity by destroying our human history - which arguably belongs to everyone on the planet.

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If we can’t exterminate this ISIS filth we don’t deserve the planet.

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Further blowback from our malconceived “clash of civilizations” adventure into Iraq specifically to topple Saddam and destroy Baathist control of the country. We are doing the same thing by proxie to Baathist control in Syria. For all their faults, the Baathist Party was/is a Western-inspired, secular party that stabilized multi-ethnic, multi-religious countrys with a modicum of fairness for minoritys. (The PLO in the occupied zones was another such Western-inspired secular party.) We have created conditions and space to grow the murderous, iconoclastic ambitions of zealots for ideological purity. As ecological deterioration drives away more people, these chickens are coming home to North America to roost.

As Colin Powell warned about invading Iraq: “We break it, we buy it.” So we did and have to the tune of $$trillions. The largest cost, however, is in nonfungible human suffering paid for by millions. It continues to grow.

Peace to al-Asaad, his family, friends and common humanity.

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