Actually, maybe more. Dispassionate evil implies someone has taken the time to think about it…and still gone ahead and done the evil.
The Nazis were chilling, because they were the products of an educated, enlightened, progressive, advanced nation. They had every advantage of knowledge, wisdom, reason, and the history of moral philosophy, and they still acted the way they did.
Except that there’s no more reason to trust that the Gospel of Thomas is any more accurate than the synoptic Gospels. According to Wikipedia, scholars are divided into two camps as to the date of Thomas, but even the earliest put it at 50 - 100 CE. Which is to say, contemporaneous with Mark. The other camp puts it in the second century. So no closer to the historic Jesus than the Synoptics.
Whereas the message of Gnosticism is that the world was created by an evil or incompetent Demiurge, that it is an “error”, that some - but by no means all - people have a divine spark (the rest being no better than beasts), and that truth is a hidden pearl that is only accessible to the enlightened elite. Oh, and women can’t enter into Heaven unless they become male:
"114. Simon Peter said to them, “Make Mary leave us, for females don’t deserve life.”
Jesus said, “Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven.”
I mean, honestly, whoever that itinerant preacher from Galilee actually was, and whatever he actually said, he’s become a blank slate for Christians to project any theology they can derive. And given that it’s not even historically certain that the man existed, that’s entirely understandable. But Gnosticism is no more or less a valid version of Christianity than orthodox Christianity. And to bring this hijack back to the point of the thread, I’m sure that if the Gnostic interpretation of Christianity had become orthodoxy, there would have been just as much blood on its hands as there is on those of Islam or Hinduism or communism or just about any -ism in human history. And just as much grace.
I would cavil and say, not “orthodoxy,” but “state secular power.” The power of the sword, not just the decrees of the miter. That’s where it gets dangerous, and where the temptation to exercise that power has been historically irresistible.
If it happened today, I’d agree that he’s probably Muslim. If it happened 25 years ago, I’d assume he was a Tamil Tiger, whom you may have forgotten “popularized” the practice of using suicide bombers before the Wahhabists adopted it. Islamic terrorism is distinctive now, but the religion wasn’t founded in the last two decades. As has been repeatedly pointed out, we’re just seeing the recent rise of a particular extremist faction within Islam (which may or may not last in the long run) and projecting their views and actions onto the rest of the religion.
Look - there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. If Islam was genuinely the violent religion some argue it is, the rest of us would be utterly fucked. Personally, I don’t worry much about it, and even if perchance I get blown up by an Islamic terrorist on the way home tonight it still won’t justify the condemnation (nor the persecution) of all 1.6 billion.
Except that, the more “muslim” a country tends to be, the worse it seems to get, in terms of radical violence and a poor civil rights record. It seems then, that “good” Islam, in Europe and North America, maybe in Egypt and Turkey, it seems as if “good” Islam only exists where there are strong secular forces to keep it in check.
What the heck does “the more Muslim [note the capitalization, please] a country tends to be” mean? And try not to answer it with the usual “No true Scotsman” stuff.
In places like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, places where there is no secular oversight, places where the laws are run more or less straight from the Koran, we get very very bad results. Places like the USA and UK, where there is a great amount of secular oversight, we get “good muslims”.
Make a list of the worst atrocities humans have committed on other humans during the last 100 years. And then check which ones of these have been committed by Non-Muslims. That makes an awful lot of checks, doesn’t it?
Even today there are a lot of Non-Muslim countries that you would not want to live in. How about the Congo with one of the most brutal civil wars of the present day? Or Honduras with a homicide rate twenty times as high as the US (which has a pretty high homicide rate in the first place.) One of the ugliest terrorist movements in Africa calls itself the “Lord’s Resistance Army” with a nice record of murder, abduction, mutilation, child-sex slavery, and forcing children to participate in hostilities.
Also, why is it that there was a serious problem of violence between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland for most of the 20th century while their cousins in the USA, Canada, Australia, and pretty much everywhere else were mostly getting along? The Appalachian Mountains are heavily populated by the descendants of Ulster Protestants who migrated there during the late 1700’s. If you show up in some holler town there and tell them that you have come to help them rid their town of Catholics, you will be kindly taken to the nearest police station for booking.
The answer, of course, is that the violence in Northern Ireland was mostly fueled by political sentiment that had a facade of religious justification (holy war) painted on top of it.
The same is true of Christianity, except that virtually all predominantly Christian countries are now secularized. But have a look at some of the fun and games going on in African countries like Uganda where merely being gay is enough to get you imprisoned (and capital punishment has been proposed with the support of US evangelical Christian groups) or in former Eastern bloc countries where angry mobs led by priests have lynched homosexuals with the co-operation of local authorities.
So presumably the same argument applies - where enlightened secularism holds sway, religious extremism of all sorts is held in check. Where religious views are allowed to supersede human rights, well… Kim Davis is just the thinnest end of the wedge.
I suppose you have a point with the Lord’s Resistance Army, but in all of those other situations violence is being committed for some secular reason. My point never was, ONLY muslim dominated countries have violence. My point is when the county is run “by the book” you get bad results. And people here are going a looooooooooong way out of their way to try and deny that fact. Well, not deny it. Just a whole lot of:
Look, over there, bad things happen over there too!!!