Radical Religous Suicide Bombers: Where do they go?

Great Debates
1

This is more of a question for theists, but if it strikes an interest then you can do whatever you want.
These suicidal Islamic bombers of 11.9.01 did what they did because they apparently believed that this was what God wanted them to do, and that they would be richly rewarded in the Afterlife. Did this happen? My first inclination is to say that they are burning in hell for what they did, but latley I have been thinking

Non-Fundamentalist Christianity and every other religion that i know of, preach that even if you believe in something else than the ‘right’ religion, as long as you lead a righteous life and do what GOD WANTS YOU TO DO, then you are allowed into Heaven.

Granted, what the Terrorists did violated everything Islam stands for and by the Q’oran and Mainstream Islam, they are punished with Hell, but seeing as how they were doing exactly what they believed God wanted them to do, to the point where they died, would God really punish them? I personnaly do not believe in a God that would send you to Hell just because you followed him wrong, and while the magnitude of this disaster makes me naseous, I can’t help wondering what happened.

If I do not make sense or i did not make clear what I am saying, please know that i am in no way trying to justify what happened, it was an evil act, and i will try to elaborate further in a later period. And Please, No Flames

2

They go all to pieces :wink:

3

A lot of Nazis believed they were doing God’s work, along with everyone involved in the Crusades and the Inquisition, lots of Tsarists who repressed political dissent, both sides of the American revolution and the US civil war, the Isreal-Palestine conflict, the troubles in Northern Ireland; to be brief about it, both sides of most armed conflicts contain lots of people who fervently believe they are doing God’s work.

If that’s who goes to Heaven, I’d rather not go. I don’t think I could get a good night’s sleep there.

4

It turns out now that most of the “suicide” bombers were realy duped, thinking it was an old-fashioned airplane hijacking.

Only the pilots were radical religious nuts.
The “musclemen” had apartments full of liquor and porno.

5

This is a good question.

I think it comes down to the difference between subjective good and objective good.

If subjective good is enough to get you into Heaven (ie if you think you are doing Gods work then you automatically are doing Gods work) then, as jack@ss says, heaven is going to be a pretty full place.

If however the “entrance fee” to heaven is objective good (ie “good” is defined by an outside force, God, and not by each individual human) then the whole question starts to make more sense.

The WTC hijackers believed they were doing Gods work. Is this belief then sufficient to get them into heaven?

Only if Gods definition of “good” tallies with their definition of “good”. Since practically everyone in the world thinks the hijackers were in the wrong then I think its safe to say that their view of “good” is not God’s view.

I think the best way of understanding what Gods view of “good” is is by looking at what the bulk of humanity view as “good”. If the bulk of humanity think an act is evil then it is probably fair to assume that God would also think that act is evil.

So the only way the hijackers can go to heaven is if we’ve got a really weird God who happens to also be a radical Islamic fundamentalist.

If this is the case, that God is a whacko hardline Islamist type, then He hasn’t done a very good job with humanity since whacko Islamists make up a tiny percentage of the world’s population.

A percentage, I might add, that is getting smaller by the day with every bomb the US drops on the Taliban.

6

The Onion reveals the truth…

Hijackers surprised to find themselves in Hell

7

Actually, if the hijackers did it out of a genuine desire to do what Allah wanted, they went to heaven.

I would go further, and say that if they were duped into thinking that they were only hijacking a plane, and had no idea they were about to die, but were hijacking out of a genuine desire to please Allah, that makes what they did better. They had no desire to kill the innocent, only hijack them. As a matter of fact, that makes them martyrs.

God is merciful, and He does not need my advice on who He wants with Him in heaven. Fortunately.

I am Christian, not Muslim, but my opinion is that anyone who is attempting to please God (however you may conceive of Him) is, in fact, on his or her way to Heaven. There is but one God, whether we call Him Yahweh, Allah, or whatever. Insofar as anyone reaches out to Him, they find Him.

Blessed be He.

Regards,
Shodan

8

For re-education.

And the chance to work off a shitload of bad karma.

9

I don’t think this reasonning hold water. AFAIK, god isn’t elected and his commandments aren’t dependant on the result of opinion pools. They’re absolutes.

Also, this would mean that “good” and “evil”, from the point of view of a supposedly unchangeable god, would vary over time. What people considered right back then and consider wrong now, god considered right at this time and consider wrong now. It seems quite unconsistent with the usual concept of god.

Also, is it dependant on the geographical situation? Suppose I’m an Aztec in 1480 or so. Sacrifying people to the sun is right (if you don’t do that, the sun will dissapear or something to that effect). More or less everybody around you agree. On the other hand, the wide majority of the humanity, at the same time, thinks that human sacrifices are wrong. But you never heard about the rest of humanity. So, are you doing the right thing or not?

I suppose you’re assuming that there’s a kind of universal moral, agreed upon by eveybody, everywhere and at all times in history. And that this moral is what god consider as “good”. But actually, there’s no such thing as an universal, eternal moral.

Let’s suppose…Currently there are more and more vegetarians. Perhaps someday (unfortunately IMO) eating meat will be frowned upon by the majority. Perhaps people will considered that we were barbarians, killing innocent animals and eating their flesh though we didn’t really need it. Will we be retroactively damned? Or kicked out of the paradise to be sent to hell when the majority will decide that what we did was actually immoral? Or will we benefit from the excuse that at our time eating meat wasn’t considered as “evil”? In which case, I guess we will meet tons of interesting people up there, who did some pretty nasty things which were believed “right” at their time (or in the place they were living in).
Apart from that, the OP posted a very interesting question. If you’ve been convinced that what you did was right and approved by god, are you really responsible, even if actually it wasn’t god’s will? And could you be punished if did whatever you could, including giving your life, to please god? On the other hand, who would consider just a god who would welcome Torquemada in his paradise?
Fortunately, there’s no god, which helps a lot solving this issue from my point of view. But still an interesting theorical exercise. And actually which could be related to human justice issues, but I don’t want to hijack.