I think a lot what is happening now in Iraq is about revenge. Vengence is important, whether it be for family, tribe or sect–and it’s not a strictly religious thing. It’s like saying that Christians in the U.S. are materialistic. Well, so is just about every other religious group in the U.S. In Iraq, it’s an honor thing. A male of the family, tribe, or sect is expected to exact retribution. They probably truly believe that the people they are killing did the same thing to someone in their own family, tribe or sect. It’s extreme tit for tat. It has escalated, and continues, because no one is able or willing to really put an end to it.
“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.” - Steven Weinberg
Valentines. Batholemews, etc, yeah, my bad.
History isn’t the question at issue. It was whether Islam is more prone to sectarian violence than Christianity in general. Apparently not, although today perhaps.
IMO, a typical falsely deep quote by an atheist, in the vein of John Lennon.
People do things. People are flawed. Some are very flawed. Some will take any excuse they can find, and they’ll always find one.
To answer the OP, these motivation to burn these particular Sunnis appears to have been the bombing that killed 200 Shi’ites the day before. It’s all about revenge; the religious issues are incidental, just a way of telling who’s on which side, much like Northern Ireland.
The problem seems to be that their society as a whole puts “religious beliefs” above a common national law and nobody seems to think this is out the ordinary.
It’s actually a very good argument for the seperation of church and state.
Civilized nations have various religious and belief groups with varying degrees of extremity, but in the heirarchy of things “national law” takes precedence. You have your skinheads, KKK members, bible thumpers, fundamentalists, etc. but if any of them commit a crime in the name of their religion or belief, it takes a “religion free” government/society/police force to step in and say “you can’t get away with that and you will be punished for it. We as a society, despite our religious diferences, have agreed this is best for everyone and have agreed that our democratically agreed upon laws supercede individual group beliefs.”
Other nations (i.e. Iraq) can’t seem to get past this hurdle. Their religious group beliefs supercede law. And as a collective nation they all seem to agree upon this. If not the majority would create a religion free military/police force that would not tolerate these religious mobs creating death and mayhem. So far they haven’t seemed to be able to get their act together.
I was going to, but I see I’ve been beaten to the punch.
“Do not be angry with me if I tell you the truth.” --Socrates
Not as much as some people would have you think.
I’m NOT for the instituting of a religious government. I’ll make this its own paragraph so people notice it.
But it’s kind of ridiculous when the the TV news fawns over someone like Mother Teresa and her concern for the poor, and doesn’t admit that their appreciation for her comes directly from a Judeo-Christian attitude that people matter here and now, and they aren’t just to be ignored so that they’ll slide into their next life, which is how those people were mostly being treated.
Because ‘God’, by his inaction, says it is okay to do so.
Listen, you Greek sonofabitch, don’t you dare tell me when I can be angry at you and when I can’t, okay? I’ll be angry at you, or anyone else, any time I goddamned please. You fucking “truth-tellers” really piss me off sometimes.
(Can we move this to the Pit, already? Please?)
There’s some question as to whether this actually happened.
All the suicide bombers in the middle east would have found some other reasons to blow themselves up, even without the promise of a paradise afterlife?
I don’t think it’s easy for us to appreciate how completely central Islam is to society and the individual in the middle east as christianity has long since lost that hold. IMHO, no, without the religious motivation they would not.
Compare the Children’s Crusade and the children fanatic suicide sodiers of the Iran-Iraq War. I’ve been reading the Great War for Civilisation and Fisk’s first hand accounts from the trenches and the battle fields leave no doubt at all that religious madness was the absolute driving factor in the motivation of iranian soldiers.
To us it looks like insanity. Just like certain medieval periods, with the central Christian obsession with the Devil, death and hell-fire, would to us today. Or aspects of Christian fundamantalism today.