Z as in Zealot

He doesn't look like a killer .. - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
April 15th is not a day that we love, normally because of income taxes being due. For 2013, the young Tsarnaev brothers, Chechen immigrants, made the day all the more frightening by detonating two pressure cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon finish line. It seems that 26 year old Tamerlan and 19 year old Dzokhar were carefree and careless in their methods. They strolled casually along the street planting bomb-laden backpacks, little realizing that watchful security cameras recorded every move. They later bragged to a car jack victim that they were the bombers.

What the brothers lacked in common sense, they made up for in religious devotion. In 2012, Tamerlan is thought to have visited a Salafi mosque in Dagestan where he was versed in radical Islam. He came back a “purist” with a beard, condemning American libertine behavior. Both boys posted various Islamic prayers and poems on their web sites. Because America is a free society, and many among us are religious devotees, none of these behaviors seemed out-of-bounds. In the aftermath of their horrific plot, the specter of Islamic zealotry did in fact rear its head.

In days that followed, the “liberal” media (Salon, Huffington Post, msnbc) contorted themselves mightily to deemphasize the radical religious angle. This crime was done “independently” by “loners” who acted without any guidance or participation in a terror cell. Never mind that the formula for the bomb came from the Al Quaeda magazine, Inspire. Never mind that Islam was given as a life view on FaceBook. My personal feeling is that participation in a terror cell doesn’t matter. Whether it was a large collective effort or individual madness, a jihadist religious philosophy drove this behavior, pure and simple. In my previous blogs about Heaven’s Gate and Jim Jones’ temple I suggested some cautionary remarks about any prophet, priest or minister who exhorts you to:
o Commit murder
o Commit suicide
o Destroy property
o Commit blind, random acts of destruction
o Violate secular, state laws regarding sex with minors, plural marriage
o Disown blood relations, give away property
o Castrate or otherwise harm yourself
o Perform disfiguring corporal punishment on “non believers”

If someone (a mortal human, like you) is claiming to have some cosmic connection and asking you to do these crazy things, your inner cynic should come to the fore. In the above case, the boys’ father was a secular lawyer who hated radical Islam. It’s odd that they could still be swayed away from his more reasoned approach.

Even “mainstream” organized religion can go places it shouldn’t – look at the Westboro Baptist Church who protests American soldiers’ funerals with placards that read “God hates fags”. Look at the Catholic Church which simultaneously condemns gays while sheltering pedophiles in its ranks. Speaking from my own singularly secular perch, all religions can give me the willies. Unitarians serve up some of the weirdest rituals of them all (what with its Wiccans and Pagans). While I will stay in my zone (and the reader, stay in your zone as you see fit), let’s not any of us throw away a life over “wackadoo” extremism that makes promises and threats to weakened minds. I believe there is in fact a God, and he (she or they) expects better from us.

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