Among the litany of horrors emanating from the land of the two rivers, comes a report of ISIS militants destroying artifacts in the Mosul museum. It's not surprising that individuals who have no qualms about killing people in especially revolting ways would be able to destroy items of stone and ceramic. The ISIS militants are so obsessed with dogmatic concerns that they seek to efface any history that doesn't conform to their sterile vision of the world as a sinful distraction from their "otherworld". This is the same nihilistic impulse that drove the Taliban to destroy the Bamiyan Buddhas, that drove the razing of Tenochtitlan. The same impulse leads to attempts to ban teaching evolution in public schools.
As Tengrain reported, ISIS shares the impulse to ban the teaching of evolution with the fundamentalist evangelical Protestants of the United States... the only reason Ken Ham is not revered by ISIS is because ham is considered unclean according to Islamic dietary laws.
The real problem of religious fundamentalism is that the fanatics aren't content to wait until they attain their afterlife- they invariably seek to impose their nihilistic view on the material world. It's precisely this unwillingness to let those of us who see the value of this existence live in peace that makes them so dangerous.
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Everything you say is true, but more than one thing can be true. Never let it escape your attention that fundamentalist ideological movements like IS must have a steady stream of recruits and converts to be sustainable, and these are, for all their seventh century demands, not stupid people. They know the best way they can grow their ranks and spread their caliphate is to inspire hatred for their faith among the non-muslim world. The more people who denounce them, attack them, bomb them, legislate against them and otherwise declare their resistance or a state of war, the better it is for the movement.
So doing the things they do, in the broadly publicized way that they do them, from savage killings to destruction of historical heritage to brutal crimes against women, are every bit as much intended to create the conditions for a larger war and consequently greater recruitment, with increasing violence and savagery on both sides.
The key is that IS is a regional problem - a region that does NOT contain the United States. We have no business involving ourselves in the conflict, and we should be clear-eyed and honest enough to realize that our military intervention is contributing to the problem, not the solution.
This just in...
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