Saving their Souls in Fallujah?

[marct]

Hi WM,

Actually, I think it has been around in what was to become the USA since around 1620 when a group of folks landed at Plymouth Rock.

Could be - there is certainly a long history of millennial movements in the US, and they tend to be the ones who produce extreme fanatics.

It has a habit of resurrecting itself (pun intended) until it gets slapped back down through other corrective belief experiences--I think most folks can identify further, more modern examples for Judaism after the Zealot Rebellion or Bar Kochba.

Possible. I suspect that both the Expulsion from Spain and the 16th century millennial movements in Eastern Europe (e.g. Sabbatai Sevi) could play a part in it.

And WWI played an analogue to the 30 Years War for Christianity IMHO.

I would agree that it did so for the concept of unilinear evolution (e.g. progress towards perfection; sort of the secular eschatology developed by Social Darwinists and others). For Christianity itself? I don't know about that, although maybe for Christianity in Europe.

I think the latter half of the 19th Century and the establishment/success of the modern Israeli nation state ought to be belief correcting experiences for eschatological Islam but, for reasons that elude me, have not yet become such.

I suspect that the process goes back to a combination of Hoffer's observations on True Believers and to having a geographical locus for a religious group and seeing that religion being used as an excuse to smash the geographic locus. Just a guess, but it might be worth following up.