Saving their Souls in Fallujah?

[marct]

The unformulated question in my mind is could this be an example of America producing our own radical Christian analog to Al Queda?....

When patterns start to emerge there is usually agency behind them even if we don't understand it.

You know, Sam, you folks have had your AQ analog for quite some time now both at the ideological level (e.g. the Moral Majority, some of the extremist White Supremacist groups, etc. BTW, I'm not saying they are the same outside of their analog as fanatical ideological groups ) and at the level of action cells (the Militia movements, etc.).

Religions that focus on eschatology, which BTW includes the whole Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, tend to be much more focussed on what happens in the afterlife than in the current life. As a result, such true believers have little problem with martyrdom and the effects on the living of other actions that they may take in this world, as long as those actions do not hinder the actors' chances of achieving a better state in their afterlives.

Good point, WM. The type of radical transcendentalist theology that really pushes the eschatalogical agendas in this tradition usually doesn't change until its believers get their faces rubbed in it. For Judaism, it was the period from 68 bce to 135 ce that did it, for most of Western Christianity, it was the Thirty Years War and its aftermath. So far, no analog fr Islam comes to mind...

I think it is probably pretty hard to engage in a rational argument with those who hold ardently to such beliefs about the impact of one's actions in the here and now on the folks who continue to live on after that person goes to his/her "reward."

True. And have you also noticed that, in its extreme form, it also never seems to impact their judgement of what will happen to them in the afterlife?