Hi Tequila,

Quote Originally Posted by tequila View Post
The asshole sounds like half the guys in my boot camp platoon. Bored kids looking for meaning and finding it in the wrong place. Sometimes I think 70% of our jihadi problem is the lack of a decent non-religiously oriented "cause" or institution in most Muslim countries --- a Marine Corps equivalent to join in order to find challenge and a sense of identity.
This has been a real problem in North America for about 40-50 years or so. A friend of mine spent a fair amount of time researching some of the radicalization amongst Jewish kids in the 1980's, and the pattern is pretty much the same. I saw a similar pattern looking at a lot of people who joined modern Craft and some of the Charismatic groups as well.

It is one of the central problems in large, secular societies - we don't have many good, functioning, rites of passage. Also, because there isn't a single, unifying, religious symbol system, we have a mishmash which has a really hard time working together. Personally, I think the Romans had a much better system with the Pontifex Maximus .