What If God Is Nuts?

A Moroccan Jihadist climbs on a High Speed European train in Brussels. It is easy to get weapons in Belgium, less so in France. He is armed with a full automatic machine gun, a Kalashnikov, AK 47, nine magazines for the AK47, a handgun, a knife. He has been told, and believes, that, as the faithful, he should obey god’s writ. And even more than that, he will fight racism.

How come?
If Islamophobia, the fear of Islam, is racist, does not that mean that Islamophilia, the love of Islam, is anti-racist? Thus by believing Islam to death, are not Jihadists fighting racism? Jihadists believe that, to the bottom of their all consuming hearts. When god is nuts, nuts are gods.

And What If God Is A Crazy Homicidal Maniac?

Notice that France is the most atheist country (thus number one targets for Jihadists). From my point of view, France’s healthy skepticism about the morality of god, is directly traceable, not just to Clovis and his Franks, but to the election, in Paris, more than a century before that, of Julian as “Augustus“ (supreme Roman emperor, in 360 CE). The Catholic bishops hated the all too moderate and philosophical Julian, who was derided as “the Apostate”. The Franks organized a flurry of anti-Christian coups, during the Fourth Century.

The High Speed train enters France. The Jihadist goes to the toilet to equip himself (for a slightly different version, see the New York Times). He comes out, a Frenchman in his fifties confronts him, grabs the Kalashnikov AK47, and runs away with it. The Jihadist shoots the Frenchman, the bullet enters next to the spine on the left side, in the lumbar area, through the entire left lung, and comes out through the clavicle. Alerted, two young American soldiers, and a friend, an Afro-American, plus a British businessman, and a French conductor, jump the killer. The lead American hero, Spencer, loses his thumb to the killer’s cutter (it got re-attached in a French hospital, right away). Everybody survives, because the would-be assassin’s gun jams. As related in the Times:

“Mr. Norman [UK Consultant] and Mr. Sadler [Afro-American student] had joined in the efforts to subdue the gunman, who “put up quite a bit of a fight,” Mr. Norman recalled at the news conference in Arras on Saturday. “My thought was, ‘I’m probably going to die anyway, so let’s go.’ Once you start moving, you’re not afraid anymore.”

Mr. Stone [large Martial Arts expert, Air Force First Class] wounded and bleeding, kept the suspect in a chokehold. “Spencer Stone is a very strong guy,” Mr. Norman said. The suspect passed out. Mr. Norman busied himself binding him up with a tie.

Mr. Skarlatos [22 year old Oregon National Guard soldier, back from Afghanistan, friend with Sadler and Stone] , the AK-47 in hand, began to patrol through the carriages, looking for other gunmen. He made a series of startling discoveries: The suspect’s guns had malfunctioned, and he had not had the competence to fix them.

“He had pulled the trigger on the AK. The primer was just faulty, so the gun didn’t go off, luckily,” Mr. Skarlatos said. “And he didn’t know how to fix it, which is also very lucky.” In addition, the gunman had not been able to load his own handgun: “There was no magazine in it, so he either dropped it accidentally or didn’t load it properly, so he was only able to get what appeared to be one shot off,” Mr. Skarlatos said.”

In the fifties, George Orwell wrote excellent books where he introduced, and condemned, the notion of “thought crime”. Actually he had invented nothing, the USSR had condemned people to death for “Thought Crimes” before.

Roman law itself distinguished the notion of “Mens Rea” (mental act). To be culprit of voluntary homicide, it’s not enough to kill somebody, one has to have thought about it (mental action). Orwell may have thought too fast, and too superficially: fast and shallow thought crime.

We live in a world where human thoughts are increasingly capable of enormous amplification. So what people think about matters.

Legislators recognized this after the Nazi fiasco. Nazism was an ideology of hatred. Once allowed to rule, it programmed tens of millions of Germans into exterminating others. Ideally, such hate ideologies ought to be outlawed. But the lines are hard to draw between fantasy and thought meant to program people into killing robots.

So legislators, starting in France and the USA, decided that hatred of an ideological character, if one could legally prove that it was present, would be an aggravating factor in the commission of a crime.

Another approach was tried earlier. With Christianism. In the Middle Ages, Christianism played an horrendous role. It started with the Fall of Rome to which it contributed heavily (said Gibbon, and I  agree, in part). Then Clovis and his Franks mitigated the Jesus superstition, and things went well, until the rise of nationalism, tribalism, plutocracy and Crusades in the late Eleventh Century (also the time of the break between Rome and Constantinople: all those phenomena are related). After that, Christianism became a force for the worst… Until the last execution for heresy in Spain in the Nineteenth Century, if not the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, where the Church and its Opus Dei, were on the side of fascism (Franco, Hitler, Mussolini).

In the New Testament, Jesus orders to kill unbelievers: Luke 19-27. Thus Islamism is just a parrot, if not a parody, a parroty, of Christianism.

Luke 19:27: “But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.”

Please compare with the Qur’an “Verse of the Sword” (Sura 9, v5):

“9:5 When the sacred months are over slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them. If they repent and take to prayer and render the alms levy, allow them to go their way. God is forgiving and merciful.”

Islamophiles, like pedophiles, are hard pressed to explain that one away. Muslim terrorists revolve around this verse, doing what it orders. The Qur’an, a very short book (83,000 words, I counted) contains many other verses, to the same effect.

Christianism, obeying Christ, killed millions, if not tens of millions. Still, in the end, it was made to submit: any priest teaching Luke 19:27, the core of Christianism in the Middle Ages, would now be fired. So how was Christianism forced to submit? Asking Louis XI, Henry VIII, or the French Revolution, brings the same answer: Christianism was FORCED to submit.

Forcing Christianism is not new: the Franks forced Christianism to submit to their state, most notably in the Sixth and Eight Centuries. In the former case, the Vatican had to submit to the nomination of Frankish bishops, and when the Pope threatened to have them burned for teaching secularly, the Frankish authorities pointed out that Pope “Gregory The Great” had no army. In the Eight Century, the Church underwent nationalization, to pay for the war against Islamism. Then the Popes, on their knees, begged the Franks to come subdue the Lombards (Charlemagne did so, once the Church agreed to recognize him as Roman Emperor). (And I am not even mentioning Philippe Le Bel’s accidental execution of the Pope in the Fourteenth Century, followed by the incarceration of the Papacy in Avignon, among many similar exploits of anti-clerical type…)

There is one religion, always: that of the state (in the generalized sense of religion I use). Superstitions can be tolerated, as long as they are compatible with the state. So make Islam compatible. And that means some Islamist texts ought to be viewed as the Thought Crimes they are, and being ignored as well as Luke 19;27 (and other statements of Jesus to the same effect) are ignored.

If we, who believe in an ever wiser civilization, could submit the fury of Catholicism (“universalism”), we can certainly submit the meekness of submission (what “Islam” means)… Civilization is rising: time for the savages to realize that the gods must be crazy.

Patrice Ayme’