Religious Fanaticism Threatens Us All

Recently a crazed mob of religious fanatics in Pakistan viciously murdered a woman and two of her granddaughters over the matter of purported “blasphemous material” posted on Facebook by a relative. 

A seven-year old child, her baby sister and grandma were slaughtered solely because their family belongs to a minority Islamic religious sect known as Ahmadis, who believe that another prophet came after Mohammed.

Islamic State (IS) jihadists, in Northern Syria are stoning young women to death for the “offense” of having sex outside of marriage. They dig holes in the ground; plant their innocent female victims in them, pelt them with rocks, and then drag their lifeless bodies away. 

When they aren’t stoning their victims to death these fanatics are beheading them, chopping off their hands or tying them to stakes to be left for hours in the scorching desert sun as punishment for trivial “offenses” like not fasting enough during Ramadan.

In neighboring Iraq, the same jihadists are victimizing whole groups of innocent people that they view as religious apostates because they don’t “believe right.” This includes the murder and brutalization of Shiite Muslims, Yazidi religious minorities, and Christians; thousands of them for no rational reason.

The savages have murdered at least 500 members of Iraq’s Yazidi ethnic minority, many of them women and children who they buried alive. Hundreds more women have been kidnapped and enslaved. Their Sunni Muslim oppressors view them as “devil worshipers.” 

They’ve declared an Islamic caliphate in the conquered territories prompting tens of thousands of victims who don’t “believe right” to flee for their lives. Victims who refuse to convert to the “right religion” are murdered on the spot.

There is a common denominator here that many people want to ignore because the real problem involves the sensitive matter of religion. They refer to the criminals as terrorists, militants, jihadists and the like. Several labels are used, and rightly so, since they all fit, but few people want to recognize the root cause of the problem – religious fanaticism.  

Now, normally I’m flatly against the U.S. meddling in the affairs of people in other countries, but I think there are exceptions. All of the civilized people of the world, including Americans, for example, should come together in unison for the purpose of hunting down and neutralizing the perpetrators of these genocidal religious motivated crimes. I don’t condone occupying other nations, but I do believe in eliminating criminals.

No religion – no personal philosophy for that matter -- confers upon its adherents the right to murder, maim, enslave, or otherwise victimize innocent people for the “offense” of adhering differently.

This kind of religiously oriented philosophical madness has been going on since before the dawn of human civilization. It’s about time that the rational people on this planet recognize that religious fanaticism anywhere threatens us all.