A Terrorist’s Belief in Islamic Paradise May Have Justified the Manchester Bombing May 26, 2017

A Terrorist’s Belief in Islamic Paradise May Have Justified the Manchester Bombing

What possible justification could there be for the suicide bomber in Manchester to kill 22 people outside an Ariana Grande concert? Was there a reason, beyond just “terror,” that he picked a target where innocent children were inevitably going to be hurt by the blast?

TerroristManchester

Becca Chalman, writing at The Humanist, argues that a belief in the afterlife is how we can make sense of something so tragic. She cites Ali A. Rizvi‘s book The Atheist Muslim to make her point:

[Rizvi] engaged a Taliban supporter online after the Taliban’s attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan, in December 2014 that killed 145 people, 132 of them children. The man told him, “Paradise is for those of pure hearts. All children have pure hearts. They have not sinned yet… They have not yet been corrupted [by their apostate parents]. We did not end their lives. We gave them new ones, in Paradise, where they will be loved more than you can imagine…”

When Rizvi insisted that the children would have chosen this life, had the terrorists not stripped them of that choice, the man responded, “You will never understand this. If your faith is pure, you will not mourn them, but celebrate their birth into Paradise. But most of the people who call themselves Muslims do not believe this. They believe death is an end. This is because their faith is not pure.” In other words, pure faith, a literal interpretation of a paradisiacal afterlife proffered by the Koran, justifies slaying children.

Just to reiterate, no, not all Muslims feel that way. But if you’ve ever wondering what these monsters are thinking, that’s as plausible an explanation as you’ll ever see. You don’t need to look beyond religion to make sense of why these people would be willing to kill themselves, along with children.

Want to defeat Islamic terrorism? Get people to stop believing in martyrdom, in jihad, in an afterlife, and a paradise that exists only after death.

This is why atheists pay so much attention to a God we don’t believe in. These sorts of tragedies occur due to unchecked, unquestioned acceptance of irrational dogma.

(Screenshot via YouTube)

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