Suicide

Thanks to Hootinan for this photo of 18-year-old Ahmed Khatib, who blew himself up for Allah. He’s misinterpreting the "peaceful nature of Islam", right? Some people would beg to differ. Any religion can be used to justify violence and oppression — once people are brainwashed into believing that their own senses and reason are subordinate to "faith", it’s not hard to get them to follow the orders of some mystic. However, there is only one faith in the world consistently being used to justify violence and brutal regimes on a worldwide scale — Islam. Again, the lesson here is not that the Qur’an has some magic line that makes its followers violent — but that whenever reason is systematically subordinated to faith and life of individual sacrificed for some "greater cause", it is only a matter of time before that cause is used for violence — and that lesson is just important for Americans as it for the Arab world.