>
> Christian fundamentalism is mostly about afterlife insurance.
I think it's mostly about presenting the semblance of superior sanctity to their neighbors. Out of respect for nineteen centuries of Christians who took metaphysical issues seriously, what most people term "Christian fundamentalism," I prefer to call "the Rapture Cult." The Rapture Cult appears to have no religious substance at all. All Rapture Cultists own Bibles, which none of them have read. The sneers and self-adulation you read off the bumper sticker are all there is.
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> As Robert A. Pape, for instance, demonstrates...
So I went to that link where I read
> [D]uring the past 20 years, suicide terrorism has been
> steadily rising because terrorists have learned that it
> pays. Suicide terrorists sought to compel American and
> French military forces to abandon Lebanon in 1983...
I don't understand why Pape arbitrarily distinguishes between suicide attacks "authorized by a national government" and those authorized by quasi-governments like Hezbollah and the PFLP. And I thought "terrorism" referred to violence against civilians for the purpose of levering public opinion (as distinguished, for example, from the goal of killing off the workers in the enemy's munitions factories). If the 1983 attacks in Lebanon, directed at buildings full of soldiers, were "suicide terrorism," then I guess the term is being used to describe _any_ combat involving sure self-destruction for the attacker. In that case the Kamikaze campaign by the Japanese Air Force against the U.S. Navy was the Twentieth Century's most destructive program of "suicide terrorism."
Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net