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I suggest that the deeper underlying answer to this question of...
“What causes Muslims to be violent?”
...can be seen in my constant insistence that humans are basically “sleepwalking” through life.
In other words, the level of consciousness that humans must function at in order to make this dream-like “Illusion” of objective reality make sense to us, is attenuated and limited in such a way as to cause us to be susceptible to
“delusions.”
And what I am getting at is that all of the world’s religions are, in essence,
group delusions that humans get caught up in. And through the passing of time (and metaphorically speaking, of course) these delusions seem to develop a sort of psychologically-based “gravitational mass” that attracts and holds their adherents to their divergent surfaces.
And in keeping with this gravitational metaphor, the greater the size and mass of a religion based on the number of its participants (such as seen in Christianity or Islam), then the more difficult it is to achieve “escape velocity,” so to speak.
And the point is that Islam...
(with its clearly written call for violence against infidels, or against blasphemy, or against any other perceived threats to its existence)
...is especially difficult to escape from due to the particularly intense brainwashing its adherents receive from the moment of birth and the way that its very doctrines instill fear in the brainwash-ee for even thinking of escaping.
And my ultimate point is that those of us who are not caught-up in the “gravitational pull” of Islam, need to have some compassion and empathy when it comes to understanding the dilemma of its adherents.
In other words, we need to recognize the existence of the
psychological prisons (delusions) that many humans (through no fault of their own) are literally trapped within based on the sheer chance of where they awakened into life on this planet.
The bottom line is that nothing is going to change in this world until the “old paradigm religions” have been replaced by something better – by something that not only makes more sense than that which it is replacing,...
...but also helps to support the innate feeling that many of us have about the existence of a higher degree of wakefulness that awaits us after we have experienced a “second birth” via the process of death.
I am talking about a second (and final) birth into a transcendent context of reality that is touted...
(by virtually all spiritual traditions)
...to reside above and outside of the “dream-like” illusion of the universe.
And make no mistake about it; the majority of humans on earth are simply not going to accept anything that even remotely resembles atheism or hardcore materialism as a replacement.
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