For obvious reasons, many of us in the West are baffled when it comes to comprehending the motives of Islamic State (IS). Their brutality is beyond repugnant, so attempts to figure it out go on.
There's the sympathetic, sort of Marxian theory: terrorists can't get jobs, they're disadvantaged, so it's understandable that they'd resort to torture and murder. Fyi, I don't hold with this theory. It's often held by materialists who like economic explanations and don't like "values" explanations.
But there may be a move to start believing in beliefs. Last March, Atlantic's Graeme Wood said that IS "is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs" that include a mission to bring in the final war of the world, apocalypse.
And just yesterday a CNN article claimed the same thing. Author Frida Ghitis sited IS attacks on powers like Russia and France to demonstrate her theory that IS is actually trying to get that apocalypse going - to incite it.
Only a very small segment of humanity wants to bring in the apocalypse by murder and torture. But it doesn't take many to make a terrible difference in the world.
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