Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
But our modern, secular outlook has tremendous difficulty addressing the root causes of radical Islam because we look for rational and materialistic explanations for everything.
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Our modern, secular outlook has no trouble at all in addressing the root causes of radical mysticism, Islamic or otherwise (like the quaint version of Christianity advocated by peter12). That some do not accept the primacy of those ideas is not an indictment of the ideas, but an epiphenomenon of human nature, that has evolved both to seek for something that is not there to be found, and to be far better at rationalizing beliefs than discarding them for the rational.
As I've said before, radical Islam is just the latest flavour of radicalism, which has changed its form from anarchist to fascist to communist to Islamist over the last hundred years, and that will no doubt will gain new forms in the next hundred. You "deal" with such by having better ideas that lead to better outcomes in your society, something that cannot be roadside bombed or suicided away. We are already winning this war. That is why our opponents become increasingly desperate.
That being so, however, many young men* like violence, and like power over others, and like to escape responsibility for their actions. That will never change (other than, perhaps, technologically modifying the genes that cause this behaviour) and rather than focusing on a particular subset of such young men, it is a more useful to think about how society should try to moderate the actions of ALL such young men by socializing them successfully.
*Some men grow out of this, some don't, but the young are the mainspring of armed discontent.