Conference Discusses Sociologist's Conclusion that Religiosity, Not Education or Poverty, Causes Suicide Terrorism

In a new study, sociologist Scott Atran has objectively examined the claims that the chief causes of suicide bombings in the Middle East are purely secular and mundane, namely, lack of education, and lack of economic opportunity [1]. His results are somewhat surprising.

Starting as far back as the early 80s, Atran has tracked available intelligence dossiers on the perpetrators of suicide bombings, specifically on known biographical information of those individuals. We who have been bombarded by this idea from the religiously moderate, cultural relativist American government, now have empirical data to the contrary. George W. Bush, a confessed and in fact rapturous puppet of theism, got up on his stage the day after 9/11 and made it very clear that he was apologizing sincerely for the masterwork of militant Islam. Poverty and lack of opportunity, not God, are the culprits.

I will keep you in suspense no longer. Without further ado, here are the results of Atran's study.

Only 29% of suicide bombers in the last 25 years qualified as "poor," even by the generous standards of Western demographics. A whopping 57% were college-educated, compared to the abysmal 15% rate of college education as a median of the demographic data of the populations from which nearly all suicide bombers came.

Atran cites certain, notable examples such as the September 11th bombers who, for all of the blindly populist, cultural relativist lies of our dangerously theist president, were not dredged up from the bottom of Iraqi society: none were from Iraq, none had known any level of political oppression in their lives, and most surprisingly, all were college-educated. Bin Laden himself, for example, is a member of one of the wealthiest families in Central Asia, and is college educated.

He quotes Palestinian relief worker Nasra Hassan, who was a relief worker who interviewed almost 250 Palestinian suicide bomber recruiters, failed suicide bombers, and families of successful suicide bombers. He found that "None were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or depressed... They all seemed to be entirely normal members of their families."

So what correlative factor satisfies our thirst for patterns in the madness of suicide terrorism? Hassan continues: "all were deeply religious." They believed that their actions were mandated "by the divinely revealed religion of Islam." In fact, if we step back, we may make another, startling revelation: 100% of the suicide bombers that Atran isolated in his study were Muslims. I consciously divert you away from the word "Islamic," because I feel that that word is shrouded in the deliberately subversive ideology of cultural relativism and religious moderation, which urges us to seek alternative answers to the truth: religiosity statistically is more causative of violence than non-religiosity.

Let us superimpose this data on other information available to us. An earlier study by Rod Smith of data provided by the Federal Bureau of Prisons has found a huge number of theists in our prisons, disproportionately so to the amount of the general American population that they account for [2]. Catholics and Protestants together totaled a whopping 74% of the prison population. Atheists, who constitute four percent of the population, constitute only about one fifth of one percent of the prison population.

Another study, titled "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies [3]," takes a step back and contrasts the religiosity of societies with their rates of "immorality," as per popular conservative perception. According to the ramblings of people like Pat Robertson, who you may remember as the man who claimed a distinguished Vietnam combat record even though it turned out that he spent the entire war keeping the officers' mess well-stocked with liquor (he also lied about the date of his wedding to hide from his fellow theists that his wife was several months pregnant when they got married), we ought to see that more religious societies are more moral than nonreligious societies.

This simply does not stand up to rational scrutiny. The cited survey finds that "In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies. ... The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developed democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly."

While it does not necessarily suggest a correlation, the data is staggering and the evidence is mounting.

Taking Atran's data at its face value, his startling conclusions alone should be a sharp and painful reminder that we live in a world where our very survival as a species is threatened by the adherents of the fairy tales of Middle Eastern death cultists. Ought our history to be eternally defined as cyclical, endless conflicts between the incompatible philosophies of Iron Age shepherds and Arabian marauders? Is it right, is it moral that mythical fabrications like Jesus Christ (a synthesis of the mythologies of older mythic figures such as Attis, Mithra, and Sol Invictus), or bloodthirsty pedophiles like Mohammed, are in such proud control of the barbarity that is tearing our world apart?

This data alone suggests that we have good, solid evidence to treat religiosity as inherently dangerous. Suppose you are at a bus stop across from an abortion clinic. Which of these two do you suppose is more likely to have a gun concealed under his coat: a man sitting next to you clutching a Bible, or a man sitting next to you clutching a copy of War and Peace? Who is more likely, in your conception, to end up toppling a Red Cross station with a car bomb: the Muslim student at the European university who mutters to himself over his Koran at every meal, or his science professor? Meditate carefully on your answers.

This new data is a sharp, potentially uncomfortable reminder of the fact that, wherever you find strong, fundamentalist God-worshippers in dense concentration, so too you find incredible levels of violence and depravity. Why do we consider it politically incorrect to offer religion as a reason unto itself to intervene in an area? Why would it be so atrocious to delete God from our currency, our pledge, our courthouses, and the minds of our children, if we can cite legitimate reasons for doing so? Do we need further rationale to justify limited military operations in Somalia beyond that it is being devoured by the Muslim death-cult?

Religious moderates have cast up their smokescreen of mundane causality for terrorism, but now we simply know better. Now we know not to be fooled: empty wallets do not blow up busses in nearly the numbers that hearts full of God do. We ought to take this warning at its sternest face value.

We even until have neglected the obvious darkness cast on our society in day-to-day events, not merely in the relatively distant act of the suicide bombing. How many young boys are subjected to the psychological horror of sexual abuse at the hands of a lustful Catholic cast of pedophiles? How many children have killed themselves for having the wrong sexual orientation because of the immense social pressure put on them to deny their true selves by Leviticus? How many homosexuals end up in crime, prostitution, drug addiction, prison, or simply death after being ejected from their homes by wrathful Southern Baptists?

Catholicism has infested my country with pedophiles. Protestantism has littered the streets with dead doctors and despairing children. Islam has brought us to the brink of World War III at the gunpoint of militant ideological expansionism. When will the madness end? Shouldn't we be littering the streets of Turkey and the Middle East with pamphlets outlining the fundamental tenets of evolutionary theory or filled with lists of contradictions and factual misstatements of the holy books of the world's deadliest religions? If we can make a factual argument that an atheistic world is safer and more prosperous than a theistic world, oughtn't we act, and act now, before one of the bloodthirsty God-worshippers gets his or her hands on a nuclear device or a vial of the Ebola virus?

The religious moderates have failed us, and it has cost lives. Let us move on now in the spirit of humanism, to love our fellow man and to work for a better world, not one guided by the morality of the architects of the Jihads and Inquisitions. Let us glorify our love for each other and our secular institutions. If we were to do anything less, then we subject ourselves to eternal siege by Islam and sabotage from within by Christianity. How many more riots have to take place over a bunch of cartoons before we realize that God-mindedness is a madness?