The Sideshow has found a better word for “religious extremists”:
I have found the word I’ve been looking for.
We usually say “religious extremists”, which is a neat phrase, I guess, except that it already relies on the idea that the people we’re talking about are advocating an extreme version of the religion they claim to espouse – not that they have twisted the faith beyond all recognition, but that they are adhering to it so intensely that they are becoming an annoyance and embarrassment to the larger faith’s own adherents. As if all Christians or Muslims should be as “devout” as the Christianists and Islamists want us to be, but we just can’t be bothered.
This presentation has long offended me and, worse, I think, gives an unearned legitimacy to these versions of our faiths. I’ll leave aside the question of how other faiths’ “extremists” wander from the origins of their professed faiths, but I’m pretty familiar with Christianity, and while I recognize its bloody history I also know that most of what is presented to us as “Christianity” by so-called fundamentalists doesn’t really have a lot to do with the teachings of Christ, so I feel I’m on pretty safe ground in saying that whatever these people are, they are not actually extreme Christians – they are something else.
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But the “Christian” foreign policy, based on deliberately trying to stir up Armageddon, is the capper. These people are most assuredly not embarked on a project of beating their swords into plowshares and following the Prince of Peace. Instead, they want a bloodbath to shatter the world. They don’t just want to defeat their enemy, they want to commit the most absolute act of genocide that can be imagined, in which everyone but their relatively small sect of believers ends up not only dead but consigned to an eternity in the fiery pits of Hell.
And then they will be happy. They’ll have an eternity of congratulating themselves for killing everyone else.
They’re Thanaticists; death is the basis of their lives.