Friends and former colleagues interviewed by AP described Boelter as a devout Christian who attended an evangelical church and went to campaign rallies for President Donald Trump.
Friends and former colleagues interviewed by AP described Boelter as a devout Christian who attended an evangelical church and went to campaign rallies for President Donald Trump.
This is the exact bullshit we could brand someone that follows Islamist ideology with.
The major difference: Islamist groups purposely (as I recall learning in a college level North American religions course taught me) twist actual Islamic ideology while the Christian Right just doesn’t understand the religious text they claim to follow.
EDIT: Going to Trump rallies could be equated as the Christian Right version of terrorist training camps.
EDIT 2: My point about describing someone who assassinated people as “religious”, will place a false connotation on a group. It either paints the killer as misguided or followers of that religious faith as bad people. This is what happened with 9/11.
The FBI, CIA, DOJ have been warning about violent Christian Nationalism for years now. They’ve been the biggest threat to America for a long time now.
Pretending these people aren’t religious nuts doesn’t help anyone.
A less generous interpretation is that they do but don’t care about the parts they disagree with. There’s a lot of cherry picking going on with them, and that totally tracks with being the world’s #4 exporter of cherries.
Islam, just like Christianity, has many different groups that believe the same basic doctrine but disagree on many points. The main splits in Islam (that echo some aspects of the Catholic vs. Protestant split) as Sunni and Shia. Each divides and divides again into small communities centred on one mosque (just as, eg, Protestantism divides and divides down to individual congregations).
The big question is: how do groups of people decide which parts of the religious documents, history and practice are more relevant or even correct?
Some groups are quite ‘secular’ (like the Church of England) while others are quite ‘fundamental’, meaning that they much more strictly follow whatever the group decides are the foundation of the religion.
Is it possible to be able so say which of these groups is right? It seems to me that we have been fighting over this since before records began, so we most definitely do not have a way to do this that any majority agrees with. I don’t think anyone can say: