[Replying to me]

Me:

No, I don't suppose I have. And I don't suppose I'll really answer it here either. I would only suggest that every terrorist with a political agenda -- be he Muslim, Irish, Tamil, or whatever -- believes in his cause. For that matter, the same is true for most legitimate military actions as well. The aggressor will justify his actions, to himself and to others, in whatever his cultural language provides. In the Islamic world, where there is no tradition of religion being "not of this world", the idea of God's will is more culturally entwined with the idea of doing what is right. For those in the Muslim world, arguing for what they feel is right by calling it God's will is a more natural jump than it is for us in the Christian world. Even for those of us who aren't particularly religious, our way of thinking is shaped by our culture.

The same is true on the peace side of the equation. Here in the West, we generally justify our wars in the name of some secular ideal, in contrast to Muslim warriors who almost always invoke God's will. Likewise, when we make arguments against a given war (or against war in general), it will again likely be on secular grounds. Muslims who argue against violence, just like their belligerent counterparts, are prone to frame it in terms of God's desire for peace. Indeed, for them it is built right into the language.

I don't think this necessarily implies that Islam is a more religious culture, at least not in our sense of the word. I think it's more a matter of having a culture in which religious ideas are not held distinct from mundane matters. For the Muslim (even a non-religious one), there is no such thing as the mundane. Our Christian heritage is implicit in the very definition of word.

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