Well if it isn’t acceptable to think such things, how are you supposed to know if the person wearing a burqa is just a devout Muslim woman or a suicide bomber?

I didn’t say it wasn’t acceptable, but that the same logic applied universally leads to conclusions we find distasteful, e.g. that the Republican party is the pro-torture party (which they pretty much still are). If you don’t want to come to those conclusions as well, you’ll have to refine your model.

It’s easy to oversimplify things, especially when we’re trying to analyze violent events in order to understand and prevent them. We just have a lot of people with a lot of legitimate disagreements, and with our numbers we’re going to have a lot of belligerence and a few crazies mad enough to pop off.

Can you name a single Christian group that has committed organized acts of terrorism in multiple countries such as Spain, France, the U.S., etc?

You mean like the Óglaigh na hÉireann (more commonly, the Provisional Irish Republican Army)? Are they too far in the past? They’re not gone, just inactive.

Christian terrorism takes place largely in India, Lebanon and Uganda. We just don’t see so much of it on the news here in the states because that’s brown-people news, and who cares about that?

When was the last time that a school shooter said he was doing it because the bible commanded him to?

Christian terrorists in the US like to go after abortion clinics. Robert L. Dear and Scott Roeder are two recent examples. Both were convinced Jesus was with them when they went active. Both of them were openly celebrated by Operation Rescue. And they continue to this day to seek out recruits willing to go that extra mile.

Robert Doggart, an anti-Islam terrorist in the US was discovered by the FBI as amassing munitions consistent with other rampage attackers in the US with intent to attack Muslim institutions. He still believes Jesus wants him to kill Muslims. He remains at large.

And we haven’t yet gotten into Pirates and Emperors material in which terrorism is condoned because it is conducted (often on large scale) by entities that are considered legitimate. The CIA drone-strike campaigns which do little but massacre civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan is, by any reasonable definition, terrorism. And a massacre. What do we call terrorism when it is authorized by the White House? The president could, with a single signature, save more lives than all the deaths by firearms in the US.

Interestingly, the drone strikes are a total non-issue in our election campaign. It’s not acknowledged at all. We in the US are amazingly comfortable with terrorism when it’s happening to inconsequential people in nations we don’t like much.

Generally, from what I’ve experienced and understood of militants, they often have legitimate grievances which are not directly religious in nature (the sides may be cut by faith but that’s about it) or they just like to watch the world burn. Either way, religion assuages some guilt and presents some means to dehumanize the enemy. And then we even have an atheist ideologist that convinced himself it was acceptable to shoot up some innocents. It always takes something more than faith to compel one to kill.

But most Muslims — even those who are outraged by acts of western imperialism — are determined to be peaceful, even pacifist. And yes, this is despite that some of their own scripture, taken literally, could be interpreted to call them to arms. (So it is for Jews and Christians.)

I’m sure that if you were to ask most bombing victims, they would say that they didn’t think anything of the nice Muslim who walked into the shop/market/wherever and were taken completely by surprise when the place exploded.

I’m sure that San Francisco pedestrians consistently give drivers the benefit of the doubt, sometimes even after they’ve been hit and permanently disabled. Just because a few drivers are careless or distracted doesn’t mean we should judge the vast majority by them, and SF pedestrians have a statistically greater cause to be paranoid.

The cure for terrorism, really, is to ignore the the causes and organizations. Detect and prosecute the offenders. Comfort the bereaved. Respect the fallen. But don’t give time of day to the alleged causes that motivate them. Sadly, the fear and anger from terrorism turns news of it into click bait, and is used by our leaders to convince us to consolidate power. Terrorism is the perfect device by which to reverse centuries of progress away from totalitarian dictatorship.

Though maybe some people like being ruled by a despotic king.