Boreal

THE ISLAMIC HEREAFTER

Afterword

A Real Life Example of the Appeal of Scriptural Sadism

What we know for sure about the horrific fate of Abu Lahab and his wife is that the tethered-like-a-dog spouse, who will have the abject duty of assisting God in roasting her husband—by gathering the wood that the Compassionate will use to stoke the fire—at no time tried to physically harm Muhammad; nor did her husband, for that matter.

Allah has very much a sadist’s understanding of empathy, i.e., feeling someone else’s pain: that it can be used to add to the suffering you wish to inflict. In many ways, the wife’s suffering will be greater than that of her husband. Not only will she have to watch her beloved roasted over and over like an animal on a spit, but God has compelled her to be His accomplice in the torture.

Threatening to inflict horror and pain is what gods do to get their way; even so, Allah is different. The torture chamber that is His Hell, of which He is quite proud and on which His angels stand guard, seems to have been designed to satisfy a deep-seated pathology. This is evident in innumerable revelations where God displays all the symptoms of an inveterate sadist with a love of inflicting pain and watching people in agony, which has real-world consequences.

What if you could do in the here-and-now what Allah relishes doing to human beings in the Hereafter? Your run-of-the-mill holy warrior can only do so much. Doctors are another matter, and they are not immune to the seductive cruelty that saturates Islam’s Holy Book. Given the opportunity, trained medical personnel can do a very good impression of Allah at his most pitiless, cruelest best as revealed in Revelation 4:56, the one about replacing burnt skin.

Issam Abuanza, 37, is a doctor who left his family in the UK in 2014 to join Islamic State in Syria. On social media, Dr Abuanza has said he wished that a Jordanian pilot burnt alive by IS had taken longer to die.

On his Facebook page he is pictured wearing doctors' scrubs and carrying a gun in a holster. He smiles as he raises his finger in the air - a symbolic gesture to represent the oneness of God that is commonly seen in the iconography of Islamic extremism. Another image shows him in combat fatigues, cradling an automatic rifle and reading the Koran.

He wrote about the killing by IS militants of the captured Jordanian pilot who was burnt alive, complaining that: "I would've liked for them to burn him extremely slowly and I could treat him so we could torch him once more."

BBC News May 24, 2016

Dr. Abuanza, a poster child for Arendt’s “banality of evil,” was trained to heal and relieve suffering, not to torture and murder, but he could not resist. God’s example and approval is strong motivation for all the suicide bombers and soldiers who mercilessly murder and maim men, women, and children on His behalf.

French philosophy teacher Robert Redeker, in the September 28, 2006 edition of Le Figaro, wrote that the Koran “is a book of incredible violence (Le Coran est un livre d'une ’inouïe violence).” You’ve only had a taste—but now, when someone tells you otherwise, you will know better.