ISIS has beheaded a 15-year old boy for listening to Western pop-music.
According to Kurdish media reports, the jihadist group that has captured wide swaths of Syria and Iraq beheaded a 15-year-old boy in Mosul for the crime of listening to Western pop music.
Reports cite officials in the northern Iraqi city as saying that the boy, Ayham Hussein, was discovered by ISIS henchman as he was listening to a portable compact disc player.
Hussein was detained by ISIS operatives as he sat inside a shop owned by his father in an open-air market in western Mosul. The boy was beaten and tried in a local sharia court, which sentenced him to be executed.
Even as we marvel at the indecency and savagery, we would be foolish if we failed to understand that these barbarians are doing exactly what is demanded by every preacher in Christendom: They have surrendered ordinary human decency and intelligence to faith, trusting that their sacred texts are what the Holy Men claim them to be — the word of an Invisible Friend.
Now, don’t bother huffing that they are following the Quran, but Christians follow the Bible; it’s a distinction without a difference. Not only is there plenty of savagery in the Bible (the Jews of the Old Testament are indistinguishable from ISIS; read Numbers), once you cease asking for proof, once you are guided by unreasoning belief, by faith — anything is permissible so long as it enjoys the imprimatur of a Holy Man’s reading of ancient texts written by goatherders. The moral evil is faith itself.
Faith, by the way, should not be confused with educated confidence. It is one thing to persevere in overcoming great difficulties, confidant that you have the ability to achieve your goal, and quite another thing to believe and act upon blinking-neon nonsense just because you found it in a ridiculous old book.