Make Sure You're Right, and Then Go Ahead

Quick. What do Paul Hill and Mohammed Atta have in common? I mean, you know, beside the fact that they were both murderous fundamentalist fanatics. Or that they were both terrorists driven by a hate-filled ideology. Or that they both expected to be handsomely rewarded in Paradise for the murders they committed. Or that they both had some, ahem, issues with women.

You know, this isn't turning out the way I thought it would.

In case you didn't know, Paul Hill gunned down a doctor and his bodyguard at a women's clinic in Pensacola, Florida, and was executed for that crime last Wednesday. Mohammed Atta, of course, got together with some of his Saudi pals to crash some planes into the World Trade Center just about two years ago, and I'm sure he'd be on death row too, if he hadn't spared us the trouble.

Atta and his buddies killed a lot more people, but the difference between him and Hill is a difference of degree, not of kind. Both men were, strictly speaking, terrorists. Their primary goal was to create terror in a target population. The actual killings were only secondary objectives. So it was with Paul Hill, so it was with Timothy McVeigh, and so it is with all such murdering terrorist scum.

The real common denominator, though, is that they were both True Believers, men whose minds were never darkened by the slightest wisp of a cloud of doubt. Why should they? They were in sole possession of The Truth, and they knew that God demanded blood. They lived in a black and white world, and they were the Good Guys. They all had absolute, unquestioning, unwavering belief in the rightness of their cause, and they were certain right up to the last moment that they were doing right and serving God by killing people. They never once stopped to really, seriously, skeptically ask themselves if that could really be the case.

And that's what set these guys apart from the vast majority of ordinary human beings, and all I can say is, thank God for that. Most of us have enough simple common sense in us that even if we claim to espouse some of the vile ideas that animated these guys, we wouldn't murder for them. The vast majority of us are smart enough to have the inkling of a real doubt that a Big Idea, even a Big Idea of God, might not be a good thing to commit cold-blooded murder for. Too bad it's not all of us.

I'm not in favor of constant hand-wringing, but I think a person needs to check his moral compass every once in a while. Once you start sailing blind, who knows where you might end up. After they stopped taking their bearings, Hill and Atta managed to do a full circle, and sail from their highest aspirations, i.e. to do right and to serve aggrieved justice, directly into their most despicable impulses, and they followed through on them like the evil idiotic automatons they had become.

There's a reason they call it "Blind Faith", and I find it hard to believe that anyone believes it's a good thing, yet there's no shortage of people preaching that it's what we all need to practice. Say what you like about my beliefs, but nobody has ever slaughtered innocent people in the name of Secular Humanism.

Would Hill and Atta have agreed with each other? My best guess is that Atta would have applauded Hill, but Hill would have been iffy about Atta ... unless he thought there were lots of pro-choicers in the World Trade Center.

Now Paul Hill and Mohammed Atta are in Paradise, or at least they expected to be. Considering that they both held an exclusionary view of the Revealed Truth of their respective religions, it would be sweet irony indeed if they were both roasting in Hell together at this very moment.