Where does religious fanaticism start?

Malala Yousafzai is more Christian than most of us baptized folks, yet she considers herself a devout Moslem. At the age of 15 she was shot at point blank range by a Taliban fanatic in Pakistan for encouraging education for children, especially the female kind. On her 16th birthday she courageously addressed the U.N. hoping she could persuade the delegates to move their governments to espouse free and mandatory education for all. We all could take a leaf from her book.
Where does religious fanaticism start? It would take a crowd of psychologists to translate the extremist thought patterns that justify murder in the mind of a true believer. They would have to tell us why righteous people feel justified in something so repugnant. It probably would still make little sense to most people why, for instance, the Tsarnaev brothers of Boston felt a mission to gather the parts for pressure-cooker bombs and detonate them knowing that innocent people who had done no wrong would be killed. And their photos make them look so normal, natural.
Experts tell us that the bombers and similar extremists have decided that people in general have broken God’s laws, and they are God’s self-appointed avengers. By their ethical code, whole groups are guilty of immorality, usually sexual immorality, and they know God hates this, so they are now licensed to strike. It does not matter that the people waiting at the finish line of a marathon violated no code. The “reasoning” justifies killing innocent people so that the guilty society at large might somehow suffer.
The experts further would tell us that nothing in the Koran calls for this, and that Moslems widely repudiate such fanaticism, but this does not matter since Moslem extremists like Mulala’s assailant and the Tsarnaevs did not invoke formal religion. They saw themselves as the arbiters of justice and anti-immorality. They became their own Koran, attacking a nearby symbol of what they saw as evil. But still we ask what gives such zealous ideologues the idea that they have the right to murder?
We need not go as far as Swat Valley or even Boston to find religious extremism. And we need not assume that such outrages are only of Moslems. Read the 23rd chapter of Matthew and see how Jesus fiercely berated the judgmental Pharisees and scribes of Jerusalem and we quickly learn why the most respectable religious leaders of Judaism’s capital could earn the fury of the Pantocrator, the judge of all. Repeatedly he calls them hypocrites, blind guides, givers of bad example, heartless in the face of others’ weakness, pious frauds, ostentatious snobs, fools – yet we wonder how such “holy” people could be the main obstacles for Jesus’s ministry. He had no such problems with prostitutes, tax-collector collaborationists or others who neglected the Law of Moses.
We who were baptized into Christ sometimes find it holy to be judgmental about homosexuals, as though they could be expected to “repent” of the orientation they had since they were 3 years old, if that old. Sin in our church’s most conservative understanding presupposes that someone voluntarily chooses to do what he or she knows is wrong. No one chooses his or her orientation, and research indicates that no one reverses it. Granted the difference between orientation and actions, the temptation of the religious Pharisee today as well as in the Lord’s time is to attack a perceived sin that the critic does not or cannot commit.
So, yes, we have our own Christian Taliban vigilantes who feel a righteous authorization from God to attack others. Beware their ferverinos that with suspicious frequency attack sexual targets with pharisaic ferocity. Jesus protected the woman caught in the act of adultery. His care moved the unnamed woman to crash a party to bathe his feet with her tears. He said the main requirement to be his disciple is to love God and people, even at the expense of some of the 613 specific laws of the Torah.
When pre-Christian Rome was at war with north Africa’s Carthage, Cato the Elder used to end every speech he gave in the Roman senate, whatever its topic, with, “Because these things are so, Carthage must be destroyed.” Until it happens, I would like to similarly conclude each column with: Because these things are so, the Second Amendment must be repealed.
Malala would approve.