What Comes After "It's Not About Islam?"

So a very religious Islamic couple shot up a place in San Bernardino yesterday. Everyone trotted out their favorite talking points and hobby horses. Some were more successful than others. As this continues to happen and many of the perpetrators leave behind videos and manifestos and trails leading to mosques, the "It's not about Islam" line is going to be harder and harder to sell to the average person. There are large chunks of the Koran dedicated to whacking infidels and that's just the way it is.

So what comes next from the "It's not about Islam" crowd? How about, "All religions are the same." The Crusades will be brought up and Westboro Baptist Church and who knows what else. Everyone will be tarred with the same brush of superstition, xenophobia and hatred. That's already done to some extent, but it's going to get louder when one can no longer write off this kind of terrorism as being completely divorced from Islam.

The only other choice will be to pass judgment on the different worldviews out there and find some better than others and that's not going to happen.

Update: On a related note, Mollie Hemingway has a great piece up at The Federalist. Read the whole thing. Here's my favorite bit.

Theodicy attempts to defend God’s goodness and omnipotence in light of the existence of evil. “Why do bad things happen to good people?” the question goes. (To which a Lutheran might reply, “Trick question! There are no good people!”) There are various schools of thought and debate, rekindled with every hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, act of terror, and mass shooting. Progressives seem to begin their response to tragedy with the question, “Why do bad things happen to good governments?”

The theodicy of federal government seeks to defend the goodness of government in the face of tragedy. So just as some religious groups might blame a weather event on insufficient fealty to the relevant god, some progressives blame — before we actually know what is even going on in a given tragedy — insufficient fealty, sacrifice, and offerings to the relevant god of federal government. And so they explain that the god of good government would have been able to take care of us if only we’d given it sufficient power to do so.