HumANomaly

In the wake of the Boston marathon bombings many people are wondering how two seemingly ordinary young men could so easily and so quickly embrace such violence.

This question addresses both the motivation and the process of their conversion. The irony of our concern is how willing we would be to convert people who were in the state these young men were when they planted those bombs into the kind of people we think they should be. Whether one goes from acceptable to unacceptable or from unacceptable to acceptable the process is still conversion.

We do not pay much attention to the motivation behind what we consider to be "good" conversion. But our willingness to classify conversion as good and bad may lie at the heart of the problem we are attempting to solve. The fact is that no one goes from bad to good; that is a judgment made by those who disagree with their ideology.

It appears that the message of Genesis is eternal: in the day that you claim to know the difference between good and evil, violent death will result; you will surely die.