Psychopathy and Islam
I'd like to propose an experiment. It would be non-invasive, doing no harm to the test subjects, though if they understood its purpose they would be embarrassed, and it would cost a good deal of money. It's this:
There is no love in Islam. None. Zero. Zilch. This is a religion whose female followers happily celebrate their children's suicides as suicide bombers. Whose male followers regularly beat their wives and rape women who are not attended by men as well as women who are not Muslims, because their religion espouses such behavior. Whose male followers are encouraged to rape and molest children, who have no rights at all in that culture, and who sometimes die as
a result of being raped by adults. Whose followers of both sexes are encouraged to murder out of hand those who are not Muslims, who are gay, who are transgender, who cherish freedom, who dare to criticize any aspect of Islam, to whom our Bill of Rights and the rest of our Constitution is anathema. Whose followers seem to have no moral qualms about doing such things, no revulsion against them.
In short, they act as if they have no conscience, no love, no internalized morals, just a fear of not doing what Mohammed or custom tell them to do. Which eerily resembles the mind-set of psychopaths.
So why not test them to see if they are in fact psychopathic, at least the ardent believers in Islam? That can be done with non-invasive functional MRI scans (fMRI scans). If it is thereby found that the behavior and neurology of their brains closely conform to what is known of the way that the brains of confirmed psychopaths behave along with their general outlook and regard for others, then this would be a case in which psychopathy probably did not develop in the usual way in these people, but as a result of cultural conditioning. Psychopathy as a rule seems to have both genetic and neurological underpinnings, but in the case described above, genes might not have anything to do with it, and neurological development would be based entirely or almost entirely on extrinsic rather than intrinsic factors. This would have important implications for the sciences of human development and psychology, showing that there are conditions under which psychopathological development doesn't necessarily arise solely from the biology of the individual in question.
As expensive as this would be -- fMRI scans cost a great deal of money in and of themselves, for one thing, and to get a large enough data-set to be useful scientifically it would require that hundreds or thousands of such scans would have to be done -- it would provide invaluable insights into human development.
Inquiring minds want to know: Just what's going on here?
There is no love in Islam. None. Zero. Zilch. This is a religion whose female followers happily celebrate their children's suicides as suicide bombers. Whose male followers regularly beat their wives and rape women who are not attended by men as well as women who are not Muslims, because their religion espouses such behavior. Whose male followers are encouraged to rape and molest children, who have no rights at all in that culture, and who sometimes die as
a result of being raped by adults. Whose followers of both sexes are encouraged to murder out of hand those who are not Muslims, who are gay, who are transgender, who cherish freedom, who dare to criticize any aspect of Islam, to whom our Bill of Rights and the rest of our Constitution is anathema. Whose followers seem to have no moral qualms about doing such things, no revulsion against them.
In short, they act as if they have no conscience, no love, no internalized morals, just a fear of not doing what Mohammed or custom tell them to do. Which eerily resembles the mind-set of psychopaths.
So why not test them to see if they are in fact psychopathic, at least the ardent believers in Islam? That can be done with non-invasive functional MRI scans (fMRI scans). If it is thereby found that the behavior and neurology of their brains closely conform to what is known of the way that the brains of confirmed psychopaths behave along with their general outlook and regard for others, then this would be a case in which psychopathy probably did not develop in the usual way in these people, but as a result of cultural conditioning. Psychopathy as a rule seems to have both genetic and neurological underpinnings, but in the case described above, genes might not have anything to do with it, and neurological development would be based entirely or almost entirely on extrinsic rather than intrinsic factors. This would have important implications for the sciences of human development and psychology, showing that there are conditions under which psychopathological development doesn't necessarily arise solely from the biology of the individual in question.
As expensive as this would be -- fMRI scans cost a great deal of money in and of themselves, for one thing, and to get a large enough data-set to be useful scientifically it would require that hundreds or thousands of such scans would have to be done -- it would provide invaluable insights into human development.
Inquiring minds want to know: Just what's going on here?