Cultural Survival Skills

How To Feel About Muslim Terrorists

I began writing this blog on 9/11/17.

I have a dear friend who likes to admonish me that is wrong to “hate”. For example, if I were to say that “I hate to eat fish because they taste fishy”! He would tease and chide me, “Tom, you shouldn’t hate!”

Seriously, with rare exception, my dear Christian friend is spot-on correct. Over the long-run, people who are full of “hate” often damage themselves, as well as friends and loved-ones with these overly powerful emotions. 

Yet, I must respectfully take issue with this idea that we should “never hate” anyone or anything, under and any conditions. It is clear to me, at least in a very few critical arenas of real life, that what we call hate is an adaptive emotion.

So, Just what does the word “hate” really mean or symbolize?

Webster defines the word “Hate” as: “intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury.”

Feelings of intense hostility, aversion, anger, and fears of injury are normally caused by things in the damaging natural events (tornados, hurricanes, or earth quakes, etc.); or, living things that threaten our lives (poisonous snakes, tigers,  predatory humans or entire cultures of murderous humans, etc.).

Every emotion that humans experience have evolved over the course of the history of our species. Therefore, at least under some environmental conditions, the physiological reactions and attendant emotions that we call “hate” must have had, and arguably still do have, some adaptive advantages (read survival value).

I will argue that it is wonderfully adaptive, and should not be a “hate crime” to “hate” those who are trying to kill you or your loved ones. Also, it should not a “hate crime” to “hate” any force that is attempting to destroy the society in which you live…and upon which you depend for life itself.

The same logic might also apply for researchers who are expending their life’s energies in search of cures for the various diseases that kill or maim countless individuals world-wide. Having intense emotions (“hate” for target diseases) required to motivate and focus one’s most intense scientific assault upon these many killers of members of our species is adaptive. Though not essential, “Hating” killer diseases and working feverishly to destroy them is not a bad thing, is it?

From a pure biologically perspective, the word “Hate” is only an abstract symbol produced by English-speaking people expelling air through their vocal chords and into the environment. Of course there must be auditory receptors available to sense and interpret these vibratory stimuli that symbolize this powerful concept.

Also, the word “hate” can exist in print, hieroglyphics or a binary code, but again these stimuli are only meaningful if there are receptors available to perceive it.

Though the feelings we call “hate” can have survival value, it is wrong and evil to focus theme upon all members of any religion, ethnic group or society. All that I have learned in life, confirms that there are both wonderfully good and very bad people in all of these classes of humanity.  Therefore, we should “hate“ the injustice and harm that would be brought by such an irrational, unfair and overly-generalized focus of these destructive emotions.

Regarding the matter of Islamic Terrorism.  Americans SHOULD feel hateful emotions towards the Islamic terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks on our fellow Americans. Furthermore, Americans SHOULD have hateful emotions  towards their terrorist colleagues, past, present and future.

It is a harsh fact of life that humans must sometimes kill other humans in order that they and their off-spring can survive.

I submit that most so-called “normal” (a cycle on our washing machines) God-fearing Americans (as well as agnostics and atheists) would have trouble killing another human being without feeling hatred for them, i.e., “intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury.”

Today I watched the heart-rending ceremonies remembering the most horrific terrorist attack on America in our history.

The immediate death toll on 9/11 was 2996. Once again the names of these poor souls were read allowed and the nation mourned. But the tragic consequences of this Islamic Terrorist attack is still unfolding. 

The continuing tragedy is that most Americans are unaware of the fact that 1000’s more have and will yet die from the environmental pollutants they were exposed to from the clouds of poison released into the city of New York by the collapsing buildings. The same is true of the gigantic toxic pile of destruction upon which so many labored. It is reported that there are 37,000 citizens who are now sick, as a result of this exposure. Again, it is estimated that many thousands more will die from these exposure related sicknesses than were killed on the day of 9/11.

Please read the following for another painful dose of reality.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/11/9-11-illnesses-death-toll

There are many good Muslims and of course we must learn to recognize them and respect them. Trump’s extreme vetting program for immigrants and increased intelligence focusing upon suspected Islamic terrorists and recruiters of Islamic terrorists is now essential for America’s survival.

It is also essential for Americans vote for representatives who will support an all-out war effort against Islamic terrorists…the world around. Like it or not, America is already in WWIII and it is either win or die.  To survive, America must join with allies to seek out countless Islamic terrorists, wherever they are, and kill them.

And yes, it will increase the odds of our survival if we sharply focus the emotions we call “hate” upon the Islamic terrorists as we and the rest of the world engages in the awful task of terminating their gene pools.

V. Thomas Mawhinney,  Ph.D.,  9/26/17