Comparing The Islamic State And The Puritans

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The Puritans were a religious group of early American settlers. ISIS, or the Islamic State, ISIL, or the Daesh, is a militant group of religious extremists in Iraq and Syria. It may seem odd to compare the Puritans to the Islamic State, but both shared religious ideologies that led to horrible atrocities committed in the name of their respective god. Both the Islamic State and the Puritans are groups that use or used their divine status as an excuse to dehumanizing, torture, and kill innocent people without emotion or regret. This paper will show that both groups shared similar behaviors that ultimately led to great atrocities being committed by the groups as a whole and by their members.
Before we continue, one can argue the influence of the
It is hard to decline action that is of a god 's order. In Puritanism, the will of God is an absolute. The loving message of the Holy Bible that is taught today could be argued to be missing from Puritanism. The right to live or die is entirely at God 's discretion: “so that divine Justice never stands in the Way, it makes no Objection against God’s using his Power at any Moment to destroy them (Edwards 431),” and if God puts it in you to kill an infidel, what right do you have to question God 's will? Followers of Islam claim with certainty that it is a religion of love, but the Islamic State 's interpretation is a religion of blood-lust. The comparison here is that though the religion itself is not to blame in either case, by perverting the message extremists have taken it upon themselves to be the god-ordained arbiters of who deserves to live or die. We can see the same mentality in Puritanism, where God “will repay fury to his adversaries” (Edwards 437). In the case of the Islamic State, they are being manipulated by the secular Baath party servicemen of Saddam 's regime who don 't even care about the religion in the first place

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