Razib Khan has a post up responding to something Ezra Klein posted regarding the Paris incident. First here’s the Ezra Klein piece. This is the bit that got Razib exorcised:

These murders can’t be explained by a close read of an editorial product, and they needn’t be condemned on free speech grounds. They can only be explained by the madness of the perpetrators, who did something horrible and evil that almost no human beings anywhere ever do, and the condemnation doesn’t need to be any more complex than saying unprovoked mass slaughter is wrong.

This is a tragedy. It is a crime. It is not a statement, or a controversy.

Razib first wonders if Klein had some sort of aneurism while writing that bit. Maybe he is unfamiliar with Klein’s work, but that piece was probably one of the better ones from the Vox project. I have no idea what sort of traffic the site gets, but no one ever mentions it, unless it is to mock Ezra Klein. Even the mockery has faded, for the most part. Anyway, Razib goes on to make an excellent point:

This co-mingling of religious and communal identity is not an aberration, but the human norm over most of history. In much of the world it still is the norm. Dishonoring the gods of barbarians and unbelievers has long been a matter of course. Churches were built over temples and mosques over churches for a reason. To show the power of one communal identity and the eclipse of another. Gods and people were interchangeable in the psyche. When the Assyrians sacked Babylon they dragged away the statue of the god Marduk in chains. But individuals dishonoring the gods of their own people was always a matter of serious concern, violating public order, and potentially undermining social harmony (often, innovation in religious practice prefigured rebellion). It doesn’t take much to imagine that there might be functional reason for societies to establish taboos of what is inviolate and sacred, and sanction those who trespass.

It is incorrectly assumed that religions must have an invisible man in the sky component. Dividing theology from ideology by the presence or absence of the super natural is convenient, but leads to the false assumption that ideologies are devoid of magical thinking. That’s not the case.

The most obvious example is PETA, the cult that claims to be the guardians of non-human mammal rights. The adherents of that cult imagine all sorts of things about animals that are laughably untrue. They also proselytize about the killing of animals, while running abattoirs all over the country.

Ezra Klein is a conventional liberal and of middling intelligence. He is not a blockhead, but he has a narrow mindedness that suggests a lack of curiosity about the world. He’s also overstocked with religiosity. It’s why his posts often sound like the journal entries of a rabbinical student or the private musings of a novice monk. He is forever wrestling with his faith.

Luckily for him, the prevailing religion of modern America is cultural Marxism so he has found a comfortable place to cast himself as a post-modern Tertullian. He has organized his life around proselytizing over the Internet. As a novice he worked his way up to a major media organ, but that was not enough. He went off to build his own Mosque called Vox where he can pray and train others to believe like him. It’s not a coincidence that cultural Marxism has many of the same structures as Islam.

Of course, Ezra really does not believe the things he preaches in the sense that he knows them to be true. I know two plus two is four for all known values of two. There’s no need for me to argue it or prove it. The reason for proselytizing is to convince yourself by convincing others. Misery loves company and so do the believers. Vox in explanatory journalism in the same sense that Shia is explanatory Islam.

One fascinating thing about the Paris attack is watching how the Left reacts to it. At some level, it seems they get that they are at war with a complimentary religion. As Razib points out, every religion has its taboos. Much of what modern liberalism preaches is taboo in Islam. What is sacred in Islam is considered barbaric by liberals.

The trouble is the Left can’t bring itself to condemn Islam. That’s simply against the core of their faith. Islam does not suffer from such a defect. They get that they are a religion at war with another religion. Hilariously, even when Islam makes that point, liberals are forced to call them liars and inauthentic Muslims.

Added to the crazy stew is the fact that western liberals have a technological edge and are killing Muslims wholesale. Muslims have to settle for retail killing, like the Paris attack. The simple solution is to expel all Muslims for Western lands, but again, they bump into their own dogma prohibiting such things. The result is a surge in Muslim immigrants, hell bent on killing the decadent West.

This will not end well.