No, I don't. But if we treat trying to understand reasons as justifying, then all we'll have is a world full of people shooting each other in muddy moral trenches while believing that they're occupying the high ground.

Pan Am 101 -- 17th August 1989; Pan Am 103 -- 21st December 1988; Iran airways flight 655 -- 3rd July 1988. I'm not saying that 655 wasn't an accident, but that they

perceived

it as an act of aggression. But well before that, we were involved in interventions in the Middle East. I mean, we backed Saddam Hussein, who'd been in power for almost a decade by then. We supported Saddam because Iran had overthrown the regime we'd installed that favoured western oil firms.

What are you on about? I don't give anyone any money to fight. Why on Earth did you think I would???

True, but the caliphate's a very new thing. The terrorist violence against the west was fueled by a perception that we were aggressors, and it's not without reason.

Which, funnily enough, is what we consistently do to the Middle East....

Which is the Old Testament, hence it goes back to Judaism. The whole Abrahamic tradition is against idol worship (see the golden calf in Exodus), and yet even then, the Abrahamic tradition hasn't even been unusual in terms of iconoclasts -- see also the Russian revolution, the pre-Christian vikings and their sacking of monasteries etc.

Except in this case it's because the Christians are becoming atheists, and there's simply no critical mass (no pun intended) to fill Christian places of worship. I doubt there's anyone under 40 going to the kirk in the village I grew up in.

It's the modern form of a palimpsest: a CVS repository showing all the different fad languages your PHB insisted the company codebase be rewritten in over the decades.

Actually, I recently saw a fantastic PBS documentary on the birth of Judaism, which pointed out that Abraham picked up his monotheistic faith and the name of Yahweh from somewhere in Arabia, and how Yahweh worship was used as an agrarian revolution among the lower orders of the Caananites which overturned the nobility there. There was no "exodus" from Egypt, seemingly; rather, the Caananite rulers were vassal kings under the pharaoh, and the leaving of Egypt was really just getting the land out from the Egyptian empire.

Early Israelites still hung onto trappings of pantheism, though, and when early Judaism was used to justify the rule of kings (the birth of the House of David) -- as has happened with almost every religion at some point -- there was a much stricter enforcement of genuine monotheism.

The term "cult" in theological terms relates to a specific set of beliefs and/or practices. For example, the "Marian cult" is the worship of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and the belief that she was conceived without sin. This is shared by the Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches, as well as some of the Middle Eastern and north-east African groups. Most Protestant groups (particularly Calvinist sections) refuse the Marian cult as a form of pseudo-pantheism.

The vernacular use of "cult", though, is ill-defined and meaningless.

Christ on a bike, that's the most insult-dense post I've read in a while. Islamophobia, ableism and insulting people who disagree with you all rolled into one.

Every broad group has contained some iconoclasts at some point, and you don't have to go as far back as the Crusades to see Christians destroying totems of other religions (we did it throughout the Imperial era). However, the acts of the extremists of I.S. do not represent the mainstream of Islam in any way.

They went to a fair/show organised by a vintage engineering preservation group. Must have been a hell of a day for the owners when they were asked to do something so special.

...which is why they specifically went to a vintage steamroller show, who would have been extremely happy for the unusual publicity that it generated for the guys involved.

(except the invaluable data on it, that is)

Do we know it wasn't a piece of out-of-date hardware with no resale value...?

Both are correct forms.

The subjunctive is dying out in English. The circumstances of its use vary between dialects, and a heck of a lot of people do not use it at all. I do not use it at all. It is not an "error", and it's damn rude to a hell of a lot of people to say it is.

...not to mention off-topic.

The hard-drive was less damaged by the steamroller than expected, so they put it through a stone-crusher afterwards.