I&#x27;m not sure what your stance is in that case. I certainly agree with you that these people are spiritually maladjusted. They way I see it there are two competing theories. One is that terrorism is mainly the result of economic and political grievances against the west and already present psychological disorders. The other is that in addition to economic and political grievances, religion and theological grievances play a <i>major</i> role, and that these people aren&#x27;t crazy people but people who have become convinced of a crazy idea. The former is the mainstream left wing theory, and while I am generally sympathetic to the left, this theory simply does not fit the data.<p>If true we would expect terrorists to be more lowly educated and poor people who mainly come from countries that have suffered under the west. We would expect these to be people who hate life, not people who love death. We would expect terrorism to be weakly or not at all correlated to religion. We would expect that the terrorists are not explicitly telling us that they&#x27;re doing it because of religious dogma. We would expect terrorist groups to be fighting against the west, and not mass murdering Yazidi&#x27;s for example, who have absolutely nothing to do with what happens in the world. Of all western countries, we would not expect these attacks to be against France so many times. Why have previous attacks and outrages focused on cartoonists? I could go on and on. What we actually observe is the opposite.<p>All of this is explained perfectly well by the second theory.