BOMBS ARE FALLING

So now the bombs are falling on ISIL targets in Syria. A new line has been crossed. Is it going to work?

And by that, I don't just mean: Can the job be done by dropping bombs from U.S. (and other) aircraft and training local fighters to provide the necessary boots on the ground?

There's a bigger issue involved: the so-called War on Terror itself. This activity ("terror") is merely a weapon anyone may pick up and use at any time. All folks need is a reason.

It's classic asymmetrical warfare. You can't take on the enemy in some massive frontal attack, so you jab your knife at the exposed edges. You harass. You annoy. You poke at the Great Satan and do whatever you can. Let Allah grant you his help.

Maybe you can hit a famous building so hard Allah will take it from there and bring the structure to the ground. (In the case of the World Trade Towers, it was something to do with an aviation-fuel fire and a tangle of insufficiently insulated steel beams.)

Rather than clobbering terrorists—before, during, or after an attack—we should consider discovering and short-circuiting the reasons for that attack in the first place.

So why are they attacking us? Why do they hate us?

It's simple: They are deeply religious folk who are defending their religion from attack and scorn.

And yeah, I know, Prime Minister Cameron pointed out ISIL fighters were not true Muslims, that Islam is a religion of peace, that ISIL is lying when they claim a religious reason for their actions.

Nonsense. The man is just raining PC honey on a growing segment of Great Britain. No mainstream politician can afford to be seen as anti-religion, no matter what the religion.

But check this out: No religion whose very name means "submission" can be held entirely blameless if its adherents go on a rampage, looking for a new and wider population to coerce into this holy process. (Or to kill if they refuse.) Ultimately, the radicals want a Global Caliphate: Submission from All.

Christianity is not much better. There is a long and nasty history of worldwide "missionary" work issuing from that particular pack of nonsense.

So how do you stop religious people from acting out, from pressing their case with guns and bombs and steel?

This is a tough one. Humans don't just love their various religions, they are afraid to examine them. (There is literally no way to judge God's response to such an inquiry.) Folks bound up in religions that encourage members to fear God are especially unlikely to look into the details of their beliefs.

(According to the Bible, on one occasion God got so pissed off he murdered everybody on the planet, save eight. You really don't want to offend that guy.)

If you tried to explain to a bunch of religious people the error of their thinking, you could expect them to stick their fingers in their ears and chant "la-la-la" until they saw you had stopped talking.

Or they would simply kill you to put an end to the threat of what could be fatal contamination.

Generally, you can't argue people out of their beliefs. Those notions didn't get in there by reason and so can't be removed by that process.

And any attempt to ridicule beliefs would meet with great opposition from Islamists. They appear to be especially touchy in this area. It would be like pouring gasoline on the fire.

Still, this might be a promising area for attack. If you can't utterly destroy a given religion, you may be able to modify certain attitudes within that religion.

(You can, in theory, utterly destroy a religion, but it involves killing [or converting] every member [man, woman, and child], as well as eradicating all sacred texts and artifacts. Even the most rabid Christian missionaries were not able to complete this task in the New World, hard as they tried.)

You can't prove to a Muslim that his religion is false, but maybe you could prove to him the U.S. is not actually in a war against him. Unfortunately, such arguments are becoming more difficult every day and may soon pass the Point of No Return—if they haven't already.

It would be difficult, but perhaps you could get Islamists to mellow out when it comes to "defending" their religion from a myriad of non-lethal and casual threats. How many people were killed because Protestants referred to Catholics as "mackerel snappers"? I would hope not many.

Mild criticism such as the political cartoon in the Danish newspaper (showing Mohammad with a bomb under his turban) should not have caused the furor it did.

On the other hand, those radical Muslims who dream of a Global Caliphate may need to be terminated with prejudice. In fact, they might insist.

In the end, it could take hundreds (or thousands) of years for humans to give up religion altogether.

But don't hold your breath.

Besides, the trouble with religion (or dangerous nonsense of any type) goes much deeper than a simple ignorance of how the universe operates. At base, there appears to be a fundamental flaw in the human brain.

Is anybody working on that problem?