Lack of dialogue and fear of God’s punishment drove violence and martyrdom-seeking

Evidence

Moreover, there was a lack of confidence that God’s ways were indeed explicable, or even understandable. The absence of any real possibility of dispute, combined with this fear of failure as a Providential punishment, may explain the preference for a violence which allowed the relief of feelings without any necessity for ratiocination. It may explain why, when violence of a military nature and directed against the enemy was impossible, there was a movement which sought to provoke martyrdom, an extracting of violence out of the enemy’s disposition. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 746

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The argument that violence substitutes for reasoning when dialogue is impossible, and that martyrdom-seeking is violence ‘extracted out of the enemy’s disposition’, is a dense causal model of religious conflict worth sitting with.
• XREF: Martyrdom-seeking as extracting violence from the enemy closely parallels the ‘On Sacrifice’ book’s account of ritualized violence as stabilized social structure. — connects to: Missionaries sought martyrdom through provoking Muslim violence when war was unavailable; Theological idolatry of power, fear, and violence motivated the January 6 rioters — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 218