The thought that has been bothering me for the past few days It is about the common denominator between the two cases in the last 24 hours.
In both, religious Jews harmed another group in the name of religion. In both, religious Jews used violence and murderous intent.
Moreover: the police did not raise the alert against the gay community. They have no fear that the secular side will come and take revenge. Because the people there are calmer.
And if so, the question arises: Do the religious murder more?! Or are they closer to murdering?!
Factual, no.
When you count murders in religious society versus secular society, you get a radically opposite picture.
In a religious society, there is no murder over a romantic motive, nor over a parking dispute. There is no gang war, nor just for the sake of abuse. In a secular society, on the other hand, the phenomenon exists and is rampant.
In the past decade, hundreds of people have lost their lives in secular society for criminal reasons. A very small percentage of this occurred in religious society in Israel.
So what's the difference?
The difference is that in religious society we can find murder and the use of force on ideological grounds, while secular society has taught itself that ideology is not a reason to eliminate others.
Secular liberalism holds that as long as others do not harm you, you are not allowed to harm them.
Therefore, the murders that occur against the backdrop of a conflict between two sides are less shocking to the secular street, since there supposedly exists a reason for the acts of violence.
This is what makes the shocking difference between the burning of an Arab baby who did no harm and murder over a quarrel in which one person harmed the other.
Other type of damage
But in fact, even religious people start from this assumption.
For them, there is a type of damage that does not exist in the secular world - spiritual damage. In the religious world, the true meaning of a person - these are his opinions, the ideology is sacred. It is not a game in which each player chooses his own path.
The verse that accompanies the religious Jew from birth to death is that there are only two ways. And only one of them is correct: “See, I have set before you today life and good, and death and evil… and you must choose life so that you and your descendants may live.”.
Therefore, although in a religious society there are also quarrels over parking, inheritance, and more, a person is commanded to absorb them and not develop them. This is damage that must be overcome, it is not a reason to eliminate others, and indeed, in practice, murder cases in a religious society tend to a round zero.
But spiritual harm, such as rustic views, or a parade considered an abomination – this is eternal, substantial harm, for which there is much less forgiveness and pardon.
So they are right to claim that Shishi Shlissel is not acting in a vacuum, but rather from a background of condemnation and contempt for the gay community – in religious-Haredi society; and they are right to claim that the arsonists of the Church of the Loaves and Fishes, or the Toddler – are acting from a religious background.
You are 100 percent right. But if we take 100 recent murder cases in which Jews committed murder, we will find that two of them acted out of ideological-values motives, while all the rest acted out of animalistic-power motives.
The religious acted from values, and the secular from bestiality.
All murderers are wrong in my opinion, but it's hard for me to decide who is worse.