I stare at you

I see your eyes

But I don’t know if you see me

Or just what you want to see

Today is started listening to the book: Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill by Jessica Stern. When I looked at the picture for today, I saw these tiny eyes that are multi-faceted and imagined a collage of tiny little screens the insect brain can look at, like in one of those surveillance vans with all those screens you see in your average police series. From there, I hooked on to the many ways we as humans can look at the world and each other. The religious terrorists she talks about in her book have extraordinary views and make vastly different conclusions than the average person would do when reading a religious book, for instance, or interpreting the reasons why governments do what they do. I am not so far into the book, but her main goal is to interview (mostly) former terrorists to find out their reasoning.

We all look a little bit different to the world; we have all our points of view, and that’s normal. Luckily it is only a minority that ends up killing strangers in the name of a higher power. I read books like this because these people have their “crazy” not hidden or suppressed like we do but show it to the world. The so-called evil is easier to see in people like that; that’s also the reason we still study Hitler and Stalin.