Oof! Looks like I was misunderstood. I was not saying the events of Sept 11 were not insane in a philosophical sense. I was merely stating that the people who committed those acts were probably not clinically insane, and that whether we consider them "insane" in a non-clinical sense is a purely cultural decision. Remember that among various groups, it is acceptable to kill a village full of men and then eat their flesh. To claim that all people in those cultures are insane is a cultural judgment, not a diagnosis.

I was arguing against the proposition that allowing yourself to die for your beliefs is necessarily insane. But it is also true that killing for your beliefs is not insane either. People who claim this is insanity are unwilling to face the fact that sane humans do things like this. We have a very clean and pretty view of the world, but the world is not all clean and pretty.

If we accept that, we see that it is not necessary to postualte that these men were both gay and insane, and offered an "out" of this suicide mission to avoid Hellfire. We can accept instead that they belong to a culture (in this case a subculture) where this behavior is culturally sanctioned and acceptable. Under those conditions, sane (and, of course, straight) people will do things like this.

And, mary bee, there's no call to be rude! Your own contributions to this thread haven't exactly been pearls of wisdom...in fact, they haven't been anything at all!

Steve