Looks like I am expected to say something about Mr. Omar Mateen, and I really don’t have much to say about him.
He basically shot up 100 people, in a gay bar, killing 50 or so of them, then had to wait four hours for the police to do something about it. I am pretty sure, after texting and talking to his wife, and all his old and newly acquired friends from the police department, he figured he would go out, and wave his gun at them, maybe they invite him to the tailgate party they were having outside the Pulse nightclub, I am sure you are feeling my bitter sarcasm here.
If someone is injured, and they haven’t died immediately following the shooting, due to the severity of their injury, their survival rates is severely reduced after spending 45 minutes to one hour without medical attention. If you take that into account, the fact that the police chose to have the four hour-long stalemate with the shooter, must have contributed a great deal to the number of the dead in this case, since many of the injured would have died waiting for the medical help, that wasn’t going to come. I will not try to guess at how many lives could have been saved, if the medical attention had arrived, say half an hour after the shooting began. I will leave that number to be worked out from the injuries sustained by the dead, and how long would these injuries have led to death, given no medical attention was provided for four hours. I will leave this to the more inquisitive of you to find out.
Mr. Omar Mateen, since this article is about him and his motivation, the son of some high-ranking Afghan official, who just didn’t make the cut for some reason to become the next president of Afghanistan, chose instead to move to the US, and live there, no problem with any of that, Omar himself, well educated and raised in the US, still held to the religion of his father, and his father’s father, Islam, and that is where the problem really started. It is very likely that Omar was gay, and now that he is dead, there is no empirical way of verifying that statement, so if he was, it would have been very difficult for him to square the fact that he is gay, with the other fact, that he is Muslim. So would have been his entire family, and if you have difficulty with that statement, I present you with the multitude of cases, where so many anti-gay, homophobic and outspoken clergy and politician have been discovered to be gay themselves. The pressures and guilt cycle present in Christianity regarding homosexuality is very similar if not exactly the same we find in Islam, with obviously very similar effects and outcomes. Pastor Kevin Swanson as it turns out, came out very vocally and openly in support of Mr. Omar Mateen, and reading his bible, one should not be surprised, nor should anyone be surprised when Mr. Kevin is found out to be secretly gay at some point in the future. Also for the mention, Pastor Roger Jimenez of Verity Baptist Church has found it in his religion, Christianity, to endorse what Mr. Omar Mateen has done, and I am sure there are a few more, but I will stop with the mentions here, mainly for the sake of the point I will make next.
While I could fill a page with the references in support of the Orlando / Pulse massacre, I doubt I have enough disc capacity to merely list the names of those in the Islamic world who would find nothing wrong with what he did.
Islam, the religion, does not take kindly to LGBTQAI people, not just in the generic, “hate the others” sense, but specifically, the story of Lot in the Qur’an is not there to fill the pages, it is there to serve as an example to be followed by the believers of that book. The amount of self-loathing this can generate in the human mind, and the pressures this would induce to do what he did, especially given the potential reward of 72 virgins and an instant ascent to heaven, compared to the assurance of an eternal existence in hell, for being gay, would be enough to crack the will of Mr. Omar Mateen, as it seems to have been the case.
As compelling and strong a case as it might be, I will have to reiterate, we can’t know for sure, if Mr. Omar Mateen was gay or not, we may come to know that later, but currently we simply don’t. So we will have to be satisfied with the second sufficient motivation.
Mr Omar Mateen, given the degree of faith infestation in his mind, might just have had a faith flair-up during the holy month of Ramadan, and figured, his deed of riding the world from this awful sin called gayness would even get him a greater reward, if he did it in Ramadan, given that acts like these are especially rewarded if they are done during the month of Ramadan, even more so, if done in the last 10 days of Ramadan, something he seems to have missed out on, and a thousand times over if done on the night or destiny, which he also missed. Anyways, he skips on the 7200 and the 72000 virgins and settles for the humble 72 virgins, maybe he lacked all that much interest in women, but let’s not go there. For a true believer, a sufficient motive.
But there is bad news for Mr. Omar Mateen. He is dead, and he is not having his 72 virgins either, and as I write this article, his body is being eagerly consumed by a myriad of bacteria, worms and fungi, and let me tell you, they are enjoying their meal, along with the few trees that happen to be nearby. And if he has any functioning brain left, which he doesn’t, he would know by now, that all that hooey about the afterlife, heaven, hell and the virgins is exactly that, a bunch of hooey, and he wasted his own life, and the lives of many other, much nicer people than he ever was, for a fairy tale.
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