The killing of 132 pupils: A psychological perspective

I can't sleep thinking of what can drive a person to a point where he wears a suicide jacket and blows himself in a classroom killing some 60 odd children! The conclusion that I came up with is not only valid for this person but unfortunately it also holds true for scores of Muslims at the global scale.

Let's leave religion out for one moment and focus on how humans tend to believe in anything. When I say that 'I believe in something' it means that my intellectual, ethical and aesthetic sense have validated an idea entering my consciousness. What happens is that an idea enters my mind, I start thinking about it and in the end I find it reasonably correct in rational perspective. Afterwards, I start to wonder that whether pursuing that idea is the 'right' thing to do in terms of moral perspective. Once I find that idea rationally correct and ethically right, I then start to fall in love with that idea. At this point that idea will start to appear in my personality and I can safely say that a specific idea has now transformed into a belief.  

If the source of an idea is divine, the consciousness will give birth to so called religious beliefs. That is the only difference between beliefs of a religious person and an atheist.

Emotions giving birth to Beliefs:

The critical point comes when I cannot reason about an idea, yet somehow I feel that it's the 'right' and 'lovely' thing to do. At this point, a person will mistake his emotions as beliefs.

This means that my emotions are the resultant of an idea penetrating my ethical and aesthetic sense without going through my intellect. If that idea is divine, rather than producing emotions, the consciousness will produce blind faith. This is the state of consciousness that the suicide bomber is in! His ethical sense has convinced himself that killing those children is ethically 'right' thing to do; a sort of sacrifice necessary for a better future of an Islamic society. In aesthetic perspective, he's also in love with the concept of 'martyrdom', the act of blowing himself up for an ethically justified cause.

To summarize, human emotions are governing the faith of the suicide bomber here. More specifically, the definition of faith for this person starts with the hatred of infidel forces and it also ends with it. A closer look at the tweets and posts on Pakistani social media after the incident reveals something even more disturbing. It seems that our faith is also based solely upon the hatred of Taliban and their loyal forces. This means that basic psychological problem of the suicide bomber is the same as an ordinary citizen of the society. Both are projecting their emotions on their faith without a sense of reasoning.

Solution:

Rather than thinking like an emotional being, we should let our thoughts give rise to emotions. For a religious person, this means that my fundamental metaphysical concepts about nature should arouse my religious emotions, not the other way around. If I fail to convince my intellectual sense about something, my judgment will always be emotional, not reasonable.