Here is the text of a comment I just posted to the article:
This is truly one of the most vile, offensive and utterly ignorant articles I've ever seen in the Washington Post, or any other daily paper for that matter. And I say that as a Christian (Episcopalian). None of the world's major religions advocate violence (notwithstanding certain sub-sects within each of them that may do so). And so far as I know, mental illness does not discriminate on the basis of religion. This article, by implying that it might be in any way legitimate to infer anything at all about a major world religion, based on the actions of a single adherent of that religion who is mentally ill, is simply scandalous. Ask yourself: would these two reporters, or the Washington Post more broadly speaking, ever even dream -- indeed, would they ever even have dared -- of trying to draw religious inferences if this killer had been Christian or Jewish?
Further, to pretend that one can even have a meaningful discussion about religious influences or beliefs on a particular individual's actions as if to suggest that there is some direct, cause-and-effect relationship between the two, particularly when the individual in question is clearly seriously mentally ill, is to grossly misunderstand the nature of this kind of mental illness.
Yet more scandalous still is the article's vague attribution of this alleged "debate" to an unnamed "some." The fact that the article fails to identify where, and among whom, this purported 'debate' is occurring makes one wonder what the motivations for writing such a piece were. I will stop short of suggesting that the writers wrote the article because they wanted to foment religious bigotry, but neither the Post nor the writers themselves should be surprised if people interpret it that way..
What an utterly shameful piece of 'journalism.'
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