Melissa Benoist Quotes

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

Since leaving the church, I've been working with law enforcement involved in counterterrorism and deradicalization. I hoped that illuminating Westboro's ideology - and especially the unraveling of that ideology - would be useful to the people doing that work.

People don’t get radicalized overnight. It’s a process that takes 3 or 4 years.

Any faith of more than 1.6 billion people is going to have some of them who falsely justify actions on that faith.

For many, embracing the ideology of Osama bin Laden or ISIS allowed them to become the heroes of their own story as well as actors in a cosmic crusade. For others, a 'cognitive opening' to militant Islam was often precipitated by a personal disappointment or loss.

We have to go into fundamentalist mosques; we have to stop foreign financing of Islamist groups.

The civil war across the Middle East between the Shia and the Sunni empowers groups like ISIS and al Qaeda who claim to be the defenders of Sunni rights against Shia attack.

Like the graduates of some notorious boot camp, my brothers and sisters and I look back with a sort of perverse glee at the rigors of our Catholicism. My oldest sister, Mary, was so convinced of the church's omnipotence that when she walked into a Protestant church with some high-school friends, she was sure its walls would crash down on her head.

Terrorism and religious extremism are huge challenges. They go hand in glove.

Referring to ISIL as a destructive religious cult rather than a legitimate theo-political 'radical Islamic' group is not just more accurate, it also exposes ISIL's corrupt religious narrative.

If organizations like Westboro were universally bad, they wouldn't exist. There had to be some draw, and at Westboro, there was a lot of draw. The church was almost entirely made up of my extended family, and everyone in the church felt like family.

Perhaps one day the world will end, giving the last group to predict it the satisfaction of being right - but as many have been wrong so far, it does not seem wise to make public policy on the back of these fears.

I see no difference between a violent Islamist and a far-Right terrorist.

Since 9/11 we have somehow come to accept the 'radicalization' narrative, which basically holds that people become terrorists through a series of consecutive, traceable steps laid out for them by large international Islamic organizations. Reality is messier, and also smaller.

The global jihad movement ideology is a destructive religious cult. It is so un-Islamic that it is virtually anti-Islamic.

I grew up in the church, and I went into the production of 'God Loves Uganda' intending to raise awareness of the abuse of religious power in Uganda, and after 30 public appearances, I have learned a lot about how people receive this sort of message.

It might seem perverse for honestly religious people to group their faiths with those of the sadists and megalomaniacs who run most cults, but a growing number are doing just that.

There's a difference between being a fundamentalist and being al-Qaeda and being Muslim. It's absurd to think otherwise.

Our leaders today cannot be honest about Islam with us. They will not even use the term "Islamic terrorism," "radical Islam."

This concern with the basic condition of freedom -- the absence of physical constraint -- is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free -- to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act.

I believe that in pretty much every religion there is always a small group of fundamentalists.

[Concerning monotheistic religions] The only thing these hysterical cults have in common is the belief that this world will be consumed, and deservedly so, when the moment is ripe. They also, all of them, profess a great disdain for earthly possessions. Yet they pass the intervening time in haggling over the most trivial and paltry property rights, over caves and rocks and disputable pieces of archeological rubbish.

With the time, yes we can be worried, because the secular state should reflect secular society, and this secular society, with the time, if you don't get rid of those terrorists and these extremists and the Wahabi style, of course it will influence at least the new and the coming generations.

You know, terrorism in Afghanistan had everything to do with the support for the mujahidin by Saudi Arabia and by the CIA that sought to create an international religious extremist group to fight the Soviet Union.

Through "deprogramming" or cult intervention the only issues that are addressed focus upon the specific group and group involvement. The subject of such an intervention subsequently may leave the group and go on with their life reassuming their own basic individual values and beliefs.