American Couple That Believed Evil Was A ‘Make-Believe Concept’ Murdered By ISIS Terrorists

This is sad. I’m not mocking these people. I’m sad for their friends and family. Believing in that hippie dippy nonsense about evil being a make-believe concept– it can get you killed.

An American couple, Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, quit their jobs last year in order to go on a world cycling trip. A 2017 entry from Austin’s blog reads:

“I’ve grown tired of spending the best hours of my day in front of a glowing rectangle, of coloring the best years of my life in swaths of grey and beige. I’ve missed too many sunsets while my back was turned. Too many thunderstorms went unwatched, too many gentle breezes unnoticed.”

So he and his girlfriend decided to go on a long trip around the world. They went everywhere, “from the southernmost tip of Africa in Capetown, South Africa, to Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Egypt, Morocco, Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Montengro, Kosovo, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and finally Tajikistan…” according to the Daily Wire.

Tajikistan was their last stop, because they were murdered by ISIS terrorists. What makes it even worse? While they were in Morocco back in April, Austin wrote a blog entry about how evil was a “make-believe concept.”

You watch the news and you read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place. People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil. People are axe murderers and monsters and worse.

I don’t buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own—it’s easier to dismiss an opinion as abhorrent than strive to understand it. Badness exists, sure, but even that’s quite rare. By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind. No greater revelation has come from our journey than this.

I’m sure there were nice people they’ve met along the way, and that’s wonderful. However, that doesn’t change reality. There are EVIL ideologies out there and EVIL people who adhere to them. Wanting to murder people because they don’t hold your religious beliefs isn’t a “difference of opinion.” There IS good, and there IS evil, and that’s the ABSOLUTE truth. Sadly, EVIL people took their lives, and no. That’s not a matter of opinion.

Via NYT:

A grainy cellphone clip recorded by a driver shows what happened next: The men’s Daewoo sedan passes the cyclists and then makes a sharp U-turn. It doubles back, and aims directly for the bikers, ramming into them and lurching over their fallen forms. In all, four people were killed: Mr. Austin, Ms. Geoghegan and cyclists from Switzerland and the Netherlands. Two days later, the Islamic State released a video showing five men it identified as the attackers, sitting before the ISIS flag. They face the camera and make a vow: to kill “disbelievers.”

Evil exists. That’s not a matter of opinion. That doesn’t mean we combat evil with evil, but we must be prudent. Like the scriptures say, “be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.”

It’s not wise to deny the existence of evil. It can get you killed.

h/t Daily Wire