You're brilliant. I owe you this, whether you read / care about it or not.

I will give you the simple truth: this is a deliberate and pre meditated product of my own madness.

The reason why I have mounted this question, and framed it with a blatantly wild brush under the guise of analysis is many fold, and most of it has little to do with any attachment or belief I have in the a conclusion that the beheading will take x amount of years to diminish based on a comparison to extremist violence in Christian culture - or that I really care for that matter how long such stupidity takes to burn itself out in a culture.

I say stupidity, but perhaps I'd be wiser calling it mutual suffering.

To be honest, I feel we have the potential for world peace sitting right in the palms of our hands, if we cared to see it, and we as a species could make it a reality in the blink of an eye. This is at the core of my motivation.

I feel this from the bottom of my heart, and like a crazy madness inside of me, I don't feel I live in a world that can utter it without it being shouted at or laughed down.

If I discuss world war, and violence with people, they are much more interested to discuss and put their opinions forward. Humans find the violence and hatred they generate instantly more invigorating than discussing peace, I've discovered.

They'll jump up and down singing the praises of the idea of peace like they've seen the light, and simultaneously be disembowelling their neighbour at a moments notice the next without hesitation like they are possessed.

So what I have done, is posed an argument in the guise of a theory, backed up by the semblance of an analytical process which attempts to engage people with a discussion they feel more passionate about than world peace, and within that argument given people:

1) an opportunity to think about obstacles to finding world peace on a more cyclic and macroscopic level ( depersonalising the problem ). 2) in terms of playing to a Western audience ( mostly here on reddit), allow them to entertain a recognition of a mutual history of violence in the name of fanaticism / beliefs - thereby dissolving some of the moral exceptionalism that tends to be prevalent these days. 3) present a depressing result - ( 400 potential years of beheading )- which is not really a conclusion any life loving optimist is going to want to hear - but probably needs to, because it is violence and aggression that people put a premium on, and not a realisation towards its antithesis - an alarm bell. 4) stimulate people to think of ways I must be wrong - encouraging them to think about world peace to spite me.

All of this, I guess you might call a peculiar form of activism. I'm deliberately posing a potentially idiotic argument to plant ideas ( even if people argue with them ) in people's heads which I feel are necessary to make steps towards world peace.

I've appreciated you arguing that in effect my suggestion only exaggerates the idea of separation between people.

I couldn't agree more. I would argue in fact that the entire concept of separation is in its self at the core of humanities collective psychosis - leading it to war and conflict - whether it be in the guise of religion or geo-politics. It is the concept that there is a concrete border between self that is our undoing.

The violence I see in Iraq is as much a product of fundamentalist Islam as it is the direct result of pathologically insane foreign policy from the west and a mind rapingly idiotic complicit public complicit in allowing it to happen. I have to stop gnawing my arm off at the exasperating stupidity of it all.

The violence I see in Iraq and the solution is very much the responsibility of everyone alive today, and I also think all of this suffering could very well come to an end if we so wished by really examining ourselves and asking ourselves important questions like about what it means to be human, what the nature of consciousness is, and what the function of "identity" and ownership really is.

I'm not saying I have the answers to these questions, but I genuinely sense that if we are to truly live in a peaceful world, we are going to have to stop avoiding those questions by fighting, blowing up, poisoning, each other, whilst at the same time acting horrified when we become the victims of such stupidity.

However, there is no room for this kind of conversation with most folk, without weaving at least a preliminary script introducing into the popular mind a sense of communal history, development, seeing ourselves in others, and self awareness.

It's no surprise my post didn't go down well in the Christian subreddit, - the last thing they wanted was to see themselves bunched in with the atrocities of Isis.

Admittedly, it's on the surface a little divisive, but I'm aiming at being divisive towards the ignorant assumptions as opposed to reinforcing them through some bland oft repeated narrative of us and them.

As long as people are being conditioned by the very template of separatism, ethnocentricism, and a myopic ignorance that passes for journalism in mainstream media, I'm going to have to pose things in this manner.

What do I get out of it? - some interesting responses when I get them - like your own, the pleasure of a little fire and brimstone being fired at me from those who need to hear it, and I guess a little satisfaction, that in my own peculiar way, I've not let that dream of world peace I know myself and many have, others not die in the embers of ignorance and collective stupidity, without at least a wry chuckle.

Call me an iconoclast if you wish.