People's religious convictions are unexplainable. A few years after my brother died I asked my Mother if she felt bad about the years she lost being estranged from my brother. She said no.
What always surprises people is my utter inability to condemn my parents for doing what they did. If you grow up in a home where principles and convictions are strong, it's not surprising...and it's even admirable.
And since we were brought up in a home where convictions were strong, it was understandable that my brother did what he did as well. You make your choices...ahd then you live with the consequences.
Ironically, my other brother and I married out of the religion years later and it just didn't matter anymore to my parents. I'm not quite sure what it all meant, but there were no villians...
Interesting how their moral and religious ideals, worth abandoning their son for, were fleeting. They squandered years of a loving relationship with their own flesh and blood for a belief system that was drilled into them by zealots, only apparently to realize late that the beliefs were not in fact as obligatory as the Talmud/rabbis preached. Kinda makes one wonder about the wisdom and truth of their beliefs in the first place wouldn't you say?.
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction. - Blaise Pascal
At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religous or political ideas. - Aldous Huxley
I'm in Tucson. Man, is Bullhead ever hot. We were driving through there one August and the pavement gave me a hot foot through the bottom of my car.