On 19 November 2001 The New Yorker carried an interview by Nasra Hassan of another failed suicide bomber, a polite young Palestinian aged twenty-seven known as ‘S’. It is so poetically eloquent of the lure of paradise, as preached by moderate religious leaders and teachers, that I think it is worth giving at some length: ‘What is the attraction of martyrdom?’ I asked. ‘The power of the spirit pulls us upward, while the power of material things pulls us downward,’ he said. ‘Someone bent on martyrdom becomes immune to the material pull. Our planner asked, “What if the operation fails?” We told him, “In any case, we get to meet the Prophet and his companions, inshallah.” ‘We were floating, swimming, in the feeling that we were about to enter eternity. We had no doubts. We made an oath on the Koran, in the presence of Allah – a pledge not to waver. This jihad pledge is called bayt al-ridwan, after the garden in Paradise that is reserved for the prophets and the martyrs. I know that there are other ways to do jihad. But this one is sweet – the sweetest. All martyrdom operations, if done for Allah’s sake, hurt less than a gnat’s bite!’

S showed me a video that documented the final planning for the operation. In the grainy footage, I saw him and two other young men engaging in a ritualistic dialogue of questions and answers about the glory of martyrdom . . .

The young men and the planner then knelt and placed their right hands on the Koran. The planner said: ‘Are you ready? Tomorrow, you will be in Paradise.’135 If I had been ‘S’, I’d have been tempted to say to the planner, ‘Well, in that case, why don’t you put your neck where your mouth is? Why don’t you do the suicide mission and take the fast track to Paradise?’ But what is so hard for us to understand is that – to repeat the point because it is so important – these people actually believe what they say they believe. The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism – as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’ So did Bertrand Russell: ‘Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.’

Excerpted from page number 344-345 of ‘The God Delusion’ by Richard Dawkins