I Watched ISIS Videos, and Felt My Soul Diminished
After years of reporting on violence, one worries about numbness. All carnage, all the time. If you live like this too long, it can warp your view of the world.
Nothing has done more to convince me of the existence of the soul than watching several hundred of them being snuffed out over the past five years, in Islamic State videos screened during the course of my reporting. One need not be spiritual or religious to identify the instant when a human body, suffering from a mortal wound, stops being human and becomes a sack of meat, offal, and bone. I experienced something similar when I worked briefly as a butcher, slaughtering cows and pigs. Suddenly, subtly, an animal (from the Latin , or “soul”) becomes food. Every slaughterer is familiar
