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Ah, right, that's the Greek Gods.
Who wants to go to heaven? Singing hymns and reading the bible for all eternity with good time girls like Mother Teresa?
No thanks. Get yourself to hell - party central and way more fun to be had.
I think the powers that be let them. Nothing new.
Nothing else matters.
I love The Atheist Experience. Matt and Jeff pull no punch. The God as the mafia boss analogy was great too:
Why be good when you can be saved? You don't need to do good deeds, only to worship. You're unworthy whatever you do anyway, so you might as well repent and worship.
James Bond: I promised them Le Chiffre and they got Le Chiffre.
M: They got his body.
James Bond: If they wanted his soul, they should have made a deal with a priest.
If we could all stand together and just say to these boys "its 100% bull, this is your one life, enjoy it as much as you can because when its over, there is nothing else" but only atheists can make that point.
I understand personal freedoms and all, but surely if someone has made an extended trip to Syria in the last few years, they should be put on some kind of heightened surveillance. I'm not referring to 3 weeks stays to see family members, but something longer. Or even if they have been seen or noted near the Syrian/Turkish border, rather than visiting Istanbul to appreciate the historic sights.
Surely that would be a way to at least assist law enforcement to prevent these sort of attacks.
Am I being dense?
http://www.thegoodbook.co.uk/blog/usefulresources/2016/03/24/three-objections-to-good-friday/
I think this is going to be a big problem for Europe going forward. Both economic pressures and national security pressures seem to suggest much closer coordination between countries & bureaucracies, both within Europe and with other nations. It may also mean more border restrictions (like what happened with Canada/US after 911). However, the people are likely going to resist this because it will impinge on freedoms.
I really believe Europe/The EU has to come closer together to survive, but I doubt it will. Too many cultural divisons and suspicions between countries, poorly designed institutions (for economic coordination anyway) as well as an understandable desire by the populace for more freedom.
The Greeks for example are under a lot of pressure with all the migration on their shores, and that's before accounting for the fact that they are already bankrupt. That powder keg is about to explode as an international crisis again soon.
It's also fascinating that most of these bombers are domestic citizens. Not foreigners.
Anyone who writes a whole book entitled "What Happens When I Die" needs to get out more.
Worm food is my shorter reply
Interesting.
This in essence is indeed also my point of view. The current EU backers are fervently claiming we have a European 'culture'. In doing so they neglegt 2000 years of nation building, claiming, fighting. They seem to think that if you just put a central government in the middle it will all work out. Which has historically little presedent. Not that it hasn't been tried before, but it always ended in misery (and bloodshed). The Austrian-Hungarian Empire, Yugoslavia, etc.
Not that I'm against working together, on the contrary. There are far too many border crossing problems. But those should be dealt with (again, imo) through a far simpeler system of one 'European government' consisting of (prime)ministers of the respective countries who oversee institutions like Europol and the like.
Alas, they're trying a 19th century solution for a 21st century society.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3509367/Muslim-shopkeeper-stabbed-death-hours-posted-happy-Easter-message.html
The guy wasn't even an infidel but one of his brothers but a simple message of 'Happy Easter' enough to drive these mentalists to kill.
The religion of peace...
And more about Brussels: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3508394/Hijab-wearing-woman-caught-camera-TEARING-Israeli-flag-Brussels-memorial-dead.html?ito=social-facebook
Just like for the Charlie Hebdo attacks: after blaming the victims, the Islamists decide to blame the Jews.
F**k me. Isn't that basically an anti Semitic race crime?
Presumably after this disgusting behaviour she crawled back to her taxpayer paid for flat in Molenbeek to continue hating our western values that allow her to get away with this.
We are own worst enemies though. The fact that she got out of that square alive says a lot in our favour I suppose because try doing a similar thing in a Muslim country and see how long you last before being hacked to death by a crazed mob. But shouldn't she at least be arrested? Presume that square was crawling with police but are they still so scared to cause offence that they didn't intervene? Probably scared to get too close - she didn't look the thinnest lass and they were probably worried that it was C4 she was carrying not a bit of extra timber.
It's becoming something of a habit. Terrorists bomb or shoot up a public place in the name of Allah and suddenly the various Muslim communities in our country take a stance and scream that this is not the work of Islam. They are of course right in the sense that only a minority within the Islam endorses these attacks. In fact, some say it's important to call those terrorist groups 'sects' or even 'cults' rather than Islamic groups. These five letter words would make a clearer distinction between the good guys and the bad guys.
Personally, I can agree with that to some extent. Indeed, the Westboro Baptist Church is a cult too and not an average Christian group. Still, it draws its inspiration from the Bible, as do other Christian groups. The only difference is the interpretation of the Biblical words. In the exact same way, fundamentalist Islamic cultists annex terrorists are drawn to a very peculiar and terrifyingly extreme interpretation of the Quran. For let's make no mistake; perhaps in the highest echelons of Islamic terrorism power is more revered than religious purity, but the kamikazebombers still do it for Allah.
So whether we're talking about the Bible or the Quran, the point is that our major religions have a big problem with their holy writings. Since they are open to multiple interpretations - and we're not talking about a few minor details here but about interpretations that pinball between crude extremes - the foundations of their religious beliefs can be twisted and bended at will. Our law may also leave room for creative interpretation, e.g. concerning some highly detailed real estate dispute, but never to the extent where one can choose the path of a virtuous life, and another the path of terrorism, starting from the same source material.
It's obvious that religious teachings are so ridiculously uneven and entirely depending on the intentions of the teacher, that there's hardly a way to control them and prevent extremists from rising up. Worst of all, both the Bible and the Quran are many centuries old and have never been adjusted to our ever changing society. The Catholic Chruch may have acknowledged several important scientific findings like Heliocentrism, the Big Bang and indeed Evolution, but it still keeps those inaccurate, age-old texts intact. We're supposed to understand that somewhere hidden amidst all the symbolism, metaphor and crazy talk there's a read-between-the-lines interpretation where the Big Bang, Evolution and Heliocentrism neatly fit in. However, those who refuse to pay any attention to these scientific truths can still choose to ignore them as the Bible doesn't explicitly mention them. And for the life of me, I can't understand why it doesn't. We change operating systems, traffic laws, scenes from Star Wars and much more almost every year; why can't the Church, after 2000 years, decide to rewrite the Bible and bring it closer to the world of today?
Same with the Quran. Some Muslims tell me that the Quran does not endorse violence, that it is a peace loving book, yet the Internet is littered with quotes from the Quran that leave little doubt as to what they mean. All infidels must die and Earth must suffer eternal apocalypse. If the Islamic leaders are so concerned with how we feel about Islam, if they really want to convince us that all this terror isn't Islam, why not dig deep into their own unstable system and look for the cracks? Why don't they rewrite their age-old holy book and make it very explicit that any form of violence is out of the question?
Of course I know why. Same as with the Bible. God wrote that book, right? He inspired people and in some weird trance they sat down and recorded what He whispered in their ears. The sad part is that none of this ever happened. Stories were told, collected and handed out as a trade paperback for those of religious persuasion. And even if you believe the God-wrote-the-Bible idea, I'm sure He wouldn't object to a more harmonised and contemporary, long overdue "second print" of His book. The Quran can follow. In fact, since they share pretty much the same Old Testament, why don't they sit down together and strife towards a compromised version? Or better still, perhaps they should abandon that Old Testament altogether, for it is without doubt the most dangerous racist, misogynist and unethical book ever written.
"This is not Islam." Maybe not. But guys, you have a problem. Do something about it.
Well, it's your choice : deal with the big picture, or deal with the details. Watch out, if you bother about the details, then you have to deal with such weird concepts as being right and being wrong :)
Cracking post.
The obvious solution would be to just ban both the Quran and the Bible which I think I could live with.
But unlike Mein Kampf, God dictated those books. Or at least one of them.
Atomism and ethics
Some later philosophers attributed the idea that man created gods; the gods did not create man to Democritus. For example, Sextus Empiricus noted:
Some people think that we arrived at the idea of gods from the remarkable things that happen in the world. Democritus ... says that the people of ancient times were frightened by happenings in the heavens such as thunder, lightning, ..., and thought that they were caused by gods.
Three hundred years after Epicurus, Lucretius in his epic poem On the Nature of Things would depict him as the hero who crushed the monster Religion through educating the people in what was possible in the atoms and what was not possible in the atoms. However, Epicurus expressed a non-aggressive attitude characterized by his statement: "The man who best knows how to meet external threats makes into one family all the creatures he can; and those he can not, he at any rate does not treat as aliens; and where he finds even this impossible, he avoids all dealings, and, so far as is advantageous, excludes them from his life."
Who is "you"? Muslims? Judging from what also happened in Charleston and Colorado Springs last year . . . or what happened in Norway a few years ago . . . I think human nature is the real problem, not just Islam. Humans are aggressive beings who seem to see nothing wrong with resorting to violence to solve what we feel are a problems. Worse, we constantly use excuses - religion, race, politics, etc. - to feel superior over others and indulge in our violence. Focusing on one particular group isn't going to solve the problem.
Perhaps this penchant for violence will always be a problem as long as we humans keep pretending that we have good reasons to make others suffer.
Plus religion has succeeded in creating a taboo around itself so even non-believers feel very reserved when it comes to openly criticize religion. It gets a respect that it has not earned and does not deserve. This taboo needs to be attacked and dismantled before religion can be fairly seen and observed for the childish fairy tale that it really is.