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While we may not be able to do anything about ISIS or even if we could eradicate them another group of fanatics would emerge to take their place, we could however do something to secure ourselves in our respective countries. It would take balls & the ritual burning of that other book of new religion - the bumper handbook of political correctness. As things stand we have many known or suspected terrorists/sympathisers/recruiters/fundraisers living among us. Once due processes of law have been observed these people - people who are here to do us harm - should be removed from the country. Yes it could be said that this would radicalise others & push them into the arms of the extremists but hey, if they wanted to follow the same path then they too could be eligible for a one way ticket.
As it stands now we have ISIS terrorists moving almost with impunity between the UK & Syria where they are no doubt being trained, further brainwashed whilst engaging in atrocities of a nature so bestial they defy description.
We have to face the fact that these people cannot be deradicalised or otherwise made to fit back into western society. They are our common enemy & we should act accordingly to rid ourselves of them. Unless we do that we - as the French authorities have already said - should get used to terror attacks.
I do believe the rest of the world has to follow Frances example & remove religion from the politics of governance, I gringe when the US president ends speeches with 'God bless America'. :-?
Robert Boyle, Sir Isaac Newton, and Johannes Kepler, among others, might disagree with you.
If we lived in the 17th century maybe, but I live in the 21st century, times & views change.
"Everyone has a right to their beliefs and that shouldnt change. What should change is that you openly get ridiculed if you admit to believing in a magic being up in the sky who created everything and will look after you when you die - because dying really sucks doesn't it? So it's nice to delude ourselves that there's a heaven? Grow the fuck up and stop behaving like a toddler. When you're dead you're dead and that's it. What makes people so arrogant to think there's something special about us humans that makes us different to a chicken that has its neck wrung and ends up in an ASDA value chicken and leek pie or a hedgehog that gets splattered across the A47 from Swaffham to Norwich? We're made of the same bone, offal and gristle and we end up just the same as your pet hamster did when you buried it in the ground in 1987. So stop wasting your time with praying and get on with the fleeting moments of existence that you have been lucky enough to have been granted."
TheWizardOfIce
[/quote]
I think that must be the best dissection of religion I've ever read! Brilliant!
In their days, theology was the only (approved) road to science which was then still very much in its infancy. The compelling evidence we possess today that the Ptolemaic view of our solar system is wrong, that geocentricism is wrong, that the universe is a lot bigger than we previously assumed and that therefore we, God's ultimate creation, aren't but a speck of dust on the cosmic scales of both time and space, has come from applying scientific principles which the likes of Newton, Kepler and Boyle helped to discover. Had they lived past their natural lives, they would have turned down faith by the early 20th century, when quantum physics, relativity and early particle physics picked up momentum and rapidly began to explain many "cosmic mysteries" in purely rational, scientific terms, based on empirical evidence and cold mathematical logic, rather than on superstition or magical thinking.
One cannot blame these guys for being raised where and when they were, and thus for having been infected with theology from childbirth. No-one spoke about the Big Bang or Evolution yet when these guys were around. Science had to make some massive progress first. But had it not been for Newton, Kepler, Galilei and others, that level of progress might still not have been achieved today. We might all still be sitting in church, saying our prayers, living - on average - between 30 and 40 years, getting killed by the flu, having to take three month boat trips from England to India and treating women as baby factories and house slaves who are entitled to neither education nor any other indulgence we nowadays take for granted. Science is a wild beast, and these guys have let it out of the cage, so that it can wreak havoc in the jungle of false claims, magical thinking, biblical delusions and more. And if Pope Benedictus XVI (Ratzinger) can say that the discovery of gravity directly led to the atom bomb (and get away with it), then I can say that the discovery of gravity led to, amongst other things, the very laptop on which I'm typing this post. Jesus was a Jew but spawned Christianity. Likewise, Newton and co were alchemists and theologians on whose works we have built pure science. Incidentally, Lemaitre, father of the Big Bang concept, was himself a priest. In the past, it wasn't uncommon for theologians and priests to lead us to scientific enlightenment; very often they were the only educated folks in a wide area. But it's become a bit of a 'thing' today, that science prefers to shun those who still cling to archaic views of the origin of the universe. And frankly, I too have become more cynical towards those people, having been one of them a long time ago. Science and religion cannot work together, come together or coexist on the same intellectual canvas. They are enemies, for one brings the armies of light, and one the armies of darkness. One wants to free the mind, be reasonable, learn and teach; the other wants to trap the mind, remove reason, brainwash and indoctrinate.
Science has destroyed the gods of thunder and rain, agriculture and fertility, ... by delivering meteorology, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, medical science, ... We have beaten hundreds of fabricated deities that our Bronze Age and Iron Age ancestors had dreamed up to compensate for their lack of knowledge. Only one is left standing, the last trace of ignorance, stubbornly defended by the ignorant and those prone to some magical thinking. We'll ultimately be able to remove him? she? it? too, as science keeps digging deeper in the heart of the cosmic womb, providing better and more reliable explanations for pretty much everything. But the last war, as we can see today, is usually the bloodiest... when people are killed left and right "because they don't believe" and when religious leaders still dictate that young children be taught to obey the Church without question, for if not, they will go to hell. This form of child abuse, a crime in my opinion, is still common practice in that part of America which I'd refer to as the You Ass of A, where Evolution isn't taught in biology class, while Genesis is. It's probably a testament of how pacifist we, scientists, are, that we haven't been burning down churches yet. The other way around, however... oh well, history can back me up on this.
Nevertheless, they certainly weren't weak minded individuals.
In modern times, to name a few, we have;
Francis Collins: Leader of the Human Genome Project and director of the National Institutes of Health
Richard Smalley: "Father of Nanotechnology"
Sir Robert Boyd: A physicist important in the founding of the European Space Agency who was Professor of Physics in the University of London
"In the wake of the Nice attacks people are already saying: "But the terrorist wasn't pious. See! It has nothing to do with Islam.
Please stop.
Your good intentions towards us Muslims are only making the problem worse. This is as dangerous as saying it is everything to do with Islam."
I wasn't presenting those authorities to somehow prove my Christian religion, I was citing them to disprove the idea that religion is the "last bastion of weak minds." These people were also noteworthy considering that many secularists appeal to scientific authorities to prove their viewpoint.
My point in mentioning any of this was not to try to prove my religion, but to counter the idea that religion itself is the problem. The problem is not religion in general, but one particular religion; radical Islam (To those defending Islam; Please note the important qualifier "radical").
Therefore, it's best to attempt to contain it and marginalize it. On that I agree. I'm grateful for secularism & laicite, and that should be encouraged as widely as possible.
Having said that, I am of the opinion that the attack yesterday, and other attacks would have taken place with or without religion. It's a culture war. Not dissimilar to the one taking place on the streets in the US between African Americans and cops. Religion is a symptom and not a cause. It's a facilitator and motivator in this case, but there could just as easily be another motivator. Ultimately the perpetrators have a grievance.
Actually, I have noticed that one of the most common indicators of violence in the US and globally is a socially maladjusted individual (normally younger) with some mental (psychological) instability.
Plus, in many parts of the World, religion is culture and vice versa, they are interwoven. Its simply not possible to talk about culture without religion.
Re your last point, I think a case can be made that any grown adult that talks to an invisible all powerful sky fairy has issues.
Putting the blame entirely at religion's door is as deluded as their reasoning.
There is a difference between appeal to authority, i.e. saying "Newton and Voltaire believed in God, therefore belief in God is rational and justified/justifiable", and appeal to a particular expertise in a particular field. If say a doctor says you have a pneumonia, it is likely that he is right. He might have diagnosed wrongly, but identifying diseases is in his field of expertise. When a secularist uses scientific authority to defend his worldview, it is usually because science does exactly that: explains through investigation and observation how the world works.
When a scientist believes in God (whether he is a theist and member of a particular faith or a deist), however great they are/were as scientists, so far none of them have backed up said belief with anything else than the belief itself or very weak argument (Voltaire's watchmaker analogy for instance). And it is not their belief in God that makes their work useful. The validity of the theory of gravity or of the Big Bang is assessed irrelevant of the faith of Newton and Lemaitre.
"Putting the blame entirely at religion's door is as deluded as their reasoning. "
They don't have any reasoning. That is one of the first sacrifices of religion.
I have to think for myself, not follow others and their weird beliefs and if I
F*ck up, it's my fault not some magical bloke in the sky.
Because I think the topic title should be:
Deadly Terrorism: Paris/Paris/Brussels/Orlando/Istanbul/Nice (07/14/2016)
Because make no mistake........not just Europeans are suffering from ISIS, Al Qaida or loners who are inspired by ISIS.
If I hear you.......I think you wouldn't mind if 'The Left' gets captured and gets send to prison with no trial.
Why I am saying this? Man, not all people are 'leftists'. I for instance am a strict 'Radical Centrist'. I combine parts of the ideology of 'The Left' and 'The Right'. And even then.....it's way too simply to mark an entire group as 'The Left'. You have centre-left-wing people, ultra-left-wing people, independence movements, green party supporters, left-wing christians, social democrats, communists.
I think it's dangerous if people consistently are being stigmatized as some kind of criminal group or dangerous faction that threatens democracy. Well frankly, I don't think 'The Left' is just that.
If you are a centrist then you must love British politics. All we have is a bunch of centrists and Jeremy Corbyn.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/36804157/are-we-becoming-numb-to-terrorism-from-hearing-about-it-too-much
I have to say that personally I agree with this notion. Terrorism is now so commonplace it is rapidly turning from shocking to boring.
When it is rare it has a shock value that grabs the attention and achieves the terrorist's objective of causing fear. When it happens an almost weekly basis then it's difficult to maintain such a level of shock without it stopping you going about your daily buisness. If they continue at the current frequency how long before a terrorist attack barely raises a shrug. And perhaps this is a good thing? If the news doesn't broadcast hour after hour of footage and instead just limits it to a short statement - 'there was a terrorist attack in X today. 30 people died' and that's it - don't you cut off the oxygen of publicity that they desire?
And if they see nothing changes might they not see how pathetically futile their efforts are?
The last two major terrorist attacks I have viewed rather dispassionately. The Brussels one I saw as an inconvenience as I was due to visit in the Eurostar and had to cancel my trip. The Nice one piqued my interest more than if it had been in another town as I was on the promenade d'anglais two weeks ago. But to say I was shocked and in fear would be inaccurate. We've seen so many of these it's not shocking any more. What would be truly shocking would be if there were no more. And to say you go round on a daily basis being scared of terrorism makes as little sense as saying you go round being scared you will die in a car crash or get cancer. It's just another thing out there that may kill you if you are unlucky but it's not something to dwell on.
Of course it's not really a solution to be so used it that we barely notice but if we reach a position where terrorist attacks are relegated to a slot after the weather perhaps they might die out because even the terminally deluded and stupid might consider it not worth blowing themselves up if they only coverage they get on TV is after the 'And finally...' bit about a cat stuck up a tree?
Yet we somehow seem to find it difficult to understand how Muslims can perhaps sympathize with other Muslims miles away.
I was not casting an opinion on whether people sympathize or not -that's your statement. We are all human and I'm sure we do sympathize with loss of life. I was saying that I have not seen threads open up here when such incidents happen in non Christian nations. That's a fact.
Turkey, a predominantly Muslim country, who is prosecuting a war against ISIL (and also fighting Kurds and Assad) and from where bombing raids have taken place, has also been attacked, ostensibly by ISIL. So has Malaysia, Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, Yemen, & Indonesia in 2016 alone. All are predominantly Muslim nations.
So, as I've said, this is a brand of Islam (namely the Wahhabi & Salafist sects, financed primarily by the Saudi kingdom and other sheiks, and which has inspired ISIL), that are propagating this violence. I suggest that this is where condemnation should be focused.
You also said (quote) "Whenever we have one of these incidents affecting 'white' or 'western' nations, we have these threads opening up and all these discussions. That's great. We tend not to see the same fervour of condemnation when it affects a non Christian nation."
Reverse racism?
What's your counter to why we don't see the threads open up here when there is violence in a Muslim country? What's your counter to how ISIL is attacking Muslim countries as well? How does that play into this being an Islam against the West narrative?