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Regarding the coalition with Saudi Arabia, its an absolute disgrace! How are we supposed to be able to have a positive influence on the situation, or even be taken remotely serious as working in the moderate Muslims interest, when we continue arming an sponsoring one of the most destructive forces in the region? Is it strange that Iran are not exactly rushing to make compromises with us?
Because saying it has some rationale behind it, some legitimacy is better? It is not only worse, it is pretty much an appeasement policy. And appeasement never works. By all mean, let's praise the moderates of any faiths. But when someone makes an extraordinary claims, then he has to be treated with skepticism. When someone bases his oppressive ideas on a faith, especially when he wants to act on them, his faith has to be rightly debunked and ridiculed. Whether he thinks the sharia law should apply in the UK, or whether he is a Christian in Indiana wanting to discriminate against gays, atheists and unbelievers.
Those peace prices, I wonder what caused the trouble in their respective parts of the world for them to militate for peace? Could it be... religious conflicts?
And more seriously, among those six, there is Yasser Arafat, who was also a terrorist for a good part of his life, carried a gun with him and never renounced violence to further his cause. Some Nobel peace prize! It is true that it may be the most controversial of the Nobel prices and many won it simply by ending a war they started.
Anyway, it is true that the Muslim world does not have the same scientific enlightenment that it had in Middle Ages. Not that we can be too smug about it: 40% of Americans believe the Bible to be the literal truth, for instance.
It is by many accounts the world's fastest growing religion (including, some say, in Europe) so if that's the case, it's particularly disconcerting.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/02/living/pew-study-religion/
"Moribund"? That term seems a bit excessive, doesn't it?
Not exactly great news for secular societies. On the plus side, disbelief is doing better and better in the Western world.
I mean the once rich Islamic culture. It used to be at the forefront of science and learning and is now patently not. Most Muslims are unaware of the diversity and richness of their own history and culture. It has all been reduced to tedious literal interpretations of the Koran.
So it is important to keep people stupid or at least change the truth towards your point of view.
It might be that my English is not perfect, but I thought the word "moribund" carried an element of extintion or termination with it. That seemed like an exaggeration. However I agree with your point when explained as in your last post.
Well its a start..?
Speaking out against the majority takes guts. Where would we be if Darwin had kept his ideas to himself and patronise those that "knew" that it all started with Adam or Eve? Or Copernicus with his unheard of idea that we are not at the centre of the universe.? The longer we placate religion rather than deal with it in an honest and adult way, the longer these issues will rumble on for. The reason we dot burn witches is that we drew a line in the sand and realised it was a load of "bo**ocks", we need to move on.
well i do think the traditional rich culture of Islam in all its diversity is pretty much extinct. we now have two competing fundamentalisms of shia and sunni, only interested in out doing each other in their intolerance. i dont see the Islamic world contributing a huge amount to science, the arts or our understanding of the world. it's sad because Muslims used to associated with open mindedness and a sense of enquiry and a desire for learning (not just Koranic learning)
Theres only one load of old bollocks and thats what you're spouting here. So we should just ignore a thing called progress and go back to believing we need to sacrifice animals to the sun to guarantee a good harvest or thinking the world is flat should we? These things were facts of life until people became educated enough to realise that they were bullshit and then they disappeared.
This appeasement of religion that it has to be afforded special status and be respected is a big part of the problem. By all means people are free to believe whatever crap they want in the privacy of their own homes but until the state marginalises religion to the point of it being an irrelevance rather than indulging it then how can we move on from this infantile state of mind?
Depressingly though religion is far from moribund, even in the west. I read this quote this week from Mourinho which broke my heart as now I look at someone I admired rather differently:
"I believe totally, clearly," he told the Telegraph. "Every day I pray, every day I speak with Him. I don't go to the church every day, not even every week. I go when I feel I need to. And when I'm in Portugal, I always go.'
When a bloke as intelligent and erudite as Jose comes out with something like this there really is very little hope of peasants in the third world turning their back on the loving god that has given them so much to be thankful for (living in squalor, life expectancy of 43, high infant mortality - yeah cheers God I bow down on the floor of my mud hut to your munificence).
Very well said Sir. Yasser Arafat winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Priceless.
Good luck winning allies in the fight against Islamo-nutjobs then. I foresee you having a few recruiting issues winning people over to your side in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan etc. Or may be we hold off the ideological war on religion until after we've got rid of jihadi John and his chums.
You have to be seen to be a church going Christian to even get a crack at the White House, so I think the real world is a long long way from where you think it is or want it to be.
Religion is going to be around for a very long time.
Things won't change for the better if we pander to every religious claims and respect them. Whether it is from an Islamist or a Christian fundy. Because you don't get allies when you refrain from criticizing faiths, you get appeasers. If someone says Obama is the Antichrist, he deserves to be laughed at. If someone says women in the West dress like whores because they wear makeup and show this oh so dirty part of the body that is an ankle, you can laugh at him too. If a priest says condoms don't help against STDs, he should be laughed at.
The problem is ideological, twisted, obscurantist, stone age ideologies. And I will certainly not hold back and shut up hoping not to offend someone whose ideology is backward and destructive.
Also quite shocked that the Western powers appear to let it happen regardless? :-?
What can we do, bomb the living daylights out of them?? Which is a free PR job for the disenfranchised of the Eastern nations.
In my humble opinion you should not interfere in religious warfare, because fingers get burned and it is in their interest to pull us into their war simply because the West is an easy target to fight against. Let them have their war they are entitled to their own religious grievances. We got enough religious idiots of our own.
And in a century they get to be insulted when history shows them being a murderous bunch who embarked on genocide, the Turks still get upset when history shows them what they did. Pope Francis did right today.
As always no good will come from it.
Are you Neville Chamberlain in disguise?
I agree with you that it's thoroughly depressing that you can't become president without pretending to be a Christian nutter but I'm afraid I'm not about to subscribe to your level of appeasement.
I'd rather risk having my head hacked off on the tube that do what you're advocating and get Jihadi John around a table and start negotiating with him.
Far from it. Wilful misrepresentation on your part .
I'm keen that jihadi john and his chums are taken out sharpish. However, in case it had passed you by , it's not secularist atheists doing the fighting against IS in Iraq and Syria. It's mainly Muslims and some Christians.
Some of those people (like the Kurds) are long term allies of ours and we need more like them if we are going to defeat the Islamo nutters.
Also incase you didn't know , Churchill and Roosevelt made an Alliance with Stalin to defeat Nazism. They made the rational decision that the more immediate and urgent threat was beating the Nazis, not convincing the Russians that they were ideologically misguided.
We need the same approach now. Alliances with more moderate Muslims (or just the less evil and crazy ones) to destroy the cancer of Islamo fascism.
Yours is as much a fundamentalist position as IS - we won't deal with any one unless they're ideologically pure. Tolerating religious/philosophical diversity and dissent is 'appeasement' it seems, in your world view. Down your route lies intollerance, division, endless conflict.
I'm the one advocating pragmatic, real-world solutions to beating the nutters, not imaginging a fantasy world where everyone shares my own aetheist views.
Any way, as history shows, aetheists are as much capable (if not more so) of murder and mayhem as any one else. I don't share your belief that a world without theism would automatically be a peaceful one. We humans have a habit of finding new ways of falling out with each other.
By all means lets ally with moderate Muslims and Christians. But then we would need to agree on what is a moderate. And in no case this would mean shutting up on any crazy religious claims. You say your actions are ordered by God, you should be called on it.
And which atheists have been even worse than religious zealots in history? Don't say Hitler, I'll start laughing. Because he was not an atheist. Neither was Franco. It is true of Mussolini and Stalin but neither killed in the name of atheism and their countries were anything but secular when they ruled it. Same with North Korea now.
Nicely done, you just have shown the craziness of Christians to be a far more annoy bunch than the folks from the Islam.
that said I cannot fault any of your arguments except the cutting of baby bits were I have known so-called atheists doing that due some medical reasoning.
Someone said religion makes good people do bad things. I'm afraid I have to point out that religion also makes a lot of good people do a lot of good things as well - something the religio-phobes on here seem all to keen to overlook.
And the idea that atheists somehow lack prejudice is laughable. Has no one noticed how aetheism has often gone hand in hand with exteme nationalism?
Even if you strip away 'religion' people will seek moral codes to live by and ways to organise their lives. You'll still have to deal with conflicting ideologies and philosophies and history shows that they can be just as bad and irrational , if not worse than 'religion'.
There are also lots of people out there who culturally identify as Christian and Muslim or whatever who are ambiguous about the existence of god. Instead they recognise that their religion offers positive values by which to live their lives and something that binds them to others - giving a sense of community, belonging etc.
The role and value of religion is so much more than the stereotyped idea that all it does is tell people to chop up babies or kill gays.
And yes much Christian teaching on contraceptives is insane, but since In the west at least, most Christians seem perfectly capable of realising that for themselves and ignoring it, may be we need to give people more credit for being able to navigate their religion and actually use it in a positive way.
Also, in much of Europe - Germany for instance - a huge amount of social provision for the less fortunate is still provided through churches. So there is a lot if good that goes on in religion as well as the inevitable bad.
good people can be theists and religious. Bad people can be atheists. We are not denying this Getafix. I'd say however that you cannot be a good Christian or Muslim and be a good person. You can be Christian but you'll have to compromise on the commandments of your holy book or even ignore it altogether. And you'll need to stop confusing devotion to a doctrine And moral behavior. Worship is NOT moral. It does not in itself contain even a shadow of moral code.