Only way the asshat can stay in office.
I feel like religion is the rallying point of Islamic terrorism, but not the root cause. Groups like IS are able to rally so much support because people are scared and angry. and theyâre scared and angry because ofâcliched though it isâthe end result of centuries of European colonial imperialism. At this point, theyâre hitting us because we hit them because they hit us because etc etc and nobody cares where it began anymore, and everyone is convinced against all logic and historical precedent that the other guys will stop fighting if we hit them harder.
23 Likes
All of them!
7 Likes
Can we burn them, too?
There are many, many things we all could do (politicians included) to make it possible not to blame either religion or colonialism (history). We choose not to and convince ourselves that we need more of the same. Why? Do we each think that we will not be the one to suffer, so it is someone elseâs problem or that we are powerless in the face of history?
Two things help to break the ice and encourage open discussion: 1) your opponent has to see you as genuinely self-critical, 2) make small gestures which you are able immediately to implement and not grand promises which you can always postpone until the conditions are right.
As I write the BBC is reporting enhanced security in the UK. Details to come later. âŚ
3 Likes
Itâs the same God. I donât think anyone is fighting about how to spell Abraham.
Jeff Duncan is the reactionary in this thread.
2 Likes
Why do you assume that this madness is exclusive to religion? The very countries drawn on the globe are âconsensus realitiesâ as well. Maybe we have gotten to the point where all claims of consensus are up for review. I, for one, am not willing to give up only one fiction and keep others.
2 Likes
Please, not today, not here.
15 Likes
What is this, UKIP?
(Nice to know that this is the kind of solidarity people can expect from you when things get difficult.)
1 Like
Do you know what is the motto of Paris ?
âFluctuat nec mergiturâ
Tossed but not sunk
11 Likes
Itâs the same God, but itâs only about religion on one side.
Less than five percent of French people attend church weekly. 27% affirm a belief in God, 27% affirm a belief in a âspirit or life forceâ. 40% believe in neither. The most religious slices of the population are senior citizens and muslims. Itâs quite likely that a majority of the victims were nonreligious.
Religion is the magic sauce that allows angry people to turn into murdering madmen.
There is, of course, the danger that Europe could go mad in response. It would be a different kind of madness, one were no individual needs to be murderously mad but just play his or her part to add up to a terrible sum. But the religious kind of madness is absent on the âEuropean sideâ.
17 Likes
I think ideologues can exist quite happily without religion, as can religiously motivated oppression. On the other hand, I think itâs as true to say that all Abrahamic faiths worship any number of different gods as it is to say they all worship the same one. Unless we believe that the god of Abraham actually existed and continues to reveal himself to all of these people of faith (or at least their leaders), they have a concept of a god that is developed from their holy books, teachings, traditions, culture etc. As different groups have very different ideas and claims about this concept that they consider to be authoritative, Iâm not sure how the referent can be considered the same, even if superficially it refers to an entity that occupies the same supreme position and shares some of the same stories (although there are significant theological differences in the way those stories are told). The ideas about this entityâs character, actions, expectations etc. vary a lot even between groups holding to the same faith, and I donât thing the One True God [TM] is going to come and set them straight.
Much as what these people did is unthinkable to most Muslims, yet they believed that their god approved of it, and as a one-time Evangelical I met many Evangelicals whose god was unrecognisable to me (and Muslims or even people of non-Abrahamic faiths whose god(s) were much closer to the one I worshipped), I just donât find the idea of a common god to be that useful except for pointing to a common ancestor to many modern belief systems (among the many other cultural and religious ancestors that they donât share).
3 Likes
The terrorism will continue until we all stop talking about it.
It takes two to terrorise.
That said, my deepest condolences to all the injured and the families of victims of horrendous violence, in Paris as well as in the various wars going on, as well as to the families of the ~15,000 that died yesterday of malnutrition and unsafe water.
4 Likes
Well, I consider the idea that Islam and Christianity worship different gods to be logically equivalent to the idea that two different movies about Arthur, King of the Britons are actually movies about two different British kings. Whether there was a real historic King Arthur, or whether the legends are actually built on a mixture of several kings, does not really matter.
In my experience, all groups that have any readiness at all to get along with any other religions (or non-religions) acknowledge this as a fact. The idea that Islam worships a different god from Christianity is pretty much limited to evangelicals in the US and to European right-wingers (who strongly identify with âChristian Europeâ without being strongly Christian themselves). I think the Quran spells out quite clearly that itâs all about the same god.
Unfortunately, saying you believe in âthe same godâ is not enough to make you a tolerant person.
But itâs a lot harder for them. The Nazis had to commit their crimes by carefully organizing everything, so that everyone had the option of âlooking the other wayâ when their moral sense started to assert itself. Every single Nazi was only a minor gear in a big machine of terror. There were hardly any Nazis who would have been individually mad enough to strap a bomb to their belt and blow themselves up in a synagogue. It takes religion to do that.
With all due respect to the victims Elsewhere, I would say that the way to put things into perspective for the people of France would be to draw a local comparison. People know that a lot of people die Elsewhere, and theyâve resigned themselves to thinking that it Doesnât Concern Them and that they Canât Do Anything About It.
So if you want to calm people down, remind them that about three thousand people die each year from road accidents on Franceâs roads. So if youâre not willing to do something in order to combat road deaths, you shouldnât be in favour of more drastic measures against terrorism, either.
On the other hand, you might also count the victims of the IS Elsewhere (a âfewâ of them are travelling through Austria to Germany), and take this act as one more sign that yes, It Does Concern Us.
2 Likes
Why? Iâm not claiming that the West is blameless or that France has no part in the destabilisation of the region, but the attacks here, on Charlie Hebdo or other innocent people were not because people took terrorism too seriously, or really anything to do with the actions of France. These perpetrators are responsible for their own actions, as France and the West is for theirs. We should recognise peopleâs grievances, but it doesnât mean that those grievances are in any way justified or that their targets had any part in this.
9 Likes
I wish I could say the same, but I donât play video games. Maybe Iâll just retreat to my bedroom and re-read one of the plethora of books I have there.
1 Like
To be clear, Iâm blaming the media here (the second of the two), not the actions of France. The problem for almost everyone is the fear of terrorism, not the risk of being an actual victim. Your chance of being killed in a terrorist action is as close to zero as to be ignored.
As @zathras pointed out, thousands are dying annually on the roads in France and yet there is not the constant media coverage of that. Why not?
5 Likes
Because it doesnât profit the media to do so.
2 Likes
Youâre quite right. Road deaths are something that upset me deeply and are especially poignant in the west since they really are very analogous to terrorism in that they are random, unpredictable, disproportionate and should never happen.
The reference to malnutrition was (perhaps wrongly) for rhetorical effect.
1 Like
Itâs not about absolving terrorists. The real targets of terrorism are pretty much by definition not the people killed but the people who are supposed to be influenced by that. And in modern free societies terrorism is always at least in part a trap designed to get societies to do more harm to themselves than the terrorists ever could.
6 Likes
