Everyone in my religion has to own a cat. It’s like, the first commandment.
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What! But I feel the same about you! You’re so supersmart and fantastic at breaking down an argument in such a logical way (meaning rhetorical logic).
Do you ALSO suffer from imposter syndrome? Cause I have a bad case of that! 
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I was a Neopagan for many many years and my mother is a Dianic Wiccan priestess (and has been since 1983 or so). I met my wife in Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis as well and she was a Thelemite.
That isn’t how it is used in practice. It is used as @humabababella is describing.
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wow. what a wall of text. shame you fell at the first hurdle (I didn’t bother reading half of it for that reason, sorry for you to have wasted all that time).
just to remind everyone, you said that I thought:
if someone finds out that terrorism is caused by economic and social conditions then their research can be discounted whereas if they find it was caused by religion then they’ve got it dead on
this is clearly in no way a logical conclusion of:
It would depend on what assumptions they were making in their research, usually these guys start off with an assumption of social constructionism, so it’s no surprise that’s all they ever find. Not the case with everything of course, but it’s more common than not.
let me rephrase what you said I thought, so that it will actually be logically consistent: (extra detail added in italics, in case I wasn’t being clear enough in the beginning)
**if someone were to find out that terrorism is caused by economic and social conditions, with no personal ideological influences , and this research was based on faulty assumptions, then their research can be discounted.
You’ll notice I removed the last bit about “religion being the cause / being dead on”, because I made no mention of what I expected them to find, this was just an assumption made on your part (who knows what other possible causes there could be?).
Now we can have a discussion about the actual research, and whether or not it is correctly controlling for all relevant variables and not allowing for unchecked assumptions distorting the results, but that is a very different discussion to making blanket generalisations about what I do and don’t believe.
** this detail should have been obvious from everything I’ve said to date, just adding it back in here to remind you, in case you forgot, that I’m in no way discounting economic or social factors, all I’m doing is pointing out the obvious influence of ideology on personal action
I’m pretty sure I didn’t waste my time. You seem to imagine that, as I began writing that, I thought there was more than the slimmest chance I would convince you of anything. You say that what I said was clearly in no way a logical conclusion of what you said without reading my logic.
Let me tell you what the logical conclusion of that is:
- You do not think it is even possible that you missed something
- You do not think it is even possible I have a point of view you haven’t considered
- You do not think it is even possible that I didn’t mean quite what you thought I meant and that I would clarify while admitting I shouldn’t have put it that way (which I did!)
In short, you know that your understanding of reason so far exceeds mine that my reasoning isn’t worth your time, and that your understanding of what I meant so far exceeds mine that my explanation of what I meant isn’t worth your time. Since you didn’t read to the end, I’ll give you my conclusion:
It’s hard for me to imagine how you could possibly disagree.
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You say that what I said was clearly in no way a logical conclusion of what you said without reading my logic.
I read enough of it to know that you’d failed to understand what I wrote in my previous post. So unless the second half of your post contradicts the first half, I don’t see the problem here.
Nobody disagrees with the term “salafist terrorist”. Not muslims, not even the terrorists themselves. If we can all agree to use “salafist terrorist” instead of “islamic terrorist” then maybe we can stop arguing over what to call the thing and move on to discussing what should be done about it, which to me is a far more interesting subject.
It’s pretty clear that lots of people would actually disagree with the term, seeing as Salafism is a religious ideology (and their are many many Salafists who do not in any way support terrorism) and many people seem to think that religious ideologies are not causal factors in people’s behaviors, that they are merely post-hoc justifications people use to explain the real causal factors, which are purely down to social conditioning due to economic and external political forces.
It’s weird to note that most people who feel this way don’t have a problem labeling Capitalism as a dangerous ideology though.
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Okay, let’s take a different route with you to simplify things.
First: let’s define terrorism. Let me know if you agree or disagree with this list…
Terrorism is:
- ineluctably political in aims and motives
- violent – or, equally important, threatens violence
- designed to have far-reaching psychological repercussions beyond the immediate victim or target
- conducted by an organization with an identifiable chain of command or conspiratorial cell structure (whose members wear no uniform or identifying insignia) and
- perpetrated by a subnational group or non-state entity.
We’ll continue after your response.
You do not think it is even possible that I didn’t mean quite what you thought I meant and that I would clarify while admitting I shouldn’t have put it that way (which I did!)
Ok, well I find it hard to see how that’s possible. But I’ll read the rest of it later and double check. It really was a lot of text!
Do you find it even a tiny bit ironic that his is all a discussion about how I didn’t understand you but I’m managing to add to it by just quoting myself because you don’t even bother to read what other people say?
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It’s actually a fundamental article of the Christian faith that there is nobody on earth who can take Christ’s redemption away from you, and that being a valid claimant to Christ’s sacrifice is what makes you a Christian. You can translate this into any language, but you don’t get to redefine the terms to make your cat Jesus; such sophistries are ineffective against the Holy Spirit. This is my understanding, speaking as a real-live self-identified former Christian and currently an ordained Universalist minister, raised in the Christian faith, grandson of deacons and preachers, brother-in-law to a minister, reader of many bibles.
Not always. I currently self-identify as a Universalist, a Pantheist and cat person.
Still, it’s good to be aware of other people’s historic abuse of language, especially as it relates to media, so I will be careful of this in the future. It’s no extra hassle to type “Joe says he believes in the redemption of Jesus” instead of “Joe is a self-identified Christian”.
- yes, but with the clarification that Islamism is an explicitly political form of Islam (by definition).
- yes.
- yes.
- yes. though people outside of the organisation can and do act in accordance with their beliefs and aims.
- not exclusively no, states can and do engage in and facilitate terrorism.
no, but it is ironic that you highlight two phrases in bold to try and prove a point, but don’t actually prove it.
I do think it’s possible, just unlikely. And as I said before, I will give you the benefit of the doubt by reading the whole thing later.
And please, there’s no need for the martyr act. I don’t think I’m some kind of perfect rational being, and you seem to be a perfectly intelligent person, I just happen to think you’re wrong about something.
4 I’ll give you, it has no impact on our discussion.
5 Requires clarification. I agree in spirit but by the common definition if the State is a known actor then said terrorism as actually categorized as an act of war of war crime. I honestly kind of prefer your clarification to the common definition, so we’ll roll with it.
Your response to 1, however, is problematic and needs clarification to make sure we’re on the same page. By ‘political aims and motives’ it is meant that political change is intended and that is what the terrorist act is for. We’ll get to individual motivations, but I consider your clarification unnecessarily confusing.
With the above correction, do you now agree with the definition of 1? There should be no need to mention ‘but Christian terrorists are X’ or ‘Buddhist terrorists are Y’. We’ll get to how non-special Islamic terrorism is in due course, but for the time being we need to stop defining terrorism as ‘only terrorism inflicted by followers of Islam’.
If you insist on that definition, please say so as well.
Except it is never used in regards to Christianity. Only “other” religions.
Because religion /= ideology. They aren’t interchangeable terms.
a religion is an example of an ideology.
Sure, but in history I’m pretty sure some people have held that other people’s genuine faith could be considered a sophistry that could be dismissed. Jehovah’s Witnesses (at least some of them) reject the idea that Jesus died on the cross and think that crosses are a form of idol worship, so they might say that a catholic wearing a crucifix is putting their faith in an idol, and that saying it represents Jesus is just sophistry. There are apparently around 2.2 billion Christians in the world. I find the idea that anything is believed by all christians is very unlikely.
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Read what I wrote. They aren’t interchangeable terms. The reason people will give you flak for comments about a religion but not capitalism is because they’re giving you flak for comments about a religion, not general flak for comments about ideologies. Capitalism isn’t a religion. It is an economic philosophy or ideology.
