Thoughts on the Woolwich killing

[Fidel_Castronaut]

This is what Russell Brand wrote about the murder.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/russell-...47964.html

Oh yes, I read that yesterday. Everybody needs to read that.

Meh, both agree and disagree. The abrahamic religions (one could argue religion per se) are most certainly exclusivist and by reduction divisive. True equality can never exist whilst there are people using spiritual, divine reasoning to reinforce their views, be they moderate or extreme.

The different between catcher in the rye and, say, the Quran, is that the former is an evaluation of society, of societal norms, and specifically, the place of the protagonist within that society. The latter however is a guideline for society, how it should be constructed, and most importantly, how people should behave within said society. That doesn't of course mean that 'Islam' is to blame, but it would be foolish to dismiss the men's version of Islam as simply 'loony' when clearly they thought it made enough sense to do what they did.

We run the risk of completely misdiagnosing the patient if we ignore the idea that, whilst religion per se may not have been the central cause of this horrible act, their religion, or more specifically, the ideology that these men held dear, certainly was.

I actually agree with Fr0d0 (above ^^). There is a massive reluctance to bring the word 'religion' into any of the debates for fear of reprisals (IMHO). This status quo of silence against the extremism that certainly does exist in some religious based communities (self-evidently) just fuels the fire for idiots like the EDL and the BNP. The general retort to these issues is 'Islam is the religion of peace', and yeah, whilst most Muslims are just normal people who happen to also belong to a religion [that i actually don't particularly like, but then again I don't really like most religions], there are obviously elements that aren't. It's silly to just dismiss them as a 'loony' because, even if that's the case, that's not doing anything to combat their lunacy or the lunacy of others that haven't been identified yet. We need to include religion as part of the analysis when we're looking at the MO of guys like this and why they did why they did.