French Terror Attacks, scores dead

[Longhorn]

Not wanting to get in an argument, but it seems to be a little bit petty to be getting so het up over being asked to pray, given the situation.

People are religious, quite what you expect I'm not sure.

Exactly. Most of them don't even mean it literally anyway. In this case it's nothing but an expression of empathy. It's those petty differences that if we can overcome we can be more united, not pointlessly divided.

I guess I see why it could be irritating, but to me it seems like missing the bigger picture. It's just an expression. It was drilled into the language and the minds through years.

[Longhorn]

It is very relevant: It's thanks to religion that we have suicide bombers like this in the first place.

I think it's more thanks to brain washing and hatred, and damaged empathy. See followers of the very same religion who are outraged and disgusted by the actions of terrorists.

I'm not saying there isn't a pattern of correlation between religious radicalism and violence and hatred, there is. I just mean that this is a bit more complex of an issue than 'religion is bad, without it everyone would just sing Kumbaya and hug'.

[pocaracas]

Anonymous makes a statement...
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/11/anonymou...r-on-isis/.

""War is declared. Get prepared," the masked figure says in the video. "The French people are stronger than you and will come out of this atrocity even stronger. Anonymous from all over the world will hunt you down. You should know that we will find you and we will not let you go. We will launch the biggest operation ever against you."
The hacker says that the infamous group will use its cyber skills to "unite humanity" and said that terrorists should "expect massive cyber attacks.""

"Anonymous has targeted ISIS for a number of months; the group has revealed the Twitter accounts of ISIS members and hacked a number of ISIS sites. Foreign Policy estimates that Anonymous has dismantled at least 149 of the extremist group's affiliated websites, and flagged approximately 101,000 Twitter accounts and nearly 6,000 propaganda videos."

[Edwardo Piet]

It is very relevant: It's thanks to religion that we have suicide bombers like this in the first place.

I think it's more thanks to brain washing and hatred, and damaged empathy. See followers of the very same religion who are outraged and disgusted by the actions of terrorists.

I'm not saying there isn't a pattern of correlation between religious radicalism and violence and hatred, there is. I just mean that this is a bit more complex of an issue than 'religion is bad, without it everyone would just sing Kumbaya and hug'.

I didn't say things would be hunky dory without religion. I'm saying without religion people wouldn't be suicide bombing for religious reasons

Difference.

I've already said I know prayer is harmless and pointless but I don't expect theists I consider friends to try and guilt trip me into praying when I'm an atheist merely because of the severity of the situation. If they want to pray extra hard when extra bad stuff happens fine, but don't try and pressure atheists into praying by saying nonsense like "In times like this even the atheists should be praying". It's a way to lose my friendship if they seriously think I'm a bad person if I don't pray to an imaginary God when suicide bombing is absolutely religiously motivated. It's times like this when I'm most pissed off with religion: 911, Charlie Hebdo and now this. And at times when I'm fucking pissed off with religion, if you're my friend don't expect to be able to guilt trip me into praying to an imaginary dictatorship just because you'll wrongly consider me a bad person if I don't.

[Edwardo Piet]

It is very relevant: It's thanks to religion that we have suicide bombers like this in the first place.

I think it's more thanks to brain washing and hatred, and damaged empathy

If you believe that you'll go to heaven for blowing yourself up: I call that brainwashed and drained of empathy by taking a hateful religion too seriously.

It's not as if they're misreading the scripture. Where do you think this ideology comes from?

[abaris]

I'm not saying there isn't a pattern of correlation between religious radicalism and violence and hatred, there is. I just mean that this is a bit more complex of an issue than 'religion is bad, without it everyone would just sing Kumbaya and hug'.

If you want to abstract it even more, religions start out as philosophies, and, carried to their extremes, turn into ideologies. And there really is next to no difference between secular and religious radicalism. If one subscribes to an ideology, all bets are off. And that's what's happening right now.

What I constantly miss in all these discussion, since 2001, is the fact that terrorists follow strategies. The terror is their means, but it's not their goal. The biggest mistake is to take them for fools.

In a nutshell, why I dislike Harris. It's closing his eyes before the contents of the other holy books to make blanket statements on Islam. Maybe it's not even closing his eyes, but a fundamental dishonesty. His politcal writing in the first decade of this century points to the latter.

[Longhorn]

I think if you're the type conditioned to blow yourself up, the excuse they give for your 'mission' is hardly relevant. I don't believe there would be less bombings without religions. I think it's a human flaw to naturally invent things to kill others over, and that's not even getting into all the other factors of why people kill other people.

[Longhorn]

If you want to abstract it even more, religions start out as philosophies, and, carried to their extremes, turn into ideologies. And there really is next to no difference between secular and religious radicalism. If one subscribes to an ideology, all bets are off. And that's what's happening right now.

Exactly! Religion is only one of the forms of a symptom of an underlying illness. It's just a means. Any ideology could just as easily be substituted in its place.

In a nutshell, why I dislike Harris. It's closing his eyes before the contents of the other holy books to make blanket statements on Islam. Maybe it's not even closing his eyes, but a fundamental dishonesty. His politcal writing in the first decade of this century points to the latter.

^^This^^

[Cyberman]

I prefer Trump when he was called Drutt:

[abaris]

Exactly! Religion is only one of the forms of a symptom of an underlying illness. It's just a means. Any ideology could just as easily be substituted in its place.

Exactly, and that's why I continuously stress the point that absence of religion wouldn't solve anything. The void would just be filled with any other flag to rally behind.