So now there are two standoffs. The murderer who shot the policewoman yesterday is trapped, also in a potential hostage situation.
Reports (for whatever the accuracy of early reports may be) are that that shooter is connected to the two cornered near the airport.
I can’t see either of these lasting long. The killers have got to be short on sleep, hungry, and running out of adrenalin. I only hope no more innocent people get harmed.
My way of saying this is to point out that any God who needs human help to protect His dignity isn’t a very powerful God.
If you’re gonna play the “I’m so smart” card, at least get your facts straight
Christianity is classical age.
Islam, Middle Ages.
Also, you do understand that, at least in the bronze age, the concept of “reason” as you accept it had not been invented, therefore it was imposible to pervert.
I sure missed that memo and so did thousands or religious people who made great discoveries for science.
If you don’t think that “reason” has not been used to justify violence then you show utter ignorance of history. In fact you, in the next paragrapgh, show how reason can be used to justify disenfranchising people.
I get that you’re in favor of disenfranchising people you don’t like.
Well, using the powers of reason I’ll be at you mom’s funeral chanting “she is rotting, worms are gonna eat her body” because reason, you know, it’s true. You won’t go apeshit if someone tells the truth.
To the extant that dictionaries are useful in message board arguments at all, if the language is English the Oxford English Dictionary is the only definitive cite, IMHO. And even the OED is not without it’s problems.
I believe the general rule of thumb is if you are resorting to dictionaries to support arguments that aren’t about dictionaries you’ve lost the argument.
CMC fnord!
In a kosher shop. Two killed, several hostages apparently.
Good thing atheists are never violent, and when they are it’s never because they are atheists or they never were really atheists. Never happened, ever, at all. Atheists have a perfect record. Never have reason, rationality, and science been used to justify murders; not a single time…because, when they have, it’s just an excuse or perversion.
I don’t think there’s anything at all special about the tenets of Islam that make a larger percentage of Muslims violent or supporters of violence, even though that’s a fact. There were times in the past that Christianity and other religions were as violent or more violent, statistically speaking (most likely, considering that we can’t get good stats on beliefs in the past), as modern Muslims. There were times when Islam was much more a force for progress than contemporary Christianity (and vice versa).
So I think it’s mostly a historical coincidence. It’s not anything special about Islam – it’s something special about some of the countries and regions in which Islam dominates.
**Guys, this is the Pit here, not GD. ** So what about you all STFU with your pointless debating about islam and atheism and liberalism and whatever and let us vent (or post info) about what is happening?
Thanks
Oukile (who also happens to be French)
Awwww… somebody just discovered sarcasm! <pinches cheek>
And now Le Pen (the father) is memeing, so we’ve reached peak what the fucking christ.
We’re gonna have a great year, I tell ya. And it’s gonna be awesome to be brown in France, too !
You, on the other hand, continue with your long history of stupidity—good for you.
It’s not like being Brown was rainbows and candy in France before that.
No.
Seriously, though; hijacking Pit threads to flog our pet causes is what we do around here.
El_Kabong (who also happens to be a cartoon horse)
I suggest you read up on sharia law, and research social studies and polls about the support of sharia law within the various Muslim countries. “Progressive” Muslims are in fact in violation of sharia law, which is still greatly supported in many countries and by Muslims around the world, not restricted by borders.
Of course other religions can be dissected from their inception, but most of those have evolved into modern liberal western democracy with of course infrequent exceptions from time to time. There are large percentages of Islam followers and in fact countries that have not evolved, which is the basis of the problems we see nowadays with these terrorists acts. The basic tenets of Islam are not compatible with western liberal democracy. The problem is these basic tenets have not been formally put in the past, and instead is many countries and cultures are still practiced.
Continuing to write these acts off as deranged small subsets of that religion does not address the basic problem of silent support of these acts per Sharia law, which is supported by millions. Just because the large majority of Muslims would not commit these acts does not mean they do not agree with acts such as ‘avenging the prophet’. Only until some of the basic tenets of Islam are rejected by the overwhelming majority, which in turn results in certain members literally carrying out these acts, will this terrorism diminish.
I’m talking about countries rejecting the shitty treatment of women and their place in society as ‘property’, instead of this shitty treatment being the law of the land. Until things like ‘stoning’ for adultery are formally rejected these things will keep happening. Until the respect for freedom of speech is ingrained, instead of millions throwing a shit fit when they get ‘offended’ and then a subset of that anger vows ‘revenge’ for a fucking cartoon, book, or article, this will keep happening. That evolution will not happen in our lifetime, so just keep your above post to cut and paste excusing this BS for the rest of your life, instead of calling out the accountability where it belongs.
OK friend, here goes:
From here. Impressed yet?
+1
Dead wrong. I can think Christianity is a shitty belief system without thinking that my girlfriend is a bad person for being a catholic. Similarly, I think Islam is a toxic, dangerous ideology that we’d all be significantly better off without. This doesn’t mean I want all Muslims to convert or die. (Well, okay, I’d like for them to convert, but I’m not going to demand it of them.)
…Really? I’ll give you a hint - the majority of places with a Muslim majority? They don’t look so good. The radicals have this weird tendency to take hold.
Some locales where Christians are a massive supermajority:
…I mean, sure, there’s Detroit, but that’s not a post-apocalyptic shithole because of radical Christians coming in and ruining everything.
Trying to prove something by defining your terms is kind of a complete waste of time?
Seriously, trying to demonstrate “this criticism is racist” by pointing to a certain dictionary definition of “race” ignores completely that in rejecting your definition of “racist”, the person you’re arguing has clearly also rejected your definition of “race”. So stating your definition of race just means talking past each other.
…That, and Merriam-Webster is a piece of shit.
All this is fine (minus the insults) – I just don’t think it’s anything special about Islam or Sharia that’s driving it… just as there was nothing special about Christianity or Christian theocracies that drove the atrocities and misogyny of past centuries in Christian lands. There’s no “true” form of Islam that demands violence, just as there was no “true” form of Christianity that demanded the Inquisition, Jewish pogroms, burning witches, etc. All these texts are interpreted in different ways.
The fanatics suck. I’m not a fan of religion in general, but it’s the fanatics that cause most of the violence, not the religious as a group.
I argue this both to try to be accurate and to be pragmatic. I think the best way to deal with this issue is to call out the bad actors while not lumping in those who aren’t trying to kill us. Terrorism isn’t caused by, for example, poor treatment of women – there are plenty of places on earth in which women are treated like shit but that produce relatively few or zero terrorists. I think rolling up all these issues can make things more difficult and more complicated, not more simple.
[QUOTE=Aji de Gallina]
It’s not like being Brown was rainbows and candy in France before that.
[/QUOTE]
Church.
Which is why I’m already dreading the coming months, where the usual shit is gonna be cranked up to 11, all day, every day.
Sometimes I love my country. This is not one of those times.
I agree with those statements, but “Islam is shitty everywhere” is still both bigoted and factually incorrect, in my opinion. Those are saying different things, from what I can see. The “everywhere” takes it out of the realm of discussions of ideology, and into the realm of meatspace.
Those are some of the good ones. There are probably more “nice” Christian-dominated cities than Muslim-dominated cities. But there are still tons and tons of “not nice” Christian cities. Have you ever been to San Pedro Sula? I have. I’d much rather spend time in Istanbul or Kuala Lumpur. So I’ll accept that the percentage probably looks better for Christian cities than Muslim cities, but I bet they’re both pretty low.
Shinto looks much, much better.
That’s the dumbest definition of race I’ve ever seen. By that definition, Dallas Cowboys fans are a race, and if you hate the Dallas Cowboys, you’re a racist. You can’t seriously think that’s a good definition of race.
You think Muslims from Morocco, Afghanistan, and Indonesia are the same race? Are catholics from El Salvador, Ireland, and subsuharan Africa the same race too? Hipsters are a race by that definition, for fucks sake.
You can’t possibly be serious with that bullshit. If Muslims and Cowboys fans and hipsters are all a race, the term is meaningless and you’re stupid for bringing it into the thread as if it were an actual argument.
Have you arrived at this conclusion through study, or because that’s the result you want? You, more than anyone else in the thread, exemplify the the desperate “all sides are equal guys!” bullshit apologist stance that I’ve been railing against. I have no doubt that if you had two hypothetical religions - one which said “our main tenet is to not cause any harm to anyone” and the other that said “subjugate everyone, kill all non-believers”, you’d be saying that all religions are equal and there’s nothing particularly violent about the latter.
Let’s not compare Christianity and Islam for a moment. Let’s compare Buddhism and Islam. Do these religions encourage violence equally? Would you say that Buddhism and Islam are both peaceful religion, and only fanatics corrupt their teachings to commit violence, and both are equal in that regard?
Your beliefs are determined through what you want the world to be, not what it is. You are immune to facts in this regard.
All sides aren’t equal. But there were times in which the Christian world was much, much more violent than both contemporary Islam and today’s Muslim world.
I’m not as familiar with the history of the Buddhist world, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that there were times in which Buddhists were similarly as violent.
This leads me to believe that the differences at varying times are due to reasons of society and history, and not the tenets of the religion involved.
