Post #397,152
12/15/14 11:25:01 AM
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The more of this stuff that happens, ...
the more I'm inclined to lean toward the late Chris Hitchens view of Islam. In much the same way that I cannot understand why anyone is a Catholic anymore. With Islam, you've got these vicious rapists all over the globe wrapping themselves in a religion and that is apparently acceptable at least to the extent that the fact that some mosques are supporting these thugs is indisputable. Yet, they keep going in spite of that now indisputable fact. With Catholics, it is widely understood that many of the "Priests" are pedophilliacs and that at least some of the money they drop each week in collection plates goes to silence reports of sexual abuse against children. This, too, is indisputable and yet they continue going to mass. In both cases, "believers" are knowingly funding some very atrocious behavior. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to understand why these Medieval, superstitious religions of fear survive when so much of their rotten core has been demonstrated clearly to even the most wilfully blind.
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Post #397,153
12/15/14 11:40:41 AM
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Why they survive...
The religions based on that mess that came out of Mesopotamia are authoritarian societal frameworks: Do what the leaders say, unconditionally, because god says so. This has worked well for authority figures for millennia and nobody discards a winning system.
Currently the "religious right" fights fiercely because they are upholding the will of god, not some cranky old rich white man. In theory. It works well because they don't have to defend anything; deities are unquestionable. Probably because they are hard to get a straight answer from... Unless, of course, you are the leader; deities seem to talk to leaders a LOT.
Judaism operated that way for millennia, and was fine tuned into Christianity to operate in a different society. Islam is the same mess fine tuned for Arabic culture. SSDD. It's not going away anytime soon. "Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable."
~ AMBROSE BIERCE
(1842-1914)
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Post #397,155
12/15/14 11:53:45 AM
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Amen! :)
Not much good has come from the traditions of desert goat fuckers. Alex
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
-- Isaac Asimov
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Post #397,176
12/15/14 9:35:08 PM
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It is definitely a bit also-ran.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13536257-in-the-shadow-of-the-swordThis book summarises history from about 100AD forward in and around Mesopotamia, the Levant and what is now Turkey. The evidence is fairly strong that Islam is a largely manufactured religion that has little to do with who or what Mohammed was. And it looks like the various religious authorities have worked hard to hide this. It is enticing to think that they learnt from how the Jewish rulers codified Judaism more than a thousand years earlier, or perhaps how Christianity became Pauline a few hundred years earlier. Wade.
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Post #397,167
12/15/14 5:45:47 PM
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This disconnect from Reason can't be parsed except from an even larger area of
ignorance, I wot: say, what? who? 'we' are, and how does that-all function?? even rudimentarily.
The Ancients created a much better class of argument than has survived the Techno-magnified noise of today, especially as that relates to the diminishing-signal, now drowned like puppies. Our lore consists in various "models" which cannot decode (the religio clusterfuck) but, I think.. point to a black-hole of still-massive ignorance: what it would take to understand and correct this jelloware error. IMhO we are in that era of near-species-wide fantasy-'explanations', taught, believed by ... a plurality, at least? where speciescide becomes possible, and for many today may well seem inevitable.
Despite Freud's conflations into a simple-model of [really, he was trying to parse the Psyche, no?] and Jung's more granular, logical? and maybe reasonable model: giant holes remained. Maslow et al merely embrodered with the same dropped-stitches.
We don't *know* much/not nearly enough what that 'subconscious' thing denotes about normal daily States of awareness (another word dimly comprehended); we have No Idea what conscience signifies? derives-from? means! Worst of all: Consciousness ("itself?") evades any clear-model from which to work--never mind the conceit of imagining we understand anything about where/what/How (!) that exists, functions. Algorithms-for-consciousness? In your Dreams, Bunky. As much in 2014 as previously. This-all despite n-billions of words, books, classes, Professorships and modern pontifications/reifications.
It seems that the only way to suppress? limit? (forget eradicate==root-out-literally!) the anti-human cruelty, wanton acts of viciousness of being-possessed by a personal-Certainty ... remains the obvious one: Nuke-from-orbit (a lasting meme from our friends at Aliens). IF you could, practically :-/ Those with rudimentary Consciousness/the base-level of Conscience: perceive the utter bestiality of employing the same POV as the defectives--to annihilate [that form of] 'defectiveness'. And, I think, the fact that such an idea produces Only cogntive dissonance is qed-Enough for this thesis.
Our Ignorance about our existence and inner workings; this unWisdom as defines what we *ARE* thus far: needs a higher-level of Consciousness to create the 'Wisdom" (pick your own) without which: the whole bloody species is STUCK in a recursive mind-HALT, analogous to *nix Kill command: which stops (that machine, too).
(Yet, via Cosmic-humor or whatever: a one Can qed the fact of our ignorance!)==nameable Unknowns.. no matter what any Sec-Def babbles about.
Or, as the Majesty *saith--in Amadeus, just rerun, Director's cut except for some fuzzed-out boobies--Well, there you are!
* this sentence usually follows some inexplicable idiocy like, "there are only a certain number-of-notes a human can hear (in some time period.")
While we wait for jelloware to catch-up with last-century's Techno, huffing and panting as it races faster-still, I see that I'll miss next year's Nobel in Species Repair, again; I can't see how you can accelerate the rooting-out of the ingrained Kill-grade dumbth of Certainty, in human jelloware. Yep, I'll go out just like Mozart--in a sack with n-others + a sprinkle of lime atop.
In the Land of the Rising Sun, they created a ritual for seppuku (later modified en-masse via that Divine-Wind word, Kamikaze. Could they have somehow intuited that they Didn't Know Shit about lots of things? and there: was seppuku.. to make a fine ritual of the opting-out ... from a clusterfuck?
Cheers, anyway (Maybe we need to invent a new Deity. To blame.) Then it won't be Our fault :-)
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Post #397,188
12/16/14 11:26:56 AM
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As if to underscore the point.
Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN) -- "'God is great,'" the Taliban militants exclaimed, as they roared through the hallways of a Peshawar, Pakistan, school.
Then, 14-year-old student Ahmed Faraz recalled, one of them changed the narrative.
" 'A lot of the children are under the benches,' " a Pakistani Taliban member said, according to Ahmed. " 'Kill them.' "
By the time the hours-long siege at Army Public School and Degree College ended early Tuesday evening, at least 137 people -- most of them children -- were dead, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province Information Minister Mushtaq Ghani said. More than 100 were injured, many of them suffering gunshot wounds. http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/16/world/asia/pakistan-peshawar-school-attack/index.htmlWonder if the "Blessed be his name, peace be upon him" crowd has had any second thoughts about Islam after that. Nope. Probably not. Keep going to the mosques.
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Post #397,190
12/16/14 12:02:14 PM
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Eventually, there will have to be a war against Islam.
It continues to fall ever more under the spell of the most violent extremists - and Muslims do little against it because that would be "against God".
Eventually even the freedom of religion folks will have to recognize that Islam has no concept of freedom of religion, only of killing anyone not allied with their particular sect. It is a deeply flawed religion.
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Post #397,191
12/16/14 12:21:03 PM
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Dunno.
I heard someone argue on the radio recently that Islam is going through the same kinds of divisions and conflicts as Christianity did in Europe a few hundred years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion and so forth. I think the thrust of the argument is that it's nothing new and it won't be resolved quickly. 76 died at the Branch Davidian compound. It didn't turn into a religious war. There was a time when the Red Brigades and the rest seemed like they would always be with Europe. But they faded away. I expect IS and al Qaeda will as well, but it's going to take a long time. And something else will take its place. It'll be "interesting" to see what happens in Saudi Arabia when Ghawar becomes too depleted to pump... (Probably less than 40 years if extractable reserves are 71 Bbbl and production is 5 Mbbl/day.) Cheers, Scott.
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Post #397,195
12/16/14 1:34:40 PM
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Needs a tipping-point--141 dead children; are they There? Yet..
Pakistan's incestuous relationship with Religio-fighters/terrorists has led them to shrug off such atrocities (politically and socially.) BBC commentator avers that, just maybe This One is so ugly that even Pakistan Pols are getting many messages. Pollyanna? perhaps, but one has to hope anyway. Wonder what the Paki word is for opprobrium? OTOH in dis-US, those dead tykes 2 years ago had nary an effect on the gun-crazies-within. Do we need a larger slaughter next? (has to be whites; black expendability is deeply ingrained as Normal here.) tl;dr ... Horror Holocust, when sufficiently depraved and repetitive.. just might awaken enough sleepwalkers, here AND over there. It's species-wide: sic transit sicko-species :-/ :-/ 'End Times' can be spun lots of ways; 7B+ overpopulation surely catalyzes such brain-miasma because Life gets to be reeeel-cheap. (Well in US, the final dying-weeks are the most expensive, but that's just a religious thing in capitalism.)
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Post #397,196
12/16/14 1:42:12 PM
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cf. Static's recent link to book re an unauthorized bio
of Islam 'founding' and deifying; I may have to spend a couple bucks--it seems that their acolytes are particularly and peculiarly misinformed about their roots.
(As world religions go..) It's best to try to find a few Why?s ... might be a clue to some truthiness antidote to current death-wishes?
Ya never know. Beats the simple nuke solution though, in so many ways.
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