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New I think we mostly agree.
Sure, the Abrahamic religions have writings in old books and traditions that are too often antithetical to modern pluralistic life.

Like our medical insurance, drug, and medical equipment systems in the US, in an ideal world we would scrap them and start over. We agree that we don't live in such a world.

But...

Juan Cole:

Top Ten Ways Islamic Law forbids Terrorism
By Juan Cole Apr. 17, 2013

Erik Rush and others who hastened to scapegoat Muslims for the Boston Marathon bombing are ignorant of the religion. I can’t understand why people who have never so much as read a book about a subject appoint themselves experts on it. (Try this book, e.g.). We don’t yet know who carried out the attack, but we know they either aren’t Muslims at all or they aren’t real Muslims, in the nature of the case.

For the TLDR crowd, here are the top ten ways that Islamic law and tradition forbid terrorism ...


Just as there are people who (wrongly) argue that the US is a "Christian Nation" based on selective reading of our country's founding documents, people can argue that Islam's documents (wrongly) argue that murder is justified. The problem is the recent teaching that advocates against modernity, not the ancient documents.

We don't scream that Christianity is at war with western civilization even though it has old documents advocating murder under all sorts of circumstances. We (most of us, anyway) have been taught to ignore or interpret-away things like that. Muslims do that as well. And they should (and must) have the freedom to do so.

Direct incitement to violence should be severely punished. On-the-sly incitement should be vigorously argued against and watched carefully. But ways need to be found to teach kids who are lost that Jihadism and the like (I'd include things like militant Libertarianism, Scientology, etc., also too) are not what they appear to be. They manipulative people for the political and economic ends of the leadership. Nawaz is on the right track there, I think.

I assume it's going to take a while for ISIL and the like to become a dead ideology. I think we're going through something like the anarchists, etc., of the late 19th and early 20th century. Of course, that led to lots of nastiness in Europe, but there's no reason why things have to go that far this time. :-( If we manage to learn from history...

We'll see.

FWIW.

Thanks.

Cheers,
Scott.
New oy you! whats wrong with individual reappropriation?
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 59 years. meep
New Heh. Slippery slope and all that. (There's always someone stronger who'll take *your* stuff.)
New Fair enough; we can agree to somewhat-agree on the pernicious Forces in play:
If we manage to learn from history...

Now There's a qualifier! that's recursive and a traditional example of the fact that humans--at base--in most-all daily robot-stimuus/response activities: those tasks which comprise a %huge of "job" activities, social interactions (not just with strangers) etc. ... are navigated by almost muscle-memory.
tl;dr perfection there: Humans are (most-often) Not rational animals. Especially-so when "lives depend upon it".

[Swan-song, then]
We are facing the likelihood of a worldwide *plebiscite--whether we like that thought or not--on How? Whether! RELIGION can continue to supersede-at-Willfulness: all variants of the SOCIAL CONTRACT.

On with: how 'we' usually deal with such crises, via our inner autonomic responses (as seems Crucial next)
Sometimes the drowning one is Saved ... but most-often by the speed of the 'Instinctive-Center' (called Reptile-brain by some) It works fastest of all (faster even than than the Emotional one--as always happens-First in a confrontation--well before/IF-even Intellect can/will start processing. Intellect trails all our LANs in speed.

(Such observations pre-date modrin soft-sciences, none of which negate these asserted characteristics; this stuff is the Poster Boy for analysis paralysis and for the spinning-off of the TLAs (like SAD, ADD ad-nauseum) most often dreamed-up by Big Pharma + willing supine MDs: all working well beyond their grasp of our wetware.)
Thus I deem this shorthand a necessary KISS, and a useful antidote to the convoluted complexification so dear to the 'social science' trainees. (I wasn't incisive enough to discover them; had to wade through much std. stuff to discover the Model.) This-all, IME is quite germane to the clusterfuck surrounding today's FORCING of an overall re-Evaluation of most societies' lassaiz-faire, unThinking toleration of manifestly anarchist parables, hidden or Up-front within all the Corporate==mass religions.

Ex of what always We Do:
The Shogunate's game-plan [at base: KIll Saddam for Shrub's emotional conflicts with Daddy, via instilling WMD -ƒeare; get cheap oil for US, huge profits for Cheney's War-machine Death-merchants ... go home in 3 or 6 months, fat & happy. We all lived through this farrago in which ... we shall be enmeshed perpetually.]

* But the RELIGION Clusterfuck goes deeper into the human psyche than mere heaped-dead-burned bodies of OTHERS, as, for most adherents: it's A Ticket to Ride their last-grasp of (an infantile-Idea of) IMMORTALITY.) N'est ce pâs?

(Maybe someday we shall Thank! the Cheney/Neoconman/Hawk droids for precipitating, Forcing an overdue massive reassessment of acceptable daily behavior on a permanently Over-crowded planet.) If 'we' survive long enough and get through Today well-enough: for the luxury of such beneficent hind-sight.

In sum then, Patience is your long-suit, and I admire your general equanimity and decent arguments for both. Merely, I 'frame' the RELIGIO-issue as transcending.. as demanding a uniquely-tailored firm response from all who demand an impenetrable-Wall between social necessities and the mentally-afflicted amongst us.

And the deepest problem I see, is: not becoming too-Offending of the billions who practice their orisons quietly, have come to rely upon the assurances of their salvations etc. WHILE ALSO instilling within these large majorities, a New Awareness that: in order for them to proceed next with their daily and religious lives: they need to PREACH the necessity of THIS SEPARATION WALL. From the same pulpits and madrassas as created the current Hi-tech Crusaders amongst (their own!) mentally-unbalanced practitioners.

{Simply, for confirmation: Look at existing Theocratically-controlled States and the plight of their inmates, especially of those who would like to Change that State's governance. Syria, Iran et al.)

Yes, such a confrontation is unprecedented (as was the fission bomb) and only an egotistical fool could imagine to See the shortest/best route through the many mine-fields of human jelloware! I think that, if we punt/kick that terribly-dented Can down that endless road One More Time? we Shall exacerbate all mere 'climate' Damocles' Swords and regress to the handy/compact/Reliable gadgets in all those arsenals.

Think I'm done on the entire Clusterfuck; no idea how many/few cohorts for my POV exist out there, nor if there are more useful overviews as might occur next: via Sheer Luck.
Am content that we'll always have Tom Lehrer and George C. to Play Us Out: and ... ... what could be more Cosmically-humorous than That? :-)

Carrion.


Of course too: post-such a RAND-grade Spasm War™ the population Would be decimated, the many sources of Industrial emissions stilled. But all Know-as-fact that there is no more high-grade ore to be found near the surface, no magical instant-food sources, not enough 'caves in which to hide' etc. It would be a miserable denouement.
Alas. We Can be Just that Dumb, despite squeaking-by all those cold-war nuke accidents (a fact also unknown to most of the planetary masses.)

Decisions.. ain't they a Byotch?! Manfred to an unwanted priest: Old man.. it is not so hard to die.
Or ..if the Meaning of liff is merely to collect more Stuff? what's to lose? ;^>
New Why?
We (most of us, anyway) have been taught to ignore or interpret-away things like that. Muslims do that as well. And they should (and must) have the freedom to do so.

I've started re-reading (actually, first go I never finished it - oldest daughter borrowed it and it's just now returned) Hitchens' God is not Great. Even before that, I was struck by something eluded to by Dawkins. Why must we "respect" any religion? You can't control thought, people are free to "believe" whatever they wish. But that doesn't mean we should treat any of them with any degree of respect. I, like nearly everyone here I'd wager, was raised that anyone's religious views need to be respected. You hear that same drivel from people like the sitting head of the world's leading pedophilliacs association the pope, among others. I, like I suspect most, just accepted that "respect for religion" is one of those late 18th century ideals that are sacrosanct. But it's utter nonsense. I haven't heard anyone cite a decent argument as to why the free exercise clause should not be stricken from our Constitution. I've never heard a good argument as to why it is important to "respect religion."
New Respect is too strong a word.
re·spect
rəˈspekt/
noun
1.
a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.


I don't feel that way about religion. My feeling is more along the lines of the Golden Rule: You don't tell me what to believe, and I won't tell you what to believe.

"God is not Great" is a good book. Hitchens was a master of English and of constructing a compelling argument. But he was also wrong about quite a few things (e.g. Bush and the Iraq War).

Flipping into "old man yells at clouds" mode isn't going to convince fence-sitters. It will hurt the cause.

My $0.02.

Cheers,
Scott.
New Re: Bush and the Iraq war.
I've been re-watching his many interviews on the topic and I have a different way of looking at what he was saying. So much so, that I'm not sure now. He was advocating a war against Islamic Cultists. And, as he said during a Daily Show interview, "You got to war with the President you've got." ;0) I think he was right with regard to the threat this particular religion posed. I didn't see it. I'll admit its beyond my comprehension how any of the desert religions have any genuine followers left and this bias caused me to be blind to the danger they posed. Their foundations wouldn't pass the sniff test of a mid-intellect 10 year old from the West. Christianity's prevalence in the West is strictly due to convention and I suspect in a lot of cases fear. Isn't it time, in the 21st century, that we alter our course? If we didn't, as a society, treat these idiotic fairy tales with legislatively dictated respect, there wouldn't be any marching morons of this particular stripe left.

On the Iraq War, about all I can say is Christianity had its crusades and moved past it. It's Islam's turn to have theirs and we should crush it before it starts. Why are we afraid to "declare war on religion"? We should mock it for all it is worth. We should teach our children to pay absolutely no heed to any clergymen, regardless of which mosque, church, synagogue, temple or chapel in which they spew their nonsense. We don't really even have to go that far. All we've got to do is ask them, "Does what he's saying make any sense to you at all?" 95+% of them will say "No."

New Meh.
(That's a good word. Sorry I over-use it. ;-)

The Australian (from 2008):

Hitchens defending himself:
[...]

We were never, if we are honest with ourselves, "lied into war".

We became steadily more aware that the option was continued collusion with Saddam or a decision to have done with him.

The President's speech to the UN on September 12, 2002, laying out the considered case that it was time to face the Iraqi tyrant, too, with this choice, was easily the best speech of his two-term tenure and by far the most misunderstood.

That speech is widely and wrongly believed to have focused on only two aspects of the problem, namely the refusal of Saddam's regime to come into compliance on the resolutions concerning weapons of mass destruction and the involvement of the Baathists with a whole nexus of nihilist and Islamist terror groups.

Baghdad's outrageous flouting of the resolutions on compliance (if not necessarily the maintenance of blatant, as opposed to latent, WMD capacity) remains a huge and easily demonstrable breach of international law. The role of Baathist Iraq in forwarding and aiding the merchants of suicide terror actually proves to be deeper and worse, on the latest professional estimate, than most people had believed or than the Bush administration had suggested.

This is all overshadowed by the unarguable hash that was made of the intervention itself.

But I would nonetheless maintain that this incompetence doesn't condemn the enterprise wholesale.

A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial.

The Kurdish and Shi'ite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide.

A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled.

The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated.

Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil-free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qa'ida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society.

Further afield, a perfectly defensible case can be made that the Syrian Baathists would not have evacuated Lebanon, nor would the Gaddafi gang have turned over Libya's (much larger than anticipated) stock of WMD, if not for the ripple effect of the removal of the region's keystone dictatorship. None of these positive developments took place without a good deal of bungling and cruelty, and unintended consequences of their own.

I don't know of a satisfactory way of evaluating one against the other any more than I quite know how to balance the disgrace of Abu Ghraib, say, against the digging up of Saddam's immense network of mass graves. There is, however, one position that nobody can honestly hold but that many people try their best to hold. And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it's not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn't count, and we are not involved.

Nonetheless, the thing that most repels people when they contemplate Iraq, which is the chaos and misery and fragmentation (and the deliberate intensification and augmentation of all this by the jihadis), invites the inescapable question: What would post-Saddam Iraq have looked like without a coalition presence?

The past years have seen us both shamed and threatened by the implications of the Berkeleyan attitude, from Burma to Rwanda to Darfur.

Had we decided to attempt the right thing in those cases (you will notice that I say attempt rather than do, which cannot be known in advance), we could as glibly have been accused of embarking on "a war of choice". But the thing to remember about Iraq is that all or most choice had already been forfeited.

We were already deeply involved in the life and death struggle of that country, and March 2003 happens to mark the only time that we decided to intervene, after a protracted and open public debate, on the right side and for the right reasons. This must, and still does, count for something.


His heart was in the right place, but his refusal to accept that Bush's invasion made things much, much worse (not just a few unfortunate consequences in an on-the-whole noble adventure) - and his searching for flakes of gold in the mountain of destruction that Rumsfeld and Bush's people constructed - was and remains a severe blot on his legacy.

Cheers,
Scott.
New But why did it make things worse?
I think, and perhaps Hitch would agree, that for the sake of "respecting the religion of Islam" we didn't go far enough.

Personally, I blame Carter. What was he thinking when he cancelled the neutron bomb?


New a decent argument? How about hanging people for attending
tribal dances? That was sort of stopped by the courts over the last 60 years or so.
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 59 years. meep
New Fail to respect != commit atrocious acts.
I'm all for letting people have big pasta parties for the FSM, but I'm *NOT* for all of us pretending to believe that a belief in the FSM is sane. Nor am I in favor of inculcating the attitude in our young that "one must respect the believers of the FSM." It's horseshit. How does society improve if we teach that respecting horseshit is a sign of an enlightened society? Let 'em do whatever they want. Just don't let them have *ANY* say in how we are governed.
New Fail to respect leads to commit atrocious acts.
lack of respect equals contempt which leads to abuse
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 59 years. meep
New You need to respect a person's right to be stupid...
where "stupid" is your assessment of their belief. It's a matter of tolerance. After all, some of your beliefs may be considered stupid by others and you want to be left alone to hold them.

You do not have to respect the stupidity itself. And certainly you do not need to accept actions based on that stupidity which affect you directly.
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
New Exactly. Well said.
New They have no such right.
     Fresh Air: some insights on th Zealots. - (Ashton) - (34)
         Thanks for the pointer. Transcript. - (Another Scott) - (23)
             He's a very wise man. Excerpts. - (Another Scott) - (22)
                 You can read that hand-waving virtually everywhere in the West. - (mmoffitt) - (21)
                     So you clamp down on Islam. Then what? - (Another Scott) - (20)
                         The structure of Islam is a major problem. - (Andrew Grygus) - (1)
                             I've understood similar things about Islam. But the Jihadist / Islamist problem is new. - (Another Scott)
                         I once shared your views. Not anymore. - (mmoffitt) - (17)
                             Meh. - (Another Scott) - (16)
                                 Gotcher mere Language solution, right chere. - (Ashton) - (15)
                                     I think we mostly agree. - (Another Scott) - (14)
                                         oy you! whats wrong with individual reappropriation? -NT - (boxley) - (1)
                                             Heh. Slippery slope and all that. (There's always someone stronger who'll take *your* stuff.) -NT - (Another Scott)
                                         Fair enough; we can agree to somewhat-agree on the pernicious Forces in play: - (Ashton)
                                         Why? - (mmoffitt) - (10)
                                             Respect is too strong a word. - (Another Scott) - (3)
                                                 Re: Bush and the Iraq war. - (mmoffitt) - (2)
                                                     Meh. - (Another Scott) - (1)
                                                         But why did it make things worse? - (mmoffitt)
                                             a decent argument? How about hanging people for attending - (boxley) - (5)
                                                 Fail to respect != commit atrocious acts. - (mmoffitt) - (4)
                                                     Fail to respect leads to commit atrocious acts. - (boxley)
                                                     You need to respect a person's right to be stupid... - (a6l6e6x) - (2)
                                                         Exactly. Well said. -NT - (Another Scott)
                                                         They have no such right. -NT - (mmoffitt)
         Just started reading, have to quit for now, but ... - (mmoffitt) - (8)
             so according to you the KKK represents mainstream christianity so we - (boxley) - (7)
                 Neither Christians nor Mormons are openly plotting the overthrow of our government. - (mmoffitt) - (5)
                     whistling at a white woman is a good reason for a hanging? - (boxley) - (1)
                         Seriously? - (mmoffitt)
                     Um. Yeah they are. - (static) - (2)
                         Yup. -NT - (Another Scott)
                         Don't misunderstand me. - (mmoffitt)
                 You meant Aryan Nations. -NT - (a6l6e6x)
         Good one! Thanks, Ashton! -NT - (a6l6e6x)

I'll let that picture pass...
87 ms