Islamist militants ambushed a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, on Saturday killing more than 50 people and terrorizing the city. [/I]
warning: extremely disturbing content

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2013/09/massacre_at_a_nairobi_mall.html

(if u saw the pic i had posted here once, it was enough)

It's sad that some people don't see anything wrong with doing things like this but the good news is that their numbers are few in proportion to those of us that do. However, I doubt that this would be of much comfort to those that have lost people to violence such as this.

Jesus skull****ing Christ, I didn't need to see that picture.

Fun fact is that those responsible are for a significant part jihadists from "western" countries.

I can't help but hold religion as partially responsible.

True, it was twisted from what it was "originally meant to represent" yadda yadda, but without it, whoever persuaded those men to go and kill innocent people would've had a much ​harder time IMO.

‘White Widow’ Samantha Lewthwaite may be behind Kenya shopping mall massacre and could be among the dead terrorists.

Survivors described how a cloaked woman seemed to command other terrorists as they hunted down and killed non-Muslim shoppers, shooting them to death if they could not recite the Koran or answer questions about Islam.

An Irish native and a soldier’s daughter, Lewthwaite converted to Islam after her husband killed 26 people with a suicide bomb at King’s Cross subway station.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/white-widow-connected-kenya-massacre-article-1.1464982

The fighting still goes on as of now, btw.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somali_and_Kenyan_conflict

And, according to wiki, Kenyan presdient Uhuru Kenyatta "lost 'very close family members' in the attack".

Or, then again, maybe the attack was just about religion. Sad.

Edit: Maybe both religion and politics are at play? The two have never been separate in Islam.

Yeah, because religion and politics are so separate in the western world.

Relative to Islam, yes.

Plus, by reading a negative connotation into my neutral comment about mixing religion and politics, you've already proved yourself to be from the West.

jesus christ i'm viewing that article of bloodshed and massacre and human atrocity and what do I get? a popup saying "if you want to continue reading this article please answer the following! which smartphone are you using to view this?? are you a parent to one or more children??"

i ****ing hate society in general, we take a tragic event and use it as a possibility to survey people about their SMARTPHONE USAGE

Run an Ad-Scan.

I have never understood the need(?) to hold ideas or "things" responsible instead of the people wielding and most often abusing them.

I hold vBulletin partially responsible for this post.

To srspost for a moment,



Counterpoint: Sri Lanka's LTTE, perhaps history's greatest pioneer in the art of getting volunteers to kill themselves and ****loads of innocents for a cause, is an essentially non-religious organization. I think the unfortunate reality is that there are many, many levers that can be used to persuade people to kill lots and lots of civilians, and religion is just one.

True, true.
The whole system is rotten to the core.
People using other people as tools to meet their personal agendas, often at the expense of others.
People lacking perspective.
There must be something we can do?

>>I have never understood the need(?) to hold ideas or "things" responsible instead of the people wielding and most often abusing them.

No need, but religion is not based in logic and easily explains "everything," which can be used as leverage by people claiming to be the authorities on this "everything." Pretty messed up. But yes, of course people are responsible. People are responsible for religion as well; it is too often used as a tool.

Maybe I should give up this writing thing and start a religion.

We will have only one commandment: "Don't do evil."

The question that comes next is, "what is evil?" naturally. Well... Intentionally harming others is evil.

You do that, we kick you out.

Other than that, anything goes. You'd even get to go to pick the heaven of your own choosing.

Guns don't kill people. Islam kills people.

Yah.
People kill people. Islam & guns sometimes help.

Gosh, my previous post = deranged ramblings of a sleep-deprived psycho...
THIS CAFFEINATED LIFE.

Just replace his use of the word "religion" with the word "ideology" & you'll be in agreement.

Hah! welcome to most modern day pagan religions... "An it harm none, do what thou wilt."

Fixed?

"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." - Steven Weinberg (physicist).

Anybody who does bad things isn't a good person.
That quote is dumb as hell.

And so are you, apparently.

I think you need to lay off the religion hate train and check out Mentat's post.

Yeah, I never really got why religion is singled out as inherently evil when anything can act as a catalyst.

I don't even think it has to be as specific as "ideology." You can get one group of people to kill a different group of people for being different without appealing to anything that resembles what we think of as an ideology. At base, the culprit is mankind's infinite capacity for finding a them-group and an us-group and then immediately beginning to wish ill on the them-group.

......

​SIGH.

What? That quote literally states that a good person can do bad things because of religion, but somebody doing bad things isn't a good person so his point that "religion is inherently evil" he's trying to get a across is moot.
What's really evil is people, pro tip Richard the Lionheart wasn't a good person.
Castro was probably a "Good" person right? All he wanted to do was create a better world for the Cuban pe- oops he just killed a whole bunch of them. It's almost like good people can be corrupted by any of a hundred different things...

Yeah I remember when I used to post obtuse anti-religion quotes. Then I realized religion isn't to blame. Human nature is to blame.

>>What? That quote literally states that a good person can do bad things because of religion, but somebody doing bad things isn't a good person so his point that "religion is inherently evil" he's trying to get a across is moot.

Tibby, you can be a good person and do bad things if you've been misled to believe that what you're doing is good because somebody told you so.

I don't care what you believe- Causing harm to others is bad, it makes you bad, religion is one of a billion things that can make a person bad.
I just made the argument that ideology does the exact same thing, did you miss that or what?
Also: Nationalism, tribalism, whatever family feuding counts as, democracy.

you should probably have been clearer that you meant doing harm to others when you said 'something bad'. that's a whole different level.

i do like your incredibly black-and-white view of human morality, though. Life must be very simple for you.

Shades of grey, we're all bad people. Killing peeps is really dark grey though.

Yeah, but singling out "religion" and not political ideology or any number of other things that also lead well-intentioned people to commit atrocities is the dumb part of the quote.

This is a good point. It's ideas that are dangerous, because ideas are powerful. To try and single out one arbitrary class of ideas is to fail to recognize the power that ideas have in human society.

I can't wait until somebody dies after an argument about internet forums.
SA Goon Troops take to the streets, clash with 4Chan Militias, Reddit Renegades attack both sides.
2030 is going to be weird.

I'm not going to look it up, but I'm pretty sure there have been murders over internet arguments already.

all dis chat like evil things happen because of comic book supervillain puppetmasters who brainwash good folks into doing terrible things, meanwhile irl the terrorists have to recruit from the mentally retarded, trafficked people, clinically depressed, and guys so desperate that the only way they can see giving their family a decent life is to strap on a bomb for post-mortem cash. nobody actually goes into this like "allahu ackbar i'm gonna **** me some sky virgins", they go into it like "I have literally nothing else to live for and I dislike these guys, so I might as well **** them up on the way out". nobody invaded arabia a thousand years ago thinkin all glory be to the jesus, they went there because it was like "wow those seljuks really ****rolled the roman empire and we should probably do something about them before they reach europe".

I know it's super easy to blame ideas for things, like it's some sort of poison and if only we could stop people from taking it everything would be peace and love and butterflies, but the truth is that all the bad **** that happens comes down to people having **** lives and seeing no other way out.

want to fix things? start worrying about social welfare and help for the mentally ill, instead of pissing your jorts over religion and radicalizing ideas.

can i still piss my jorts anyway
feels good man

Ideas aren't necessarily good or bad, they are just powerful to the extent that humans have control over their own fates. Granted, external influences like a lack of resources or lack of sufficiently sophisticated social organization have larger effects on humanity, but in today's world, it's worthwhile to note how ideas shape people's lives for better and for worse. Good ideas can lead to better social organization which can help us weather unfavorable external conditions and allow us to assert a little more control over our own lives.

Social welfare is all fine and good, but it seems to be a band-aid fix for deeper cultural problems that we don't have much power to solve.