except - and this is my point - it's not the criminal/terrorist's "idea" that's either powerful or the problem. nobody out there is shouting "hail satan" and conspiring to trap black people in a spiral of eternal crime and poverty. this **** is all on you. blaming religion/politics/dangerous thinking is a cheap-out so you don't have to face the fact that your decisions (as benign as you think they are) have consequences.

anybody who simultaneously thinks "capitalism is a fundamentally good thing" and "third world child labor sweat shops are wrong" is bull****ting themselves.

gosh I wonder why samantha lewthwaite became a radical islamic terrorist. I mean, after her husband suicide bombed a train station (and frankly, given what we know about al qaeda et al recruiting, he was either suicidally depressed or forced into doing it) she was ostracized by her entire country, widely suspected of being a terrist and weathered assassination attempts against her and her young children. generally made to feel like she didn't belong in christendom and would never be able to make a future for herself or her children in a society that had rejected her totally. but, I mean, the fact that islamic terrorists are the one group of people who would unconditionally accept you is absolutely no excuse. you should just be a responsible british citizen and eat a bullet after giving your children the death they deserve. praise jesus.

As much as i absolutely despise most social justice crusaders... social... (hold on a minute, i have to make sure i dont vomit when i say this word) welfare is one of the only real answers to poverty and the desperation that lead most people to a life of crime or terrorism or what have you. While i disagree fiercely about what should be done, i do agree that we can and should take steps to help all people to have at least a decent existence.

dont get me wrong, of course there will still be bad people doing bad things. there will always be people who want more... more money, more power... whatever. while wanting and striving for more or better is not inherently bad on any level, greed and jealousy will always be powerful motivators for people to treat each other as expendable.

which is a mental illness.

I mean, take mitt romney for example. small blessings, but in retrospect one of the main reasons mitt romney lost the election is because he skipped campaign stops in a bunch of swing states. according to staffers he did this because he threw a huge spergfit, couldn't think of the right made-up mba bull**** numeric values to assign to the value of some of his campaign stops, so he decided to skip 'em and do nothing. romney is literally dissocial and obsessive-compulsive. he gets a pass from society at large because his disability puts him at a convenient local maximum for our irrepairably broken culture, but in a world that gave a **** about isolating the dangerously insane he would have been picked up shortly after he tortured his gay schoolmate, and spent most of his remaining life heavily sedated and strapped to a table.

mentally healthy people don't want to burn down paradise. hell, mentally healthy people won't even burn down a ****hole, which is why (again) all of the 911 hijackers were clinically depressed recruits, why iraqis have to use torture and rape to recruit female suicide bombers, why palestinians won't suicide bomb buses in spite of the utterly abhorrent starvation conditions imposed upon them unless a saudi promises to pay his widow. it takes an awful lot to convince a sane person to do terrible things, a hell of a lot more than the lot of you seem to think. nobody on earth is going to buy the hard sell with no up side.

a desperate guy with a gun is going to maybe mug people. a desperate guy with a cause and a much bigger gun and a support network is capable of causing a lot more harm. like yeah the world would still be ****ty without radicalizing ideologies but they definitely tend to amplify people's dangerous tendencies

don't get me wrong, i agree that the solution (w/r/t terror at least) is definitely to find ways to reduce the number of desperate/uncared for people who might turn to terrorism, and crazyass ideologies will always be around. I do think they are powerful, though.

I think the strife in the Middle East is mostly historical. It's hard to erase thousands of years of bad blood. I don't doubt that Islam is deeply interwoven in this struggle, and I'll mention again that Islam has historically played a much larger political and social role than does (modern, anyway) Christianity.

Blaming Islam is like blaming money for the financial debacle. Yes... money was at the scene of the crime, but we don't arrest wads of cash (well, maybe we don't arrest anyone).

I was going to respond to Jon's post about desperation rather than religion being the root cause of suicide bombing by pointing out that Islam is holding back modernization, but a moment's reflection made me wonder whether or not the religion and religious leaders are the most significant actors in promoting ultraconservative Islam.

Maybe it's just a self-perpetuating feedback loop.

the "cause" doesn't matter. the whole idea that it does comes directly from al qaeda recruitment pr and a handful of "experts" who were dredged up to fart into a mic in the early days after 9/11. terrorist organizations want you think they are all mentally healthy people with such deep convictions that they are all willing to die to support their cause, but it's completely false. al qaeda almost exclusively recruited from people with histories of depression and mental illness, especially people who had previously attempted suicide, and much of their recruitment/training was built around isolating those people from friends and loved ones.

a mentally well person has exactly one cause they'd be willing to die for, and that's "look out for #1".

it's because islam has an utterly outrageous income gap, even worse than ours, with so much wealth held by such a tiny minority who are, and can only be, held in abject contempt by their own culture and the religion they profess to follow.

it all comes from this, the difference between (modern) liberals and conservatives: conservatives believe that it is better for a person who deserves something to go without, than for someone who doesn't deserve something to get it.

because in the reality they wish to create, they affirm the consequent and say that, because they have lots of stuff, they therefore must have deserved to get it. to believe otherwise they must all be really ****ty people (they are) and terrible sinners and also god/allah hates them (he does) and they will burn in hell for infinity time (they will). so they rewrite religion so that all of their fortune was deserved, they are absolved of all personal responsibility for their many many many acts of evil, and now the poor/sick are all filthy sinners and layabouts who don't need help, if they were good people and believed in god/allah enough they too would be as fortunate.

and that's how rich people make religion stupid.

Nobody can be mentally sane and possibly believe these two things without committing suicide.

It's human nature to ascribe a singular cause to some effect, when in truth there are thousands, millions, billions of causes. Though I'd still rather see people blamed for their actions than singular causes that happen to fit tidily into whatever crackpot cause you happen to be cheerleading at the moment.

"Johnny shot up the school because video games!"

Really now? I thought you republicans were about personal responsibility. Why won't you blame Johnny for his actions? I could at least respect you for doing that. But no, you have to do everything humanly possible to avoid blaming Johnny and the way you choose to do it makes you look like a mouth-breathing Neanderthal.

Video games. Not a decaying culture that seeks to isolate people from each other. Not a society that withholds livelihoods from people so that the shareholders can get a marginally better bonus next quarter. Not an education system that punishes boys for acting like boys and spends years sucking the curiosity out of its students. No—those aren't reasons for what Johnny did. Our culture is beyond reproach because we're the best! So.. vidya games!

oh my god plato really was right
Sophists are the GOP and Polemarchus is reagan

My apologies for making it sound like I believe that ideology is the root of all evil. I was merely trying to encompass or fuse religion in to ideology so that we wouldn't play the blame religion game for 3 pages, but I failed to recognize the fact that I'd then just be contributing to the playing of the blame ideology game. If there's one thing that I've learned from reading 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' it's that the question of violence isn't nearly as simple as "ideology or religion did it" (an idea that too many new atheist types seem to have after bouncing around in the Dawkins echo chamber for too long--I know, I've done it) & that fundamentalist religion & violence often have the same root causes (Jon'C has dented this surface better than I could). We don't need to go to the Middle East or even to look at Islam to see these recipes for disaster--they're happening in our own countries. In the U.S., we can't even have a serious discussion about band-aid fixes & certainly not about the sources of our problems.

It doesn't make it any less true. But, yes. I get where you're coming from. I do think that there's a difference between a religion and a political ideology which makes religion (subjectively) worse, though, and that is that religion operates on faith. You can fool others by making them believe the white race is superior, let's say, let's kill all the Jews and the world will be a better place, etc., etc or you can fool others by saying that God says torturing women by attaching weights to their labia while sticking them atop sharp cones is OK and you'll get rewarded in the next life for it cuz you're doing God's work... I suppose I just find the latter more disgusting... Meh.

yes that's why the nuremberg trials accepted "i was just following orders" as a valid legal defense, because the silly nazi soldiers were all just fooled into thinking that bad things are good instead of the terrible **** happening due to an unspoken social consensus regardless of any moral/ethical issues

i guess that's just my way of thanking you for reading the thread

koobie plz

(i read the thread in parts...)
it's undeniable that the cause of all this is human nature, that's not even an argument.
funny thing is, they were following orders.
it's a rational instinct that we seem to share as a species, we follow orders because we need somebody to lead us.
as we all know, hitler was elected.
it was a bad choice.
a part of people were treated as subhuman. this had actually happened on a number of occasions in human history. if somebody is not technically human then we can **** with it every which way, we usually thought. those same nazi officers were probably perfectly "moral" in the eyes of their peers, wives, friends and children.
you could question the way of how things went around in your country, of course, but it usually wasn't such a healthy idea.

i believe religion fools you on a level that's even more primitive to this.
i mean, look at Germany.
you'd hardly call them primitive, and they had completely lost the (second) war which they had started.

now look at countries (or regions) where law is based on religion.
it's like watching ****ing Animal Kingdom, man.

without world war 1, communism in russia probably never would have happened.
some amazing implications there.
IF NOT FOR ****ING WAR.

You can't make that call, who knows if it would've just happened differently or what.

I can make any call I very damn please.
I'm a free man.

I'm a Free-man on the land!
~occupies home illegally while yelling about embassy rights like a lunatic~

Freedom isn't always free.

I was about to give you an attaboy about "second war which they had started" but then I figured out that you probably werent talking about the franco-prussian war.

what would you consider "primitive" if not germany's occupation of belgium from 1914-1918? please tell me more about how raping nuns fits into this delicate fabric

I think you're really misunderstanding how most pious people feel about their religion. They're not doing it because they expect a reward, they're doing it because they believe they're serving a higher purpose and making a positive change in the world. Just like well-intentioned German guys thought they were doing the right thing and making their country a better place by machinegunning Jews. I don't really see a compelling distinction between the two--your argument seems like it's based on boilerplate nu-atheist dismissals of religion and Islamophobic fearmongering.

I'm not even gonna touch the thing about the Holocaust being mitigated in its barbarism because the Germans made really good rockets. I mean. Also what JonC said.

Sometimes you've just got to rape a few nuns
To make a Mercedes Benz

please stop posting

You're really, really underestimating the human capacity to sustain cognitive dissonance.

If you're able to do it at that level I judge thee mentally insane, based on my credentials as a bad poster.

Tibby,

Well, I guess this has more or less run its course

i liked the fish wearing the chicken suit

I think it likes you too.