I despair at those who believe otherwise.
I don't know who came up with "an eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth would lead to a world of the blind and toothless" but I believe it.
I'm sure it's something I'd struggle with when the hard choice arises, but I honestly believe I'd try to keep to it.
It could be, I suppose, that someone could simply hate western culture due to the acts of one nation, but that doesn't make it right. If you hate all Muslims because of the acts of few, you're most likely in the wrong. The same morality should apply to the people on the other side.
We'll never be able to stop those that abuse religions and causes for political gain, but we can starve their number of "soldiers" by not giving impressionable people more reasons to hate a country.
I believe the solution is to look inward (as I've already, "do no harm"), rather than to condemn outwards.
And yes, I'm willing to concede the naiveté of my viewpoint.
Those attacks done "in the name of islam" create islamophobic reactions from people. Media spreads this islamophobia further, to people who just trust whatever they see on TV. The climate grows to marginalize muslims further. The ones closest to the edge, who were surrounded by violence in the past (war climates) and are now surrounded by hatred from the country they live in, end up knowing only violence and seeking to be understood by their own violence.
The cycle of terrorism. We enable it. What can you do once you understand it? Tell other people? You'll be silenced. You'd get shit on on facebook. Attacked on twitter. Downvoted on reddit. HN is still a sane place but what % of the population does that really represent? Can it even make a change? And it's not like you wouldn't ever get downvoted here. There's a lot of people who believe in the direct "more immigrants = more terrorists" idiocy.
Today is such a fucking depressing day. Having to worry about my sister, my brother, my guild mates and on top of that seeing the attackers get exactly what they want: more fear. More knee-jerk reactions.
Let it fucking end...
0: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/salafismus-als-jugendkult...
I think that the level of HN is rare online but offline things are much better (at least, in my experience).
> And it's not like you wouldn't ever get downvoted here. There's a lot of people who believe in the direct "more immigrants = more terrorists" idiocy.
So talk to them and stand your ground. Sure there will always be jerks but don't let that stop you from trying and who cares about the occasional downvote.
> Let it fucking end...
Yes, please. But I fear that won't happen in my lifetime, maybe in yours depending on your age. This took decades to fuck up it will take decades to restore and a completely different approach.
If god is great and non-believers are bad and "god" says it's righteous and just to punish the non-believers, then naturally doing "god's work" is doing no harm?
Actually the truth is even messier... most of these young men committing atrocities are merely indoctrinated pawns who know very little of their own religion and instead defer to their "emir."
This ideological poison is being propagated by those individuals, with power/financial interests back in the middle east. I think the individual committing the act believes they are doing good, and the individual who convinced them to do it is too morally corrupted & detached to care about ideals such as "civilian life."
There are far more atrocities that occur in this world than there are psychopaths in the general population.
If we hope to make any progress toward peace, I think we need to truly understand the reasons why and how weak, impressionable minds with poor cultural integration can be manipulated to commit such atrocities.
It's easy to label these individuals as determined, unreachable psychopaths (particularly out of fear) but the sad truth is, most extremism is borne not of evil but of weakness. A select few manipulate this weakness to convince otherwise insignificant people, often with desires of grandeur to commit unthinkable acts. This power of perspective becomes increasingly obvious as you realize most problems with immigrants in European countries occur in the 2nd and 3rd generations -- those who have seen the true horrors of war first hand are not so easily fooled.
The hard truth is: if society doesn't provide susceptible minds with alternatives first, a small but steady % will be at the mercy of whomever comes along promising "answers."
So these indoctrinated individuals don't really see it as too horrendous of a crime to kill someone.
Maybe you choose your surroundings better, but one of the reasons I like hanging out here is because I can experience some semblance of sanity that, from my point of view, GenPop is lacking. I know few people who try to understand what's going on, but rest just repeat whatever they read on the news.
> Yes, please. But I fear that won't happen in my lifetime, maybe in yours depending on your age. This took decades to fuck up it will take decades to restore and a completely different approach.
Yes, please. But let it please not end in the collapse of what we've achieved as humanity. That's what I'm afraid the most - that at some point those tensions will explode and bring down civilization with them. The world is a fucked up place, but we're at the point in history in which we must fix it, not reboot it.
You'd be really surprised. Your point is a valid one, but one I seldom see brought up - most people are just worried that for every 100 immigrants there's a couple of actual terrorists in the lot... Mostly because nobody's told them how stupid that notion is.
Oh some people try. Hell, I told that to many people myself. People don't care about things like actually being reasonable. Instead, they're afraid and are looking to rationalize it.
My first thought about Paris is not to pray for it. It is to bring harm to those who brought the attack on the Parisians.
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." George Orwell
Actually the truth is even messier... most of these young men committing
atrocities are merely indoctrinated pawns who know very little of
their own religion and instead defer to their "emir."
How can you claim that these young men know very little about their own religion? The Koran and Hadiths are full of hateful texts. Muhammed himself beheaded a tribe of jews according to the Hadiths. Most (all?) Muslims think Muhammed is the most perfect human being ever created - akin how Christians think about Jesus. That said I'm fortunate that the muslims I meet daily don't appear to know
"their own religion" - or at least don't follow the example from which it
started - and instead are peaceable and as virtuous as one would expect
of anyone in UK society in general. They seem much like those who
call themselves Christians: following a generally moral code
without a deep understanding of what being a true adherent entails.
I fear that when shit hits the fan and it's time to choose sides (e.g. in a civil war), most "peaceful" (or perhaps just passive) Muslims will choose the Muslim side.I expect civil war in a relative short term in Europe (< 10 years), since politicians seem passive (afraid to offend muslims by making some drastic choices) or too politically correct and the populace is still too divided. I just hope I'm able to emigrate from Europe before all this happens.
Yes, Islam is a particularly violent religion -- if you have read the Koran, many of its concepts seem very incompatible with the idea of a free secular society. Then again, the bible has the crusades.
I'm personally an atheist and I honestly don't think the problem is the the text itself but the cultural, ideological conflicts of an impoverished region that allows whoever "shouts the loudest" to assume power. The kids committing these atrocities probably couldn't even tell you what you just told me about Mohammad -- my point is that they are brainwashed and utterly uneducated so whomever comes along and says "this is god's word" is who they will listen to.
Anger + Desperation - Education = Extremism
You won't solve this problem by banning the Koran, but if you can get Muslims everywhere to renounce this "us-or-them" culture in favor of a more moderate interpretation (you know, how all religions seem to evolve if they want to survive) then perhaps we can neuter these kinds of groups before there's a power-vacuum?