Chilling

All them gods are just about the same. . .

They all suck.

Most of those voices have Saudi roots.

But they have oil....
and our weapons.

And all their most fanatical "disciples" apparently have a problem hearing what their God is trying to tell them, too. Perhaps while chanting that line they should have reflected upon what it meant.

...

The Koran says:


By building a military base in Saudi Arabia, devout Muslims believe that was a US attack against Islam near the Holy Kabah, a defiling of a holy land which deserves retribution that is wholly endorsed by the Koran. More moderate branches of Islam, such as most Islam practiced in Asia and EuroFuckyLand may not endorse such a literal interpretation, but a lot of good that moderation did. Moderates have done a piss poor job of discouraging and alienating radicals. They tolerated the Taliban and looked the other way in Sudan when Bin Laden was hanging out there. Where were moderate Muslims when the Taliban were carrying out their genocide on the Hazarrah people of Afghanistan? Moderate Christians in Germany went along with Hitler's slaughter, partly because the charismatic guy invoked God in many of his speeches.

The problem is faith itself. Even the most moderate religions teach that devout faith (i.e. belief without evidence) is a virtue, and their valuing of faith above all else makes the world safe for fundamentalism. All I can say is those Al-Qaeda shitbags were very faithful, and pretty much did what that passage in the Koran said to do.

It's a real shame, since the pre-Islam Arab world was a society far ahead of its time. Thanks to them we have distilled spirits, arithmetic, copper and all sorts of other great things. And then Mohammed came along, and then the Crusades came along, and then Americans fighting Godless Communism came along...

And now the WTC is gone forever and a few thousand innocent Americans are gone forever because of a handful of faithful Muslims. Everybody calls them crazy, but you only have to read that nauseating transcript to see how dedicated they are to their "God".

And we're now in Iraq pouring gasoline on a fundamentalist fire because our President does what God tells him to do. Truth in religion may only be the opinion that has survived, as Oscar Wilde said, but that opinion can beget murder.

Bullshit. To say that religions say devout faith is a virtue is one thing, to say that means they value faith above all else is quite a logical leap (and unsupported by argument, just implied in a logical fallacy of hasty induction).

There's also not a shred of evidence that in the mere absence of religious faith, humans fail to find other rationales for their hatred of whoever matches their Feindbild, so the problem is definitely not religion (and probably not even correlated to religion), even though the problem cloaks itself in religion when there is one.

We now return you to you usually rational Porkio ;).

So was the better part of the Arab world well after Islam had made its appearance. Islamic coexisted much more happily with its Christian and Jewish subjects in Al Andalus than the later Christian society replacing it tolerated even only the Jews.

Faith is the centerpiece of all religious belief. Without that faith, belief breaks down.
Religions certainly value all sorts of things, but would they value those same things if you took that faith away? Aren't those values based upon what God tells them to value? If you take that faith away, then man has to write his own values. That doesn't guarantee reasonable behaviour, but it does prevent murder in the name of God. If God's on your side, then you must be right. If you are a man without God, then it's up to your own reason to decide if you are right, not some infallible higher power.

You are correct that absence of religious faith does not de facto mean that one is therefore incapable of atrocities, as Pol-Pot, Mao and Stalin have shown. However, each of them commanded a personality cult that required a devotion not dissimilar to religious faith. In Stalin's case it was his brand of Marxism that was the religion, etc. They did not kill because of their lack of religious faith, whereas religious fundamentalists kill BECAUSE OF their religious belief.

There's no problem with faith, or religion. There's no problem with Islam.
These are not different people, you are on a slippery slope when you think they are different.
These are not Islamics acting in an extreme fashion, they are human beings acting in an Islamic setting. Human beings will react in a given way when a certain pressure is applied; some will become extremists, some will give up and die, others will collect on the perimeters.

And others will have a few drinks and keep their distance from the

As long as you don't have the misfortune to be born in an Islamic Theocracy.

The people are not different. It's their religions and environment they're raised in that make them that way. Their religion (and the Christian religion by the way) treat women as 2nd class citizens. That is stupid and wrong. Religion can be reinterpreted all day long, but the more you interpret, the further you get away from the laws and beliefs advocated in the religious texts, so then what's the point of having that religion any longer? In religion, laws are God's laws, not laws respecting all men. The God of both the Christian religion and the Muslim religion is highly discriminatory and hateful. I'm personally not surprised people kill in the name of God. The Old testament advocates all sorts of murder in the name of God. Doing it 2100 years ago is no less wrong than doing it today.

Faith is belief without evidence. The attitude of most of the most faithful people I've met is that belief without evidence is a superiour notion that is exempt from the rules of reason. That belief is held up again and again in Christianity and Islam as the ultimate goal and the path to heaven. That is dangerous and anti-humanist, and requires too much trust in a jealous and vengeful Authority. That, in my mind, is a big problem with faith and religion.

or an American one.


Sixer is right that Islamic societies have at other times been among the most progressive and tolerant.

Kirk is especially right (as usual),

and GTO has the best solution(s) so I think I'll take his advise.

You're right. They lived peacefully for awhile, but it didn't last. If you denied that religious differences didn't eventually rip those relations apart you'd be wrong.

Still a logical fallacy to think that the particular excess of faith that you label "faith" is valued beyond anything else.

Many religions, to give just a few examples, see contemplative forms of faith, mysticism and eremitic traditions as particularly valued, and those forms of faith can be extreme but don't harm a fly. I'm surely not a Carthusian monk praying for the health of the world, but I really don't mind them doing it if it floats their boat.



Again, it's sloppy thinking. Either you define religion as theism (or at least guiding philosophy; certainly, Buddhism is close to a religion though strictly speaking not a theist one) or you don't, and you don't get to redefine it to suit your various needs. If you define religion as anything fitting a schema that you find objectionable, it should come as no surprise to anyone that you find religion unpalatable.

If you replace "faith" with "ideological control" in most of your comments (including the one I just quoted), we're in violent agreement. Religions are particularly vulnerable to being hijacked by people advocating ideological control, but when there is no religion something else can serve just as well (and the other ideology itself serving as an excuse is raped just as well).

As for the Islamic world, it's really naive to think that the religion itself was the cause of its decadence in the later part of the Middle Ages. Even the way society shapes religion is under control of a lot of political and social forces that have little to do with its origin.


Correlation does not equate causation, and certainly not in the latter part of the sentence (when it suits you) and not in the first (when it doesn't).

Unless you want to define "religious belief" as something which I don't classify as religion, of course, but that's just another word game.

As I said, I do believe that if I were a Muslim I'd find Allah is merciful and compassionate, and blowing up random people just because they happen to be loosely connected to people who're perceived as having harmed someone close would not be compatible with my view of Him. With that faith, I could probably just as likely not kill people because of my religious belief (which would of course be different from the beliefs of Islamic terrorists, but it's not up to you to decide their "faith" is one and mine wouldn't be).

But of course I'm "me" with this view because I'm not living in a Palestinian refugee camp being brainwashed all year long and having no issue out of the hell-hole I'm in other than blowing myself and a few other people to bits.

The Bible says you can do all the good works you want, but if you don't have faith, then those good works are worthless. If that's not valuing faith above all else, then what is it? I'm just going off what the Bible says.
What do you think is valued above all else in religion if it is not faith?

And I'm not just picking on a particular excess of faith, I'm picking on faith itself. Religion's answer for every question you ask that they can't answer is "you just have to have faith", so clearly they believe faith trumps reason. Faith is belief without evidence. That leaves room for all sorts of corrupt individuals to manipulate their followers by attaching their own evil agendas to belief. That allows Ted Haggards to drive his followers to hate homosexuals, that allows ID to lie to children about Darwin, and that makes the ground fertile for Bin Ladens, Al-Sadrs, Zawahiris and Zarqawis to prey on vulnerable oppressed Muslims and turn their disgruntlement into a weapon. Religion preys on the gullibility of the faithful, and the results are bad for humanity. Obviously faith allows for good works to be done in the name of religion too, but that same faith also allows for bad things to be done as well. There is no "Good faith" or "Bad faith", it's simply faith, i.e. belief without evidence.

I cannot honestly think of one altruistic act that cannot be accomplished without religion. In fact, if someone only does altruistic acts because their faith tells them to do so, then that doesn't say very good things about that person. If their religion is the only thing preventing them from killing someone, then they're morally weak.

Obviously if I were a dictator, I'd still allow everyone to be religious, since I believe individual choice is more important than my personal opinions on religious faith. I'm just trying to raise consciousness as to how belief without evidence (i.e. faith) allows for all sorts of deception and manipulation to take place, and when the extremists get their slimy hands on faith, they use it to inspire murder. Faith is wide open for abuse by those sorts of people. I don't picture faithless rational skeptics falling for any such abuse, but the faithful are very easy to manipulate BECAUSE they are faithful.

Perhaps I'm being misunderstood as I am rambling quite a bit. Let me phrase it another way, which is an extension of what you say above.

We can all agree that gullibility is a negative human trait. Gullible people are prone to falling victim to astrologers, telemarketers, palm readers, infomercials, condo time-share scams, David Blaine, etc. So if we frown on gullibility and can readily acknowledge that it allows people to be taken advantage of and is a form of self-delusion, why do we smile on faith and cut it so much slack?

Faith is merely gullibility about theology, the hijackers in Crosby's transcript being an example of people being extremely gullible and heavily influenced by a few particular verses of Islamic theology. The "Ideological control" you refer to is a tool used by self-deluded religious leaders to influence their gullible followers. It makes no difference whether you call it faith or gullibility, they both amount to the same thing, which allows believers to be prone to ideological control.

I don't cut faith any slack, but it's a fallacy to think that faith can't be lucid and is always gullible.


It can also be a philosophical choice. Positivism also is, and is also "gullible" in the sense that atheism is just as unfalsifiable as theism is. The faith that nothing is there but the observable world is also just that -- a faith.

The only non-faith in this respect is agnosticism; but only humble agnosticism as a personal choice, because believing agnosticism is the only correct choice is also a belief (i.e. a meta-faith); another true way of escaping all of it is to stop thinking and live the blissful life of an animal (or plant, or inanimate object).


I didn't say that faith or religion cured stupidity, gullibility, and hardened people against brainwashing and logical fallacies appealing to emotions.

Well, I do believe Christianity (at its core) actually has a powerful message and wants to open people's eyes, but I won't dispute that organised religion has failed miserably to convey the core message (and has, in fact, at many times spread messages that I find profoundly anti-Christian).


Again, you're amalgamating different meanings of the word "faith" and generally making a mess of the logical argument (I see you've abandoned frontal attack on "religion" and have now changed tack to attack "faith").

Quit tap-dancing around the evidence, please.

I am perfectly aware that the position that there is no God is perfectly tenable (otherwise faith would simply be logical, and the lack of it stupid), and very lucid about the fact that believing in God may simply be wrong (the good thing about that is that we don't get to be punished for that belief in the afterlife, because there isn't any; we don't even get to be proved wrong :) ).

I'll end this on a lighter note:

Professor Niels Bohr, a famous Applied Mathematician-Physicist, had a horse shoe over his desk. One day a student asked if he really believed that a horse shoe brought luck. Professor Bohr replied, "I understand that it brings you luck if you believe in it or not."

Leave me to my horse shoe. Blame people hurling them at people's faces, not people hanging them over their desks. Understand that people who want to injure others don't need a horse shoe to do so, either.

Define what "faith" means in this particular context. Hint: I don't think it means you have to believe it's OK to blow innocent people up for your good works to be valued.

Actually, I think it's very important that the official doctrine of the Catholic Church does not make as stern a pronouncement on people who are not self-professed Christians, even though I don't like the supremely arrogant way of fixing that theological issue (saying that deep down, the people doing good works actually have faith -- because they grok what it's all about -- I find almost acceptable, but declaring that makes them Catholics is a bit too much).

I can excuse the stern view you take of the bible (as written by humans, which I'll write without a capital B in this context). You're living in a country with many confessions preaching predeterminism, which is in itself a defensible abstract concept (which I choose not to believe in), but makes the weak mind travel down a slippery slope that leads it to believe that somehow faith is a substitute for good works, because if you have it, it's proof you're already saved.

Who says you can separate faith from good works? Faith without good works isn't faith. Not acting out your faith is either weakness or hypocrisy; divorcing faith from deeds is always hypocrisy or stupidity, and that is the sign that you're not really believing something deep down, no matter how hard you shout.

Faith alone does not lead people to commit large scale violent acts against the population it dislikes, your missing the underlying political, social, and economic forces at work, take only religion out of the equation and you still have angry desperate people.

'Zactly.

Oh, and you''re missing something else, too .

From now on I'm only reading Kirk's posts.

Thanks, here ya go 6 : ' e

That is absolutely false. It is a probability, which is not faith. I have confidence in probability, because it has been demonstrated time and time and time again to be reliable and repeatable by different individuals, but confidence is not the same thing as faith. I have confidence that some historical events in the Bible actually happened, because there are secondary sources which corroborate those accounts and archeological evidence to back them up, but that is not faith by any definition of the word I am aware of.

You are absolutely correct that faith alone does not lead people to commit those acts. You certainly do have angry desperate people with or without religion. HOWEVER, if those angry or desperate people have religious faith, that makes them easier to subject to the "ideological control" mentioned by Sixela by corrupt religious leaders. "Are you oppressed, frustrated or unhappy with what you perceive as evil in the world? Well, God is on your side, and if you prove your loyalty to him, then he'll reward you after this shitty life." That is the snake oil sold by preachers of all kinds, and vulnerable people that are subjected to the underlying politcal, social and economic forces you mention are more likely to buy that snake oil because that's the ONLY hope they see in front of them. Religious faith gives a feeling of empowerment to disempowered people, because it builds massive coalitions. That faith is also used to further a sense of entitlement to already powerful people, the modern American Christian movement being an example of that. They already have total religious freedom, and they're using that freedom to try and limit the freedom of non-Christians.

Are we just supposed to sit back and respect those coalitions built for oppressing infidels, which is what the Arab version of Islam is? Are we just supposed to respect the snake oil salesman that interpret God's will for their followers in all sorts of anti-humanist ways and direct their followers to carry out his justice on earth? I say fuck no. And I'll include Christianity in that lot of oppressors too. Is it really all that benign to tell you that your biologically programmed lust is evil? Is it really all that benign to tell someone hell awaits those who don't do what God says to do? Is it really all that benign to coerce free will into guilty self-hatred for being human and "sinful"?



I'm a pro-Jesus Atheist. I believe what you said above about the Christian philosophy as spoken by Jesus, but that is a very different thing from the religion of Christianity. Jesus was a revolutionary philosopher, but nobody gets his message because they're too busy saying "wow" to miracles and "wow" to the BS of the resurrection and "wow" to what the disciples said and "wow" to worshipping him as the son of God instead of LISTENING to what he said. Jesus didn't make his followers do that, their blind faith in the supernatural made them vulnerable to the Christian Church machine which tells them what to do and how to think instead of encouraging them to figure it out for themselves.



Kirk is a very altruistic man who sees the world through a unique lens. His benevolent tendency to see the good over the bad in things in this situation is allowing him to cut faith too much slack, but there's still wisdom in his words.

I agree with what you say there. In my experience, however, your views on Christianity are the exception to the Christian norm. In fact, you're the only Christian I've ever spoken to that acknowledges the bible to be a purely human text and fallible. I know lots of Catholics that say the bible is metaphoric in a lot of ways, but they still are so preoccupied with this retarded concept of "sin" that they are wracked with guilt. That programming is not easily undone, but faith makes that programming very very easy to instill.

Religion's engine is faith. I'll happily attack both of them. Given the thousands of years of oppression inflicted by religion via faith, surely they can sustain a mere verbal assault from me.



What evidence where? You have given examples of faithful people behaving in a benign manner, and I will happily acknowledge that faithful people often do behave beningly. HOWEVER, you still have yet to acknowledge that faith is easily exploitable into atrocity, and there's plenty of evidence of that in NYC, DC, London, Spain, Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout history.

If you can give example of a stronger mechanism than faith that allows religious people to be convinced they KNOW God's will, then I will accept that as "evidence" to support your argument. All you have to do is read that transcript of flight 93 to find evidence of my argument.


Those men had a tremendous amount of faith in their God. They sacrificed themselves (and tragically many others) for that faith, which is further than most of us would go. They're reprehensible pieces of shit, but very faithful.


A cop-out is never lucid. Just because there are still gaps which science has not filled does not by default mean faith fits those gaps lucidly. I suspect you're defining faith as something OTHER than belief without evidence, but I'd call that a hypothesis, not faith. You may want some of your hypotheses to be true, but let's not confuse that with lucidity.

From now on I'm only drinking. I believe that it will help. This is an example of faith and reason coming together.

Being in the spirits is a good thing and drinking is a better use of time then praying or nit-picking over hoky religious doctrine.

The contrarian in me cannot find anything in that post to argue with.
Cheers!
Sadly, I have no booze on hand at the moment (at work) so you'll have to put up with more of my bickering with Sixela until then...>>>

This is what your bible says that backs up what I said:

Ephesians 2:8-9 - "For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, that no one should boast."

Rom. 3:20,28 - "because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law."

Galatians 2:16 - "nevertheless knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by faith in Christ, and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified."

Those all conclusively say faith trumps works. Faith may exhibit works, but works alone are not good enough.

Am I still "dancing around the evidence"?

I'm no theologist, but I just felt like sharing my experiences with Muslims here.

Most Muslims that I've met (albeit in an American university) were all pretty much "vanilla" theists just like most Christians here. By that I mean that they acknowledge that there's lots of stupid and unethical things touted in their holy scriptures, but they take it to be "fluff" related to the culture of the time it was written. They basically try to be a good person and to be nice to other people. It's just that instead of learning "Jesus died for your sins" in Sunday School, they learned "There is no god but Allah, and Muhammed is His prophet". How much of the "mythology" they actually believe isn't important, because they don't let that determine how they treat people.

Those who act strictly based on scripture and oppose any other viewpoints, often violently, are there in both Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalists and American Christian fundamentalists. If American were in as bad economic and political shape as the Middle East, I bet the fundamentalist Christians would be acting just as horribly as today's Islamic terrorists.

As far as drinking to make everyone in the world happy, maybe those Carthusians were on to something...

I can respect their moderate stance. Most younger Muslims I know are also that way, and steer far away from Fundamentalism. Good for them. Anybody can be that way though, with or without faith and certainly with or without religion. However, a religious fundamentalist cannot be a fundamentalist without faith. Yes, it's the fundamentalist that is dangerous, but the faith is the fuel in his gas tank, and the non-fundies still run full-service faith gas stations by saying faith is virtuous.

We are taught from a very young age to respect faith. In our country a mere motion picture is usually subjected to harsher criticism and held to higher standards than any religious faith is subjected to. Why?
A Native American gets to take Peyote because of his faith even though it's illegal in the US. Why? A Quaker can evade compulsory military service because of his faith. Why?

It's time to stop giving faith a free ride.

I'll drink to that.

I just did.

Sayonara work, hello absinthe.

Joy to the world!

Yes, but the horse is dead.

I guess it will have to wait until the second coming now...

Porkster, I hate to tell you this, but faith moves mountains.
You can take all of your facts, and every, single, probability; stack everything you got, throw in science too,
and I will beat you,
with the smallest scrap of faith,
in fact, I'll do you one better:
the world you live in today, is the one you pictured a short time ago;
You determined everything around you.
All of our constructs, every part of our reality was imagined, and faith, coupled with action, made them be.

I know you get it right, right?
You fuckers, I'm tired, I'm drunk but,
I just want you to see;
admit it, everything around you, you dreamed to be.
In fact, it's even simpler than that; there is nothing around you you did not agree to be.

Power, fuck, you got it,
what more do you want?

I know, you want to be right, right?
Fuck me.

Sweetie,
tonight you hit a spot.
Not a good one, but one no less.
Bless ya, darlin'!

I'm a mess, I guess, all my dreams are shattered because I'm looking at half a glass Nimes I'll never finish and I can't remember the dream.
It had something to do with convincing you,
without boring.
It really is a vision, this thing I want you to dwell on, it's all real,
it's all your deal.

This is a delicate subject, I hate to offend.

This ain't no bible, it's the lounge, forget about me, save yourself, really.
But if you have a specific question, ask me, I'll try to get drunk enough that the answer won't be pollutted by the thing that is me.
Wait a minute, fuck that, I'll twist you if I can, I admit that.

I was just kidding, sort of,
I've still got this urgent vision, but I'm just like, . . .
treading water.

To keep from drowning,
it's all noble and shit,
but sometimes it scares me, you know, what with the sharks and hawks and all.