This is Muhhamed the Teddy Bear. He is a terrorist. He murders people because they named him after a false prophet of a fictional god. Bad Muhammed!
This is Muhhamed the Teddy Bear. He is a terrorist. He murders people because they named him after a false prophet of a fictional god. Bad Muhammed!
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jshanewhit
That is awful. I’m glad to hear that you are out of danger and healing. I hope they catch the bastards and give them a taste.
Charlie,
Just as a suggestion, try not reading it. The atheist’s responses are often worthwhile but, in its case “…” is an empty set.
Why are we not talking about the more serious side of this subject, like the fact that Sudan’s constitution calls for a “freedom of religion”, like that of the United States, and that the government is overstepping its boundaries and instituting the Shari’a as federal law?
Very sorry to hear about what happened to you jshanewhit. I hope you get well soon.
In another blog, a poster informed me about this lecture from the AAI 2007 conference.
http://richarddawkins.net/article,1710,We-Few-We-Happy-Few-We-Band-of-Brothers,Andy-Thomson-Richard-Dawkins-Foundation
The title is “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” if the link doesn’t work. In the lecture, he refers to a book “The Looming Tower” by Laurence Wright. You can find it at Amazon with commentaries.
Scott Atran who has written on religion and religious terrorism is interviewed here.
http://discovermagazine.com/2003/oct/featdialogue/
“In your book In Gods We Trust, you call religion an evolutionary riddle. Why?
A: Think about it. All religions require costly sacrifices that have no material rewards. Look at the Egyptian pyramids. Millions of man-hours. For what? To house dead bones? Or the Cambodian pyramids. Or the Mayan pyramids. Or cathedrals. Or just going to church every Sunday and gesticulating. Or saying a Latin or Hebrew prayer, mumbling what are to many people incoherent words. Stopping whatever you’re doing to bow and scra-pe. Then think about the cognitive aspects of it. For example, to take alive for dead and weak for strong. I mean, what creature could possibly survive if it did these kinds of things systematically?
Look at the things that religion is said to do. It is said to relieve people’s anxieties, but it’s also said to increase their anxieties so that elites can use them for political purposes. It’s supposed to be liberating. It’s supposed to encourage creativity. It’s supposed to stop creativity. It’s supposed to explain events that can’t be explained. It’s supposed to prevent people from explaining them. You can find functional explanations, and their contraries, and they’re all true.
Why then has religion survived in so many cultures?
A: Because humans are faced with problems they can’t solve. Think about death. Because we have these cognitive abilities to travel in time and to track memory, we are automatically aware of death everywhere. That is a cognitive problem. Death is something that our organism tells us to avoid. So now we seek some kind of a long-term solution. And there is none. Lucretius and Epicurus thought they could solve this through reason. They said, “Look, what does it matter? We weren’t alive for infinite generations before we were born. It doesn’t bother us. Why should we be worried about the infinite generations that will be after us when we’re gone?” Well, nobody bought that. The reason that line of reasoning didn’t work is because once you’re alive, you’ve got something that you’re going to lose.”
“Freedom of religion” simply doesn’t work for religions which explicitly oppose freedom of religion. When someone’s religion says, “Slay the infidel!” they simply cannot be allowed to practice it.
I don’t think anyone should get special rights to practice their religion. That’s like giving people special rights to wear funny hats.
We can protect individuals’ civil rights and prevent them from being persecuted for their religion (or for their funny hat), but nobody deserves special privileges for believing in nonsense.
bernarda and jshane,
Without research we can’t answer the question completely, but I think we should not discount socialization.
Little girls play with dolls, little boys play with fake handguns. Not because they choose them (at least initially), but because that’s what their parents buy them.
Obviously correlation does not equal causation, but I’ll still be very surprised if there is a “violence” gene that males tend to get more often than females.
I think theres a couple of things that make it up. One is young males telling other young males they are not male (possess balls)unless they do what they are told. Theres a saying “If you want to see your future,look at your friends. Another one is american “Bad Boy Culture” the media inflicts on people. It can range from NSYNC to prohibition era gangsterism and back.
Another favorite is building self esteem by improving yourself ,but some do this by tearing others down.
test test test test