These were religious lunatics carrying their beliefs to very ugly ends. What's more frustrating is people attempting to ascribe other motivations to these actions.
Let's be clear. This was an act of terror, plain and simple. It's message was also equally clear. It's not about social progress. It's not about rights. It's about some group(s) of people with a narrow view of the world shaped by religious ideology imposing that world view on the rest of us through the use of terror. tl;dr: "We will attack you until you bend to our will, period. There is no middle way, only our way. Subjugate or die."
Sadly through all of this, I can't help but also think of that Steven Weinburg quote:
"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 requires religion."
Religion seems to be the one thing that can so effectively hijack a reasonable human being and convince them to do things that anybody else in their right mind would see as horrifying.
What also eats at me is the pray for Paris thing. I understand the sentiment, but all I can think is that these monsters did lots of praying beforehand. Fuck praying. Have solidarity and compassion with Paris. I think those are better sentiments. Praying got us into this mess.
If you feel the need to pray instead pray for the families whose loved ones were cut down simply because some lunatic wanted to appease their particular sky wizard.
Which begs another question? Where was the other sky wizard? What loving and caring sky wizard stands by as hundreds of people are killed?
Fucking. Religion. Poisons. Everything.
People are always quick to point out that us Atheists are angry. Yeah we're fucking angry. We see the world going to hell in a hand basket over the ramblings from a bunch of 2000 year old misogynistic, homophobic, genocidal goat herders. I should note I have nothing against goat herders, keep it up!
What I find equally horrifying is people reading these religious texts and going "Hmm, this sounds completely reasonable!" What parts? I've tried. I've read the books and I find them soundly terrible. For any good thing you can find in any of these books, it's drowned in an ocean of ignorance and intolerance.
So here we are. We have a whole shitload of people who have an insane world view and access to weapons where they can cause great harm.
Please explain to me a middle way here where a) we don't end up a subjugated people living under the theocratic rule of religious lunatics or b) we don't end up becoming monsters in our own right.
I don't see it. I only see this becoming an uglier and uglier blood bath. Which is playing right into these lunatics apocalyptic world view.
What is this all about at the end of the day? Religion; that poisons everything.
Hitch, you were right all along...
Hitch, you were right all along...
