Kepler
Cornell Big Red
Re: At least seven killed at Fort Hood
I hope you're joking, since I was saying exactly the opposite of the strawman you're reacting to.
Or maybe you were just locked and loaded and I gave you an excuse; I know "equivalency" is a favorite red herring around here.
The question is, do you find it outside of believability that somebody makes some value system transcendent, and it wipes out all the other values he either had or at least said he had. The answer is, yes, of course that can happen -- Paul on the road to Damascus.
I know you've got an itchy trigger finger regarding the Muslims, but I'm not getting in the way of your shots at them here -- fire away. The point is, if there are principles that are more important than all others, we should expect people to act on them, and have to be prepared accordingly. Any religion can fall into the abyss.
It's not just a matter of evolving through it, either -- the religious wars of the 16 century were aberrant in the history of Christianity, non-believers were usually just shunned until they became a political threat -- that's when they brought the hammer down -- so it really had very little to do with religiosity itself (there goes your equivalency argument), and nothing to do with the religion's content. The radical phase of Islam is historically aberrant too, not that it's any consolation for the thousands who are murdered in Islamist attacks and anti-Islamist counter-attacks every year. We have to deal with it in the here and now, and I don't think there are many practical differences between how you'd deal with it and how I would.
But don't let that get in the way of a good pre-fab rant.
I hope you're joking, since I was saying exactly the opposite of the strawman you're reacting to.
Or maybe you were just locked and loaded and I gave you an excuse; I know "equivalency" is a favorite red herring around here.
The question is, do you find it outside of believability that somebody makes some value system transcendent, and it wipes out all the other values he either had or at least said he had. The answer is, yes, of course that can happen -- Paul on the road to Damascus.
I know you've got an itchy trigger finger regarding the Muslims, but I'm not getting in the way of your shots at them here -- fire away. The point is, if there are principles that are more important than all others, we should expect people to act on them, and have to be prepared accordingly. Any religion can fall into the abyss.
It's not just a matter of evolving through it, either -- the religious wars of the 16 century were aberrant in the history of Christianity, non-believers were usually just shunned until they became a political threat -- that's when they brought the hammer down -- so it really had very little to do with religiosity itself (there goes your equivalency argument), and nothing to do with the religion's content. The radical phase of Islam is historically aberrant too, not that it's any consolation for the thousands who are murdered in Islamist attacks and anti-Islamist counter-attacks every year. We have to deal with it in the here and now, and I don't think there are many practical differences between how you'd deal with it and how I would.
But don't let that get in the way of a good pre-fab rant.
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