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Huge Terrorist Attack At Mosque In Egypt

"CAIRO — Militants detonated a bomb inside a crowded mosque in the Sinai Peninsula on Friday and then sprayed gunfire on panicked worshipers as they fled, killing at least 235 people and wounding at least 109 others. Officials called it the deadliest terrorist attack in Egypt’s modern history.

The scale and ruthlessness of the assault, in an area racked by an Islamist insurgency, sent shock waves across the nation — not just for the number of deaths but also for the choice of target. Attacks on mosques are rare in Egypt, where the Islamic State has targeted Coptic Christian churches and pilgrims but avoided Muslim places of worship."

Snipped

Really terrible... our world is sad ::)
 
Religion! :nono:
 
Will it ever end? Why don’t humans realize that if the issues haven’t been resolved in thousands of years, maybe it’s the humans and their beliefs that are the problem?
 
monarch64 said:
... Why don’t humans realize that if the issues haven’t been resolved in thousands of years, maybe it’s the humans and their beliefs that are the problem?
Click to expand...

Why?
Because religions turn brains off.
Religious indoctrination starts when children are very young and impressionable.

Religion is an adult topic.
Like alcohol, driving, tobacco, and sex, religions should only be optional and available to adults AFTER brains are sufficient developed to think critically.

Do you teach your 2 year old about booze? about sex?
Of course not.
 
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Kenny, I agree wholeheartedly. I’m still trying to gauge how much I can say about my dislike of religion before I get myself banned, or unintentionally offend someone. And yes, it does matter to me whether I offend someone, just like I wish it mattered to religious people how deeply it offends me when they automatically consider their beliefs more “right” than mine.

Anyway. The whole religious debate and struggle throughout the history of humanity (or whenever it began) makes me think of that meme about if you’re noticing everyone else is an ******* all day, maybe it’s YOU who’s the *******.
 
Fear of offending the offenders?
Right.

So, this will go on forever.
... wouldn't want to offend anyone.

They kill, control womens' bodies, prevent marriage equality ... but we stay nice and polite.
Great. :nono:
 
This attack is so sad. So many innocent people needlessly died. My heart goes out to the victims and families.
 
Kenny...I abhor organized religion. I can’t just stuff that in people’s faves and expect them to hop on my opinion bandwagon. You know that.

It’s a lot to do with the approach.
 
monarch64 said:
Will it ever end? Why don’t humans realize that if the issues haven’t been resolved in thousands of years, maybe it’s the humans and their beliefs that are the problem?
Click to expand...

Yes, absolutely. It's not wrong to have beliefs, but it's ultimately not too useful to make those beliefs part of who you are, to incorporate them into an identity. When that happens, everyone who has a different belief than you have, is seen as trying to destroy your self.

What what people are defending when they defend beliefs, is self - they are defending the mind-created self.

The vast majority of humans alive right now, are insane, are obsessed with protecting the self.
 
kenny said:
Because religions turn brains off.
Click to expand...

If we had a separate forum for people who wanted to discuss esoteric topics like politics and religion in the abstract, I might debate this with you. It is not that I disagree that religion lies at the base of many historical divides that caused human suffering and enormous bloodshed; that is inarguable. In my opinion, religion does not, always, turn people's brains off, however. If one looks at the writings of the Torah or the the writings of some Catholic theologians (I am thinking Jesuits), we will see that people have been extremely thoughtful as they weighed what they believed was right and wrong and why. It is just that, if one is religious, one must ultimately make a leap of faith. People who do not want to do that, who believe it is unscientific to believe in God, find that step to be irrational. Taking an irrational step in one's thinking might make the thinking wrong, but it would not mean that the thinker had his brain turned off throughout the whole process. It would just means that at the end, he took took a wrong turn.

Just my opinion, of course, as always when I post.

Deb
 
AGBF said:
If we had a separate forum for people who wanted to discuss esoteric topics like politics and religion ain the abstract, I might debate this with you. It is not that I disagree that religion lies at the base of many historical divides that caused human suffering and enormous bloodshed; that is inarguable. In my opinion, religion does not, always, turn people's brains off, however. If one looks at the writings of the Torah or the the writings of some Catholic theologians (I am thinking Jesuits), we will see that people have been extremely thoughtful as they weighed what they believed was right and wrong and why. It is just that, if one is religious, one must ultimately make a leap of faith. People who do not want to do that, who believe it is unscientific to believe in God, find that step to be irrational. Taking an irrational step in one's thinking might make the thinking wrong, but it would not mean that the thinker had his brain turned off throughout the whole process. It would just means that at the end, he took took a wrong turn.

Just my opinion, of course, as always when I post.

Deb
Click to expand...

Thank you for this thoughtful post. I always appreciate your grace when I know that mine would fail.
 
AGBF said:
If we had a separate forum for people who wanted to discuss esoteric topics like politics and religion in the abstract, I might debate this with you. It is not that I disagree that religion lies at the base of many historical divides that caused human suffering and enormous bloodshed; that is inarguable. In my opinion, religion does not, always, turn people's brains off, however. If one looks at the writings of the Torah or the the writings of some Catholic theologians (I am thinking Jesuits), we will see that people have been extremely thoughtful as they weighed what they believed was right and wrong and why. It is just that, if one is religious, one must ultimately make a leap of faith. People who do not want to do that, who believe it is unscientific to believe in God, find that step to be irrational. Taking an irrational step in one's thinking might make the thinking wrong, but it would not mean that the thinker had his brain turned off throughout the whole process. It would just means that at the end, he took took a wrong turn.

Just my opinion, of course, as always when I post.

Deb
Click to expand...

I don’t know that people who are “against religion” do so for scientific reasons. I concede there may be people who think that belief in a god is irrational, but they are a small number.

Certainly for me, and I would hazard extending this view to others, the reason I am against organized religion is that I saw the hypocrisy of my (the) church and its members. So at the age of 12, I told my parents I will no longer go to church — a decision I’ve re-evaluated a few times in the decades since and found still valid (I also tangentially studied religion through the various religious texts - Bible/Old Testament, Quran, Torah/Talmud, Vedas - in college).

In the meantime, I try to be a good person — necessary for a functioning society — with the exception of going to church services, yet I’ve been told (by more than one group who a part of more than one church) that I would have less chance of going to ‘heaven’ than a mass murderer who confessed and “received god” on his deathbed. This tells me that people haven’t been all that “thoughtful” when it comes to evaluating their religion. In fact, much of what’s happening and what’s happened have suggested to me that people (regular people, not the writers of religious texts) didn’t think critically when they took up their religion and joined a church, and don’t think critically when it comes to staying in their religion and church.
 
t-c said:
I don’t know that people who are “against religion” do so for scientific reasons. I concede there may be people who think that belief in a god is irrational, but they are a small number.

Certainly for me, and I would hazard extending this view to others, the reason I am against organized religion is that I saw the hypocrisy of my (the) church and its members.
Click to expand...

I may have been less clear in what I wrote above than I had hoped to be; I have no desire to defend organized religion. Although, as an American I do believe in the strict separation of Church and State and also in religious freedom (including the freedom to be free from religion).

My argument was intended to be that many religious people throughout time have been deep thinkers despite the harm that religion has done to humans. And, as I have posted here many times (apologies to those who have read it many times), when I taught European history I taught about how, during the Protestant Reformation, the Catholics burned Lutherans at the stake, then Lutherans burned Catholics at the stake; then both of them burned Calvinists at the stake. And that wasn't even taking into account what the English were doing as Henry VIII and Mary Tudor kept changing the State religion back and forth between Catholicism and Henry's new Church and burning anyone who didn't make the switch in his own religion along with the ruler! (And, yes, Elizabeth I changed the religion back again, but she wasn't as big on burning, so I left her out of this.)

Deb/AGBF
 
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