More religion.....

This remains a danger

For a person to think that most or all Christians are like the Hagee groups would be a mistake as I have found many that are not in any way like these particular folks are.

As one well versed in Dawkins and Shermer and Dennett, I am well aware of the tendency to paint all Religious people as equally misguided but it's both politically inexpedient and logically fallaceous to do so. (My personal view is that the Universe as a whole should be given at least as much credit for being conscious as we give the subset we refer to as Humanity.)

However, to take a late interpretation of a allegorical story and turn it into a course of political action that includes the wholesale slaughter of innocent people, pretty thoroughly flies in the face of anything that any thinking person could possibly consider sacred.

Again quoting myself....

One of the tactical mistakes that far-left types frequently make is that they write off people with strong religious convictions as being unreachable or unreasonable. What they fail to realize is that one of the reasons that Christianity is so popular is that many of its moral precepts make perfect sense whether you happen to believe in magic or not.

When Jefferson wrote "we hold these truths to be self-evident" he of course meant that certain things are so obvious that they don't need to be defended. One of these self-evident truths is that if you're of the opinion that human life is sacred then you should oppose war with at least the same degree of fervor that you spend opposing abortion.

If on the other hand, your theology is based on the premise that pleasure is sinful but that pain is desirable, then it makes perfect sense to cheerlead warfare. Such thinking should be exposed at every opportunity.



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Josh nails it..

What I've been trying to say....

And groups all over the Middle East, who have little if any actual connection to al Qaeda, are adopting the name al Qaeda in vicarious support or sympathy or, perhaps mostly and most damningly, because we've managed to make it a strong brand.


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Words matter.....

But these are stories you haven’t been reading in The Times in recent weeks as the newspaper has slipped into a routine of quoting the president and the military uncritically about Al Qaeda’s role in Iraq — and sometimes citing the group itself without attribution.

And in using the language of the administration, the newspaper has also failed at times to distinguish between Al Qaeda, the group that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an Iraqi group that didn’t even exist until after the American invasion.
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