Saturday, November 14, 2015
Wrote for two hours in the morning before doing chores with Alice, including repairing her front tire. I wrote another two hours in the afternoon, then watched the news.
I watched this YouTube with Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz. It's helpful to listen to articulate voices explain what's going on.
The Paris attacks feel different from the other terrorist/murderous attacks in recent years. Maybe it's the indiscriminate nature of the attacks in which ordinary people enjoying life on a Friday night were targeted. These fanatics welcome chaos and self-sabotage, believing as they do in the afterlife for themselves and hell for non-Muslims. It's troubling to think there are many thousands of men out there who would love to see the entire world blown up. The problem for Muslims is the context these terrorist acts are creating for those who aren't Muslims. When a Christian terrorist bombs an abortion clinic, we have context for that and lay blame on the warped individual, not Christianity. No so with the religion of Islam. There's a growing war over the beliefs of these fanatics and the insistence that more moderate Muslims vociferously condemn their actions. Do we focus on the individual terrorists or the relgion itself? This battle has been going on for years now. Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens before he died, and other thinkers point the finger at the religion itself, while others are not so comfortable with that, fearing the blanket prejudices and judgments that seem to go hand-in-hand with sweeping generalizations about an entire religious group. I don't know much about Islam, aside from various quotes people pull out of the quran. I'll be watching where the discussion goes in the days and weeks following this horrific event. It feels as though the rules have changed with this awful, unnecessary event yesterday.
Wrote for two hours in the morning before doing chores with Alice, including repairing her front tire. I wrote another two hours in the afternoon, then watched the news.
I watched this YouTube with Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz. It's helpful to listen to articulate voices explain what's going on.
The Paris attacks feel different from the other terrorist/murderous attacks in recent years. Maybe it's the indiscriminate nature of the attacks in which ordinary people enjoying life on a Friday night were targeted. These fanatics welcome chaos and self-sabotage, believing as they do in the afterlife for themselves and hell for non-Muslims. It's troubling to think there are many thousands of men out there who would love to see the entire world blown up. The problem for Muslims is the context these terrorist acts are creating for those who aren't Muslims. When a Christian terrorist bombs an abortion clinic, we have context for that and lay blame on the warped individual, not Christianity. No so with the religion of Islam. There's a growing war over the beliefs of these fanatics and the insistence that more moderate Muslims vociferously condemn their actions. Do we focus on the individual terrorists or the relgion itself? This battle has been going on for years now. Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens before he died, and other thinkers point the finger at the religion itself, while others are not so comfortable with that, fearing the blanket prejudices and judgments that seem to go hand-in-hand with sweeping generalizations about an entire religious group. I don't know much about Islam, aside from various quotes people pull out of the quran. I'll be watching where the discussion goes in the days and weeks following this horrific event. It feels as though the rules have changed with this awful, unnecessary event yesterday.
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