*IF* it turns out that the Boston Bombers were..

[Phillip McCleod]

..motivated by religious zeal..

..can we finally start talking about the problem of ***religious fundamentalism*** and the violence it almost invariably begets without defensiveness? Any fundies here? Good, I'm glad we got that out of the way.

So far it's looking good for a zealot of some sort. We need a united front against would-be McVeighs, Bin Ladens and yes the Stalins. All the cynical bastards who use other people's hopes to consolidate their cruel grips.. they need to go.

All the crackpot ideas need to go. There can be no agreement on *made up stuff*, and so until we can avoid religion and politics in discussions like good Freemasons, maybe we should have an INTERNATIONAL discussion about the proper role of religion in politics and, yes, polite society.

We need to lance this festering boil before it kills more innocents.

(See the *** above.. i'm talking about FUNDIES, so don't get your onesies in a bunch liberal believers. We're here talking aren't we? We aren't bombing each other. Let's keep this up and see where it goes.)

[Warpy]

1. The problem is the people who are absolutely certain they know the truth

and that the rest of humanity is perverse/inferior/doomed because we don't agree with their particular brand of ultimate truth. It's really easy to dehumanize people who don't agree with you when you're that certain of everything.

That was the problem with Stupid's administration, they were all so certain of their own geopolitical vision that they nearly bankrupted us with two wars we had no way of winning. They were so certain of their economic dogma that they contributed to the bankruptcy by giving men who didn't need them huge tax breaks.

Give me a muddler any day. Give me a doubter who asks a lot of unpopular questions, especially late at night when he's drunk and hopes nobody else remembers what he said. Give me someone who thinks something will work and admits it when it doesn't and is willing to try something else. Give me a fiddler, a tinkerer, an experimenter.

Just keep the dogmatically certain away from me and out of power, thanks. I don't care how strong their convictions are. If they're wrong, they just keep bulling ahead because they can't bring themselves to admit they've done anything wrong.

Fundies aren't the only ones out there who are utterly certain of absolutely everything. However, they equally belong powerless and sitting on the lunatic fringe.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Mother Jones on the dead brother:

Boston Bombing Suspect Posted Video on Al Qaeda Prophecy on YouTube

The deceased suspect in the bombing of the Boston marathon, which killed three and injured more than 170, appears to have posted a video extolling an extremist religious prophecy associated with Al Qaeda to his YouTube page.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26 year-old brother of the second Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, had a YouTube page where he posted religious videos, including a video of Feiz Mohammad, a fundamentalist Australian Muslim preacher who rails against the evils of Harry Potter. Among those videos is one dedicated to the prophecy of the Black Banners of Khurasan which is embraced by Islamic extremists—particularly Al Qaeda. The videos posted on what appears to be Tsarnaev's YouTube page may shed light on the motivations for the attack on the Boston Marathon. The prophecy states that an invincible army will come from the region of "Khurasan," a large portion of territory in central Asia.

"This is a major hadith (reported saying of the prophet Muhammad) that jihadis use, it is essentially an end-time prophecy," says Aaron Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy "This is definitely important in Al Qaeda's ideology." In The Black Banners, former FBI agent Ali Soufan's book about his pursuit of Al Qaeda that is named after this prophecy, Soufan describes the prophecy this way:

Khurasan is a term for a historical region spanning northeastern and eastern Iran and parts of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and northwestern Pakistan. Because of the hadith, jihadists believe that this is the region from which they will inflict a major defeat against their enemies—in the Islamic version of Armageddon.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/04/boston-bombing-suspect-posted-video-al-qaeda-prophecy-youtube

[dimbear]

14. The younger Tsarnaevs certainly had an unusual interpretation of the laws of hospitality.

Islam has very strong constraints on actions you can legitimately take against your host.

[muriel_volestrangler]

15. The younger one got American citizenship last year

There seems a dispute whether the older one did - some say his arrest for assaulting his girlfriend or wife should have stopped that, but I don't know if that's been confirmed or not. So I don't know if they'd regard the USA as 'host' anyway. But they'd have to be disregarding a lot more than just laws of hospitality for what they've done, from normal Islam.

[hrmjustin]

3. Yes I agree that religious fundamentalism is a problem that needs addressing.

Causes too much grief in this world.

[backscatter712]

4. Religion poisons everything! n/t

[Thats my opinion]

5. Fundamentalisms of all sorts--theist and non-theist

are a danger to society. But let's be careful that we don't lump all points of view--religious and otherwise--as fundamentalistic. And under the Constitution even fundamentalists have rights.

[trotsky]

6. What exactly do "fundamentalist" non-theists do that even remotely compares?

Write books? Post unflattering comments about religion on the Internet?

[rug]

8. With or without state power?

[backscatter712]

7. Yep! We militant atheists are such a threat!

When was the last time militant atheists killed little kids and blew people's limbs off to promote their lack of faith?

[Phillip McCleod]

9. i wanted this out there before all the facts were in..

.. if it had been a xtian fundie we would still have to be clear..

Where is the line between fundamentalism and normal religious belief? how do we know when someone is about to go over the edge?

[trotsky]

10. That's the key question, and one that a religious believer can't answer.

It's a point that has been driven home by a number of non-believers - here is Greta Christina's most excellent summary:

http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2009/11/armor-of-god.html

I'm realizing that everything I've ever written about religion's harm boils down to one thing.

It's this:

Religion is ultimately dependent on belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die.

It therefore has no reality check.

[Phillip McCleod]

13. i love greta. but when i she got the blog at freethoughtblogs..

..too much of a good thing perhaps. the fashionista and twittery updates humanized her a bit too much for my taste. never was the biggest fan of humans. cats are better. i just wish she'd get back to charbroiling fundamentalism on Salon/Alternet. that's when she really shines. when she's 'on', she integrates all the progressive atheism+ ethical extensions of secular humanism with basic 1st amendment advocacy in a way that's both perfectly clarifying, and absolutely chest-poking.

she sends the fundies into conniptions. of course i love her. i just wish she'd get back to polished pieces instead of twiddling her thumbs on her blog.

[Leontius]

11. Do you equate the term fundamentalist with violent religious extremism?

[Phillip McCleod]

12. equate? hell no. correlate? hell YES. \n