"YOU THERE! Why do you hate Muslims?"

[hifiguy]

67. As usual, an excellent OP.

You are a highly perceptive and logical person and I always enjoy your writing.


Sam Harris was and is right. Period. Whether people want to admit it or not, the truth is what it is.

The contortions some here subject themselves to in order to avoid staring this truth in the face are extremely dispiriting. While any religion or belief system that appeals toand is based on placating an invisible and unknowable Final Authority can, and inevitably, will be used to justify barbarism, the facts of the modern world show that over the last few decades only one is consistently (NB, I said consistently, NOT exclusively) the source of the most barbaric and inhuman outrages imaginable. Too many people would rather be "politically correct" than face the truth.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” - Voltaire

Of all human inventions, it is beyond any rational question that religion is the worst, most useless and most destructive.

The knee-jerk reactions seen here in the last couple of days which try to explain away the motives underlying this atrocity and the source of those motivations are in a way understandable but do not bear serious scrutiny; Many if not most of us on the left are always ready to stand up for a perceived underdog. In most cases that is admirable, and in many it is morally necessary; in this case it's like deliberately putting out one eye and wearing a patch over the other. It's a conditioned reflex based in some sort of senseless and free-floating cause-free guilt, which is a mental dysfunction beyond the scope of this post. A dispassionate reflection on the assembled facts show it to be a grievously wrongheaded response.

It's not without precedent. Back in the 1920s and 1930s many of the US left denied or would/could not allow themselves to believe the reports of Stalin's almost incomprehensible brutalities, atrocities and purges, and now the same mindset of denial is being repeated, once again in the face of contrary facts. There is such a thing as a belief system, be it Stalinism or islam - and I am not conflating the two, merely using them as individual and separate examples - that have in their DNA what can only be called evil or barbarism. How often must history teach this lesson? Xtianity seemed to have outgrown this - though I have no time for it or any other religion - but the same sorts of ignorant and barbaric yawps that stoked the pogroms and the Inquisition are once again being heard in this country not only from unhinged dingbats like the PP shooter but from actual presidential candidates.

But then I'm on the autism spectrum and my mind works like Data's or Spock's. Logic and nothing but.