BREAKING News – Major Terrorist Atrocity in Paris, Just Weeks until COP21

dbstealey says
“…But I see the religion of Islam as a central problem. Islam specifically gives permission to commit these atrocities, and in fact, it openly encourages the wanton slaughter innocent people. That is intolerable. And have you heard any Islamist or group denounce what happened? I sure haven’t….”
I see religion of any kind as a central problem, the abandonment of reason in favour of dogma. One of my constant nightmares is that all the fundamentalist sects of the world realize that their core taboos are quite similar, and that their real enemies are people who think rationally and act on the conclusions that follow.
Western Europe has struggled since the Renaissance with the contradictory forces of “divine” authority, and ended up morally impotent but a world champion of hypocrisy. We have “freedom of religion”, so long as it’s some sort of accepted Christian or Judaic orthodoxy, with a cursory nod to Islam, Hinduism and Bhuddism. How many US Senators are declared agnostics or atheists? Would an agnostic have any chance of becoming President of the USA or Prime Minister of Canada?
As for Islamist groups denouncing what happened – yes, I’ve watched the TV news broadcasts from Paris, and both Imans and lay muslims have declared that these massacres have nothing to do with Islam. But really, what do you expect them to say?
Here in Canada, you won’t see a single national tv newscaster without a poppy front and centre for a week before Remembrance Day, nor a single Member of Parliament unpoppied before the cameras. Decades ago, there was a small movement to wear a white poppy as a protest against nuclear armaments, and even that fizzled out rather quickly.
I don’t think any Canadian newscaster or Member of Parliament expects to be murdered for not wearing a poppy. So I think your expectations of muslims are unfair and unrealistic.
Our strength is in the pluralism and individualism of our society, to the extent that it allows us to debate issues publicly and pursue divergent avenues of problem solving. And we’re pissing that away to build a police state to compete on their own terms with states and societies that are way ahead of us on that road.
What we need to do is to strengthen our secularism, our personal liberties, and to attract more like minded people from all parts of the world to help us sway the scales in that direction. Instead we’re indiscriminately importing hundreds of thousands of people habituated to authoritarian patriarchal government and lockstep obedience to primitive cultural taboos, many of them completely irreconcilable with our own laws and (equally primitive) taboos.
As to what really happened in Paris last week – has everyone forgotten Wikileaks already? Can any thinking person doubt that the Western intelligence community is capable of posing as ISIS leaders and recruiting,supplying, training, facilitating, and directing an attack such as we’ve just seen? Presumably Wikileaks will have taught the intelligence community to take even more care to hide their tracks.