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Current WTC happenings: The FBI is searching ISPs with FISA warrants. Architects and civil engineers are starting to speculate on why the towers collapsed. Pictures: NASA, a powerful photoessay, newspaper headlines. Current investigation news: LA Times, NY Times, CNN. They're finally starting to mention casualty figures. Finally, bjb writes: "It isn't the hollywood blockbuster of a story, but I'm a daily reader of Slashdot, and I was on the 38th floor of the WTC 1 building when the first plane hit. Oh, and I was reading Slashdot at the time. You can read about my experience here. It was originally an email that I sent out to friends and family, but I was asked by NPR's Talk of the Nation to make it a web page."
> > Unfortunately, it seems that Bin Laden and others have taken religion as a vehicle to project their political hatred and motives.
Gee, he and Pat Robertson should get together and compare notes.
BTW, as others have said before me: holding all "Arabs" accountable for something that a few did is about as logical as holding all persons of European descent accountable for what AH did. The Americans shooting up mosques make me sick.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You're correct. We can't attack Muslims for this any more than we can attack Christians for McVeigh's bombing.
But I think people really need to start seeing religion for what it is, a method of brainwashing. Sure, most people just act like passive sheep. But there are some who would twist even an overtly loving message into one justifying killing.
It's not like the only people who deceive are religious ones, or that the only mental control is that exerted through religion, but it's significant. Moreso than just for its numbers, but for the acceptance. When someone leads a thousand followers in the quest for the alien masters, everyone rightfully judges them to be crazy and watches them to make sure they're not harmful.
Yet everyday we pass buildings built by those who are essentially cultists. These buildings a meeting halls for people who believe an internally inconsistent set of beliefs that culminates in an omnipotent being creating the entire universe, for humanity, specifically their fellow believers, who then gets petulent when his tiny creations don't worship in the exact ways specified...
We don't give these people any thought because we're told that religion is good, religion is normal.
To borrow a phrase, Hell no! A bunch of sick people acting in direct contrast to what a rational view of reality would suggest is NOT something we should sit back and accept as normal.
We need to see that allowing people to brainwash their children with religion is child abuse, similar to indoctrinating them with any other wildly unrealistic lie. You might as well tell your children they can fly, as to bring them up religious.
This indoctrination hurts us all by raising people unable to cope with reality without retreating into their fantasy world. It raises people who act in a manner that is insane when viewed by someone who hasn't been similarly brainwashed.
These attacks were made by people who believed they would live forever in paradise if they killed enemies of their religion.
Seriously, if anyone said that they thought they would live forever in paradise for committing murderous attrocities, you'd call them insane and lock them up, unless they then claimed to be religious, at which point you sigh with relief and release them.
This insanity MUST stop. Religion is the direct enemy of all rational people. We must see it as the brainwashing that it is and take steps to eliminate it, as well as people who make use of it to control others, and people who profit from it. The victims we will try to rehabilitate into useful and rational members of society.
What you are right about though, is that we shouldn't be targetting any skin color, or national boundary. There are dangerous religious followers of all colors and living all around the world. The true crime wouldn't be in unfairly targetting someone for this specific crime, but in not finding and stopping a fanatic who is just waiting to be commanded by god to kill the innocent.