>Would it be a dishonest and downright repugnant smearing of all Christians to suggest that Christian theology may have contributed to the outcome?
That's a false equivalency fallacy. In the west Muslims as a group are majorly discriminated against - at least as much as gay people are actually. The US right now has a major party candidate running on a platform of forced registration for Muslims, turning away refugees and even forced expulsion from the country.
When you blame an entire marginalised group for the actions of a few - this is not just wrong, it's also incredibly self-defeating. You know who in the world, when speaking about Islam, sounds MOST like Donald Trump ? ISIS - that's who. Trump could be writing his speeches based on ISIS recruitment videos ! ISIS's wants a war between Islam and the west. To do this they need to harp on the worst aspects of the theology, and they need to convince Muslims that the west will never accept and tolerate their beliefs. Without both these things - their war cannot happen, the vast majority of Muslims want nothing to do with their idea of Islam and go around with bumper stickers on their cars that read: I Shall Love All Mankind
So ISIS needs to achieve two things -they need to stoke hatred of the west among Muslims, and hatred of Muslims in the west. The latter they do with terrorist attacks, the former with rhetoric. But without the latter, the rhetoric doesn't work - at least not on anybody who wasn't basically insane to begin with. The only way to get the majority of people to embrace any crazy ideology is to make them afraid. So breeding fear is exactly what ISIS wants. They want the west to be afraid of Muslims - because if people are afraid of Muslims they mistreat them - and when they mistreat them this makes the Muslims afraid of THEM - and thus amenable to ISIS's claims that peaceful coexistence is not possible.
So the responsible politicians are refusing to play ISIS's game. They are refusing to blame the many for the crimes of the few. They are refusing to stoke the fires of fear that ISIS lights - because that is what ISIS WANTS. Trump claims he'll be tough on ISIS ? He's the best thing that ever happened to them. He is EXACTLY what ISIS was hoping would happen when they launched their very first attacks. The question is - are you smart enough to see through ISIS's ruse and avoid their trap ? Or are you going to walk right into that trap and continue to be their greatest ally. Yes - EVERYBODY who attacks Islam over events like this are the greatest allies ISIS could ever have. Blaming Muslims for the crazies is doing ISIS's most important work for them. Are you smart enough to STOP being an ISIS recruitment agent ?
You can't win a war against somebody like ISIS because a world war is exactly what they want, and the more you fight them the stronger they will get. You need to AVOID a war against them. Obama has done exactly the right thing - he got Muslim countries to fight them. He kept the war intra-religious and has led the world on a responsible and sane path of not giving into ISIS's desires for an inter-religious war. That's exactly the ONLY possible sane response to them.
Saying we can't violate the laws of physics is not "authority". We are not making rules enforced by humans who can abuse them to their own ends, we are stating the known limits of what is physically possible and even as we do so we are aware that new evidence may change what we believe those limits to be - we just trust them until such evidence exists.
>you don't have to support ISIS to be at least moderately in favor of a bunch of their more extreme beliefs about how societies should be ruled. This seems to be the core of your argument. Since the protestants invented seperation of church and state (very recently) we've gotten used to kicking out theocrats in the west - and apparently we've forgotten how many we have. The only reason things are any different is because even when theocrats get elected we limit what they can do to an extent. Hell look up the dominionism movement in the United States - there is a huge branch of evangelicals who truly believe the US should be a Christian theocracy. And they have gotten an alarmingly large number of their candidates elected - Ted Cruz for one. These people would love to have laws oppressing gay people and giving them the death penalty - they just keep running into a constitution that won't let them and then hating the supreme court for following that constitution. But look at Uganda. Uganda never liked gay people - now they are killing them. What changed ? Lots of US evangelicals who visisted the country and convinced the leadership that gays are responsible for all their problems and killing them is god's will. Where the constitutions didn't actively prevent them - US evangelicals got laws made to kill gay people too. Hell they are still TRYING to get those laws in the US - there's a ballot measure in California right now seeking to legalize the murder of gay people, it won't pass, but clearly there are plenty of Americans who want it to.
> "This has nothing to do with Islam" But it doesn't - at least, not anymore than the stupidity of any religion. Budhism has a global reputation for being peaceful, yet as we speak Bhudists are slaughtering Muslims in one of the largest genocides of our time. In 2003 Hindu's killed over 3000 Muslims in southern India (the world's largest liberal democracy) - and the man who led them is now the Indian Prime Minister ! The guy was barred from entering the USA over that until last year ! You correctly point out that the changes in the west are extremely recent historically, and I believe the difference is politics and money, not the religions really. More-over there is an interesting pattern with ISIS - which mirrors one we see with other religions. Ever notice that the most fundamentalist, the most energetic and the most utterly annoying Christians are always the recent converts ? The guy who just adopted christianity tends to be it's fiercest defender. They are worse than ex-smokers. The Muslims in ISIS are overwhelmingly the same. They majority of attackers in various ISIS operations around the world had only become muslims in the weeks or months before the attack. Hell one of the Paris attackers was still busy reading "Islam for dummies" for crying out loud (I shit you not)! These are not people who have had significant schooling in the religion. These are not people who have gotten far enough to be told what the spirit of the religion is and how that overrides the literal meaning of some verses in the book (hell the Christian bible doesn't get to that bit until Jesus). They are people who hugely ignorant of the religion they joined a few weeks ago and their actions tell you more about perceptions of the religion than of the religion itself. ISIS itself isn't run by religious people. They use some literal quotes from the Quran to justify their actions but they don't even believe those quotes themselves. ISIS command is almost entirely made up of the former military command of Saddam's army - Saddam was a secular leader (and one the US put into power in the first place) with a secular military. What ISIS really is - is the rebirth of Saddam's army.
> Belief systems that make people miserable tend to get dropped or heavily modified unless they're enforced at gunpoint That pattern tends to fail when there is a convenient scapegoat the religion can use for the misery, especially when that scapegoat is, in fact, causing lots of misery. In case you were wondeirng the scapegoat that the worst parts of ISLAM has is the United States.
In all the others the armies first got turned on the civilians and only switched sides when the civilians refused to back down and started looking like they were winning - or got outside help as in Libia. In Iran and Syria the government had more powerful weapons than those of Tunisia and Egypt - and used them, and there the armies did not side with the civilians.
So the question is - why do you assume the army in the US would be any different ? It seems the most likely scenario is that if the citizens seem to be the losing side, the army will stick with the government rather than commit treason - and since the US military is equipped to inflict absolutely mindblowing losses in a single strike, there just isn't time for the civilians to wear them down. The government literally needs just one loyal pilot to drop a nuke on one city and they win. If actual tyrants came to rule the USA - they almost certainly would do that on the first day, on the first city where an uprising began. Do you really think the uprising would continue if Dallas is a glass parking lot by the second day ?
Well, maybe if the US hadn't gotten rid of every democratically elected government in the region and replaced them all with 'friendly' theocratic dictators the region wouldn't have had so many of them.
Of course you conveniently ignore that most of the countries at war with ISIS now are not ruled by theocrats - they are the same countries that, over the past ten years, got rid of the US-installed dictators and replaced with with new democratically elected governments - many of which are secular and now have secular constitutions.
And it's not like the Muslim population have a larger percentage of hateful bigots among them - if they did, Donald Trump would never have been the republican nominee. Seriously - the USA in 2016 has nominated as a major party candidate a man who when he was asked how one of his proposed policies was different from an identical NAZI policy replied "You tell me".
>Freedom of movement does not mean you can compel a private company to do things it does not want. The no-fly list isn't forcing companies to do something they don't want, it's prohibiting private companies from doing something they DO want.
>If I don't have enough money to pay for a ticket, is the airline denying me my freedom of movement? We're not talking about the airline, we're talking about government. By your reasoning if you can't afford a gun and k-mart won't give you one for free - k-mart intruding on your 2nd amendment right ? We're talking about the terror watch list, which is administered by the government - and if you can't fly because you're on it that's the government preventing you - not the airline.
>If I don't have a government issued ID, is the airline & government denying me my freedom of movement? Some would (and do) argue the government is, some argue that it ought to be perfectly possible to fly anonymously. But you have no right to demand that of the airline, you do have a right to petition the government not to FORCE the airline to demand ID however.
>If I am carrying a gun or a knife when trying to board the plane, is the TSA denying me my freedom of movement? Absolutely - though I would say that may be a justifiable limitation on your freedom. I never said that freedoms cannot be justifiably limited in certain cases - there is no freedom of which that is not true. Freedom of speech doesn't allow you to commit fraud, slander, libel or false advertising - all of those are acts of speech, but you still can be legally prevented from exercising them and that's because everybody else is MORE free if you are NOT allowed to do those things. In the same way, if it can be shown that weapons bans on airplanes make the passengers safer then - considering the high impact of an airplane attack it's justifiable to do have them. That said, all the evidence suggests that the TSA has done absolutely nothing to make flying safer and the only change since 9/11 that actually made a difference was reinforcing cockpit doors (which ought to have been the case in the first place). The attempted hijackings since then all happened in places without a TSA using pre-TSA security measures and every single one of them got foiled. There is one other thing that changed. Before 9/11 we advised people to go along with whatever a hijacker demanded. Now, considering we have had hijackers who wanted to crash the planes on purpose, that is no longer sound advice and the advice is to fight against the hijackers - which is why both the shoebomber and the underwearbomber got taken out by the passengers. Either way - the TSA is probably not justifiable on the grounds that the restrictions they place on your freedom of movement does not, in fact, make anybody else any safer or more free.
Qeueu the right for blaming 1.6billion innocent people and religion despite the shooter being by all accounts not religious but never considering the possibility that giving bigots easy access to deadly weapons might have contributed.
Only in a few small areas. Most humans didn't - and many NEVER had stone tools.
Much like the toilets example elsewhere - it's just not universal. For the vast majority of humans that ever lived a "toilet" was a hole in the ground with a wooden seat above it. Romans had flush toilets - which consisted of a a flowing stream in a canal with seats built over it - usually made of stone. Even today in most of Asia porcelain toilets don't exist - what you have is basically a pit in the floor that you squat over and a tap with water to wash your ass and your hands afterwards.
You're right 1% is probably a massive overestimation. How else do you explain millions of muslims dead fighting ISIS and every Muslim country in the region being at war with them ?
That argument holds no water because of two reasons: 1) no armed insurrection has ever been prevented by a gun ban. If it came to that. Guns will be available . 2) guns are not very useful for this purpose anymore anyway. Not when the government in question has tanks, rpgs and nukes. If it came to that the US government would only need to nuke one city to end the resistence.
Would they ? History says yes. Recent history saw dozens of nations rising up against tyrants. Not one of those tyrants surrendered to the will of the people. Each and every one declared full blown war on their own people. Some won. Some lost. Some are still fighting. Syria is among the latter. And everyone of them used the most powerful weapons they had to try and quell the insurrections. If this comes to pass there is no reason to assume the US would do any less. The government will fight back. And they will win.
So how many more innocent people need to die needlessly so we can have an illusory comfort against a purely hypothetical threat ? Real horror trumps imagined horrors. Especially when the cure for this imaginary horror is unlikely to even work.
Personally I am not in favour of gutting the second. I would prefer its complete repeal. Before you could own a gun the burden kf proof should be on you that you are trustworthy, responsible and have a compelling reason.
But nobody enforces the law of gravity. There are no priests of science that burned Einstein at the stake for altering Newton's version. The Spinozan wonder relies on the acceptance that our understanfing of the universe is incomplete and will be altered by new knowledge. Thats the opposite of an auhoritative view. Also many scientists these days would suggest it was a mistake to ever call our theories about the observed behaviour of the universe 'laws'.
Well accidental shootings are a thing - and a hugely common thing at that (all those toddler shootings that happen so often are accidental shootings) - should we not mandate that you have insurance to pay for medical care for victims of the accidents caused by your weird-ass bizarre fetish ?
The only reason there is any difference today is because Christians nations have (very recently) stopped allowing the church to be the government. When it was, the same shit happened. What you call "Muslim countries" are merely the countries where religion rules the government - they aren't even a majority of the Muslim countries, the other Muslim countries with secular governments are as aghast as those types of events as I am.
The only thing you've shown is proof that non-secular governments have tendency to do brutal shit. When your power is derived from religious laws you are basically bound to follow the worst of it to the letter because it's the only way to secure your power. The reality is that Christians have just lost all faith in their own faith. No Christians actually follow more than a tiny fraction of the bible anymore, they don't have the courage of conviction to actually do what their god commanded them to do. This does not make their beliefs superior to Muslim beliefs - you will find the same insanities in both books, it just makes most Christians today extremely unworthy of the name and indeed, all of them would have BEEN burned at the stake by their ancestors. I've yet to meet a Christian who will refuse to wear polycotton undies because the bible prohibits mixing fibres, refuse to eat shrimp as it's expressly forbidden, force daughters to marry their rapists and kill those daughters if they turn out not to have a hymen on their wedding night (all of which is mandated in the bible).
So you got two groups of insane people believing insane shit. One group may (and you clearly believe do) have more members actually willing to do the insane shit in their belief system than the other - but that really doesn't matter much, crazy is crazy.
Well you're trying to present the less than 1% of Muslims who supported ISIS as representing 1.6 Billion other Muslims. Which would be news to the millions of Muslims ISIS have killed (they've killed far more Muslims than any other religion), the hundreds of thousands of Muslim soldiers who are dying as I type this fighting against ISIS from the 8 different Muslim countries who are at war with ISIS and actually boots-on-the-ground fighting them and the thousands of Muslims who were walking in the streets this morning mourning the dead with rainbow colored signs condemning the attacker.
The real reality is just that Christians are more afraid of law enforcement than Muslims these days, I've yet to see a shred of evidence that they are less eager to commit atrocities, just more scared to try.
>How often do you hear THAT from Islamic terrorists' families?
Well right now - the family of this Islamic shooter has been cooperating and even granting media interviews and has not, at any point, made any excuses for his behavior. That's more than Brock Turner's family can say.
>Lastly, why don't you do a quick "body count" of dead from attacks on abortion clinics and compare that to today -- or San Bernardino -- or Paris, for example. So your argument is just that the crazy Muslims are BETTER AT IT than the crazy Christians ? Yeah... that's not very comforting, it means it's only a matter of time before the crazy Christians start taking notes and getting better as well.
Yes there is. It's a clear-cut case of the right to freedom of movement which is protected by both the US constitution and the international declaration of human rights (of which the US is a signatory).
>Getting rid of guns is not going to solve the mass killing problem
Right... there actually was a wannabe terrorist who tried your "drive a car into people" approach to mass killing. He managed to injure one person, and got his ass arrested - turns out it is really hard to run people over on purpose once they know you are trying to. You can dodge a car, you can't dodge bullets. Nobody died. On the same day as Sandy Hook a lunatic in China tried to attack a school - he couldn't get a gun though so he attacked the place with a knife. He wounded three people before he was tackled and subdued. Nobody died.
And it's absolutely a fact that America has the world's most liberal gunlaws and almost all of the world's mass killings and nearly all mass-killings are done with legal guns (even in countries where those are hard to get). Mass-killers are usually not career criminals - they don't know how to get illegal guns, they don't have contacts or trust. They buy legal and when they can't they don't commit the killings - or they try to with other means and invariably achieve far less. The US alone has had more than twice as many mass-killings in the last 30 years as the next 25 countries COMBINED, and they are getting more common and the death-rates are getting higher (the opposite of the trend in the rest of the world).
The reality is that the boogeyman of the mass killer without a gun is a myth, just like the good-guy-with-a-gun-who-stops-the-bad-guy is a myth. How often has that EVER happened ? How many people have ever actually shot back at a mass-killer ? Almost none, almost never. Including in places where guns are allowed. The few times somebody tried, more often than not, they ended up killing MORE civilians because while they had to try and aim at moving target through a panicked crowd the bad guy merely had to shoot into the crowd. Indiscriminate shooting is a LOT easier than trying to hit a specific target in incredibly difficult situations. So mostly - when you have some wannabe-rambo with a gun in the place, he tries to shoot the bad guy and just ends up missing and hitting more innocent people.
>They weren't oppressive because of their atheism. They were oppressive because of their political ideology being at odds with reality and human social structure.
Neither. They were oppressive because that's what happens when you have a dictatorial government with absolute power. It doesn't much matter what religion or or political ideology the government claims to support, or gained power at the head off, once in power the tenets of the ideology are soon happily sacrificed at the altar of expanding and securing power. Where capitalist dictators ruled - they were no less oppressive. Pinochet was one of the most brutal leaders of the 20th century - and a hardcore capitalist who worshiped Milton Friedman. Franco of Spain came to power as a fascist, when fascism lost it's appeal after world war 2 he turned into a socialist and when the US started getting serious about the cold war in the 1970s he turned into a hardcore capitalist. He was no less brutal under any of the three ideologies he promoted at various times.
The only ideology you can measure by what dictators did in it's name is monarchism. Stateless or democratic forms of socialism and communism have, where they were tried, often worked quite well. Brutality is the nature of dictators, and ideology (any ideology that is conveniently available) is never more than an excuse.
>To some, the word God means essentially "nature", or "natural laws", which makes the atheist's position untenable.
Nope, that kind of Spinozan view is, in fact, a form of atheism (and one I find quite appealing myself). It's not a worship - merely a wonderment at something bigger than yourself, many notable atheists regularly express Spinozan views. De Grasse Tyson for example frequently speaks of the sense of wonder he feels when studying the cosmos - that's Spinozan thought. It differs from religion in being devoid of worship - it does not personify those forces. Recognizing a real universe greater than ourselves and our small part in that universe with a sense of wonder and astonishment is beautiful and a driving motivation for science - but it is fundamentally NOT religion and does not require any believe in things that aren't there. You could call it spirituality without the need for spirits.
And a key aspect is this: because there is no personification of these forces, they cannot be given authority - and thus nobody can claim to act in the name of that authority. People who do the latter always and without exception abuse the power that they thus acquire.
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>Would it be a dishonest and downright repugnant smearing of all Christians to suggest that Christian theology may have contributed to the outcome?
That's a false equivalency fallacy. In the west Muslims as a group are majorly discriminated against - at least as much as gay people are actually. The US right now has a major party candidate running on a platform of forced registration for Muslims, turning away refugees and even forced expulsion from the country.
When you blame an entire marginalised group for the actions of a few - this is not just wrong, it's also incredibly self-defeating. You know who in the world, when speaking about Islam, sounds MOST like Donald Trump ? ISIS - that's who. Trump could be writing his speeches based on ISIS recruitment videos ! ISIS's wants a war between Islam and the west. To do this they need to harp on the worst aspects of the theology, and they need to convince Muslims that the west will never accept and tolerate their beliefs. Without both these things - their war cannot happen, the vast majority of Muslims want nothing to do with their idea of Islam and go around with bumper stickers on their cars that read:
I
Shall
Love
All
Mankind
So ISIS needs to achieve two things -they need to stoke hatred of the west among Muslims, and hatred of Muslims in the west. The latter they do with terrorist attacks, the former with rhetoric. But without the latter, the rhetoric doesn't work - at least not on anybody who wasn't basically insane to begin with. The only way to get the majority of people to embrace any crazy ideology is to make them afraid. So breeding fear is exactly what ISIS wants. They want the west to be afraid of Muslims - because if people are afraid of Muslims they mistreat them - and when they mistreat them this makes the Muslims afraid of THEM - and thus amenable to ISIS's claims that peaceful coexistence is not possible.
So the responsible politicians are refusing to play ISIS's game. They are refusing to blame the many for the crimes of the few. They are refusing to stoke the fires of fear that ISIS lights - because that is what ISIS WANTS.
Trump claims he'll be tough on ISIS ? He's the best thing that ever happened to them. He is EXACTLY what ISIS was hoping would happen when they launched their very first attacks. The question is - are you smart enough to see through ISIS's ruse and avoid their trap ? Or are you going to walk right into that trap and continue to be their greatest ally.
Yes - EVERYBODY who attacks Islam over events like this are the greatest allies ISIS could ever have. Blaming Muslims for the crazies is doing ISIS's most important work for them. Are you smart enough to STOP being an ISIS recruitment agent ?
You can't win a war against somebody like ISIS because a world war is exactly what they want, and the more you fight them the stronger they will get. You need to AVOID a war against them. Obama has done exactly the right thing - he got Muslim countries to fight them. He kept the war intra-religious and has led the world on a responsible and sane path of not giving into ISIS's desires for an inter-religious war. That's exactly the ONLY possible sane response to them.
Saying we can't violate the laws of physics is not "authority". We are not making rules enforced by humans who can abuse them to their own ends, we are stating the known limits of what is physically possible and even as we do so we are aware that new evidence may change what we believe those limits to be - we just trust them until such evidence exists.
This is a fundamentally different thing.
>you don't have to support ISIS to be at least moderately in favor of a bunch of their more extreme beliefs about how societies should be ruled.
This seems to be the core of your argument. Since the protestants invented seperation of church and state (very recently) we've gotten used to kicking out theocrats in the west - and apparently we've forgotten how many we have. The only reason things are any different is because even when theocrats get elected we limit what they can do to an extent. Hell look up the dominionism movement in the United States - there is a huge branch of evangelicals who truly believe the US should be a Christian theocracy. And they have gotten an alarmingly large number of their candidates elected - Ted Cruz for one. These people would love to have laws oppressing gay people and giving them the death penalty - they just keep running into a constitution that won't let them and then hating the supreme court for following that constitution. But look at Uganda. Uganda never liked gay people - now they are killing them. What changed ? Lots of US evangelicals who visisted the country and convinced the leadership that gays are responsible for all their problems and killing them is god's will. Where the constitutions didn't actively prevent them - US evangelicals got laws made to kill gay people too.
Hell they are still TRYING to get those laws in the US - there's a ballot measure in California right now seeking to legalize the murder of gay people, it won't pass, but clearly there are plenty of Americans who want it to.
> "This has nothing to do with Islam"
But it doesn't - at least, not anymore than the stupidity of any religion. Budhism has a global reputation for being peaceful, yet as we speak Bhudists are slaughtering Muslims in one of the largest genocides of our time. In 2003 Hindu's killed over 3000 Muslims in southern India (the world's largest liberal democracy) - and the man who led them is now the Indian Prime Minister ! The guy was barred from entering the USA over that until last year !
You correctly point out that the changes in the west are extremely recent historically, and I believe the difference is politics and money, not the religions really. More-over there is an interesting pattern with ISIS - which mirrors one we see with other religions.
Ever notice that the most fundamentalist, the most energetic and the most utterly annoying Christians are always the recent converts ? The guy who just adopted christianity tends to be it's fiercest defender. They are worse than ex-smokers. The Muslims in ISIS are overwhelmingly the same. They majority of attackers in various ISIS operations around the world had only become muslims in the weeks or months before the attack. Hell one of the Paris attackers was still busy reading "Islam for dummies" for crying out loud (I shit you not)!
These are not people who have had significant schooling in the religion. These are not people who have gotten far enough to be told what the spirit of the religion is and how that overrides the literal meaning of some verses in the book (hell the Christian bible doesn't get to that bit until Jesus). They are people who hugely ignorant of the religion they joined a few weeks ago and their actions tell you more about perceptions of the religion than of the religion itself. ISIS itself isn't run by religious people. They use some literal quotes from the Quran to justify their actions but they don't even believe those quotes themselves. ISIS command is almost entirely made up of the former military command of Saddam's army - Saddam was a secular leader (and one the US put into power in the first place) with a secular military. What ISIS really is - is the rebirth of Saddam's army.
> Belief systems that make people miserable tend to get dropped or heavily modified unless they're enforced at gunpoint
That pattern tends to fail when there is a convenient scapegoat the religion can use for the misery, especially when that scapegoat is, in fact, causing lots of misery. In case you were wondeirng the scapegoat that the worst parts of ISLAM has is the United States.
In all the others the armies first got turned on the civilians and only switched sides when the civilians refused to back down and started looking like they were winning - or got outside help as in Libia.
In Iran and Syria the government had more powerful weapons than those of Tunisia and Egypt - and used them, and there the armies did not side with the civilians.
So the question is - why do you assume the army in the US would be any different ? It seems the most likely scenario is that if the citizens seem to be the losing side, the army will stick with the government rather than commit treason - and since the US military is equipped to inflict absolutely mindblowing losses in a single strike, there just isn't time for the civilians to wear them down. The government literally needs just one loyal pilot to drop a nuke on one city and they win. If actual tyrants came to rule the USA - they almost certainly would do that on the first day, on the first city where an uprising began. Do you really think the uprising would continue if Dallas is a glass parking lot by the second day ?
Well, maybe if the US hadn't gotten rid of every democratically elected government in the region and replaced them all with 'friendly' theocratic dictators the region wouldn't have had so many of them.
Of course you conveniently ignore that most of the countries at war with ISIS now are not ruled by theocrats - they are the same countries that, over the past ten years, got rid of the US-installed dictators and replaced with with new democratically elected governments - many of which are secular and now have secular constitutions.
And it's not like the Muslim population have a larger percentage of hateful bigots among them - if they did, Donald Trump would never have been the republican nominee. Seriously - the USA in 2016 has nominated as a major party candidate a man who when he was asked how one of his proposed policies was different from an identical NAZI policy replied "You tell me".
>Freedom of movement does not mean you can compel a private company to do things it does not want.
The no-fly list isn't forcing companies to do something they don't want, it's prohibiting private companies from doing something they DO want.
>If I don't have enough money to pay for a ticket, is the airline denying me my freedom of movement?
We're not talking about the airline, we're talking about government. By your reasoning if you can't afford a gun and k-mart won't give you one for free - k-mart intruding on your 2nd amendment right ? We're talking about the terror watch list, which is administered by the government - and if you can't fly because you're on it that's the government preventing you - not the airline.
>If I don't have a government issued ID, is the airline & government denying me my freedom of movement?
Some would (and do) argue the government is, some argue that it ought to be perfectly possible to fly anonymously. But you have no right to demand that of the airline, you do have a right to petition the government not to FORCE the airline to demand ID however.
>If I am carrying a gun or a knife when trying to board the plane, is the TSA denying me my freedom of movement?
Absolutely - though I would say that may be a justifiable limitation on your freedom. I never said that freedoms cannot be justifiably limited in certain cases - there is no freedom of which that is not true. Freedom of speech doesn't allow you to commit fraud, slander, libel or false advertising - all of those are acts of speech, but you still can be legally prevented from exercising them and that's because everybody else is MORE free if you are NOT allowed to do those things. In the same way, if it can be shown that weapons bans on airplanes make the passengers safer then - considering the high impact of an airplane attack it's justifiable to do have them. That said, all the evidence suggests that the TSA has done absolutely nothing to make flying safer and the only change since 9/11 that actually made a difference was reinforcing cockpit doors (which ought to have been the case in the first place). The attempted hijackings since then all happened in places without a TSA using pre-TSA security measures and every single one of them got foiled. There is one other thing that changed. Before 9/11 we advised people to go along with whatever a hijacker demanded. Now, considering we have had hijackers who wanted to crash the planes on purpose, that is no longer sound advice and the advice is to fight against the hijackers - which is why both the shoebomber and the underwearbomber got taken out by the passengers. Either way - the TSA is probably not justifiable on the grounds that the restrictions they place on your freedom of movement does not, in fact, make anybody else any safer or more free.
You just ignored the entire Arab spring. A dozen armed uprisings against Tyrants all within the last 10 years.
Qeueu the right for blaming 1.6billion innocent people and religion despite the shooter being by all accounts not religious but never considering the possibility that giving bigots easy access to deadly weapons might have contributed.
Only in a few small areas. Most humans didn't - and many NEVER had stone tools.
Much like the toilets example elsewhere - it's just not universal. For the vast majority of humans that ever lived a "toilet" was a hole in the ground with a wooden seat above it. Romans had flush toilets - which consisted of a a flowing stream in a canal with seats built over it - usually made of stone. Even today in most of Asia porcelain toilets don't exist - what you have is basically a pit in the floor that you squat over and a tap with water to wash your ass and your hands afterwards.
You're right 1% is probably a massive overestimation. How else do you explain millions of muslims dead fighting ISIS and every Muslim country in the region being at war with them ?
That argument holds no water because of two reasons:
1) no armed insurrection has ever been prevented by a gun ban. If it came to that. Guns will be available .
2) guns are not very useful for this purpose anymore anyway. Not when the government in question has tanks, rpgs and nukes.
If it came to that the US government would only need to nuke one city to end the resistence.
Would they ? History says yes. Recent history saw dozens of nations rising up against tyrants. Not one of those tyrants surrendered to the will of the people. Each and every one declared full blown war on their own people. Some won. Some lost. Some are still fighting. Syria is among the latter. And everyone of them used the most powerful weapons they had to try and quell the insurrections. If this comes to pass there is no reason to assume the US would do any less. The government will fight back. And they will win.
So how many more innocent people need to die needlessly so we can have an illusory comfort against a purely hypothetical threat ? Real horror trumps imagined horrors. Especially when the cure for this imaginary horror is unlikely to even work.
Personally I am not in favour of gutting the second. I would prefer its complete repeal. Before you could own a gun the burden kf proof should be on you that you are trustworthy, responsible and have a compelling reason.
But nobody enforces the law of gravity. There are no priests of science that burned Einstein at the stake for altering Newton's version.
The Spinozan wonder relies on the acceptance that our understanfing of the universe is incomplete and will be altered by new knowledge. Thats the opposite of an auhoritative view. Also many scientists these days would suggest it was a mistake to ever call our theories about the observed behaviour of the universe 'laws'.
Well accidental shootings are a thing - and a hugely common thing at that (all those toddler shootings that happen so often are accidental shootings) - should we not mandate that you have insurance to pay for medical care for victims of the accidents caused by your weird-ass bizarre fetish ?
Many already have. For example the gay-club massacre in St Louis in the 1970s which was done by a Christian.
The only reason there is any difference today is because Christians nations have (very recently) stopped allowing the church to be the government. When it was, the same shit happened. What you call "Muslim countries" are merely the countries where religion rules the government - they aren't even a majority of the Muslim countries, the other Muslim countries with secular governments are as aghast as those types of events as I am.
The only thing you've shown is proof that non-secular governments have tendency to do brutal shit. When your power is derived from religious laws you are basically bound to follow the worst of it to the letter because it's the only way to secure your power.
The reality is that Christians have just lost all faith in their own faith. No Christians actually follow more than a tiny fraction of the bible anymore, they don't have the courage of conviction to actually do what their god commanded them to do. This does not make their beliefs superior to Muslim beliefs - you will find the same insanities in both books, it just makes most Christians today extremely unworthy of the name and indeed, all of them would have BEEN burned at the stake by their ancestors. I've yet to meet a Christian who will refuse to wear polycotton undies because the bible prohibits mixing fibres, refuse to eat shrimp as it's expressly forbidden, force daughters to marry their rapists and kill those daughters if they turn out not to have a hymen on their wedding night (all of which is mandated in the bible).
So you got two groups of insane people believing insane shit. One group may (and you clearly believe do) have more members actually willing to do the insane shit in their belief system than the other - but that really doesn't matter much, crazy is crazy.
> Of course, in many Muslim countries they still stone gays to death, today.
And plenty of Christian countries do the same. What ? You thought Uganda was a Muslim country ?
Well you're trying to present the less than 1% of Muslims who supported ISIS as representing 1.6 Billion other Muslims. Which would be news to the millions of Muslims ISIS have killed (they've killed far more Muslims than any other religion), the hundreds of thousands of Muslim soldiers who are dying as I type this fighting against ISIS from the 8 different Muslim countries who are at war with ISIS and actually boots-on-the-ground fighting them and the thousands of Muslims who were walking in the streets this morning mourning the dead with rainbow colored signs condemning the attacker.
The real reality is just that Christians are more afraid of law enforcement than Muslims these days, I've yet to see a shred of evidence that they are less eager to commit atrocities, just more scared to try.
>How often do you hear THAT from Islamic terrorists' families?
Well right now - the family of this Islamic shooter has been cooperating and even granting media interviews and has not, at any point, made any excuses for his behavior. That's more than Brock Turner's family can say.
>Lastly, why don't you do a quick "body count" of dead from attacks on abortion clinics and compare that to today -- or San Bernardino -- or Paris, for example.
So your argument is just that the crazy Muslims are BETTER AT IT than the crazy Christians ? Yeah... that's not very comforting, it means it's only a matter of time before the crazy Christians start taking notes and getting better as well.
>Except there is no constitutional right to fly
Yes there is. It's a clear-cut case of the right to freedom of movement which is protected by both the US constitution and the international declaration of human rights (of which the US is a signatory).
>Getting rid of guns is not going to solve the mass killing problem
Right... there actually was a wannabe terrorist who tried your "drive a car into people" approach to mass killing. He managed to injure one person, and got his ass arrested - turns out it is really hard to run people over on purpose once they know you are trying to. You can dodge a car, you can't dodge bullets. Nobody died.
On the same day as Sandy Hook a lunatic in China tried to attack a school - he couldn't get a gun though so he attacked the place with a knife. He wounded three people before he was tackled and subdued. Nobody died.
And it's absolutely a fact that America has the world's most liberal gunlaws and almost all of the world's mass killings and nearly all mass-killings are done with legal guns (even in countries where those are hard to get). Mass-killers are usually not career criminals - they don't know how to get illegal guns, they don't have contacts or trust. They buy legal and when they can't they don't commit the killings - or they try to with other means and invariably achieve far less. The US alone has had more than twice as many mass-killings in the last 30 years as the next 25 countries COMBINED, and they are getting more common and the death-rates are getting higher (the opposite of the trend in the rest of the world).
The reality is that the boogeyman of the mass killer without a gun is a myth, just like the good-guy-with-a-gun-who-stops-the-bad-guy is a myth. How often has that EVER happened ? How many people have ever actually shot back at a mass-killer ? Almost none, almost never. Including in places where guns are allowed. The few times somebody tried, more often than not, they ended up killing MORE civilians because while they had to try and aim at moving target through a panicked crowd the bad guy merely had to shoot into the crowd. Indiscriminate shooting is a LOT easier than trying to hit a specific target in incredibly difficult situations. So mostly - when you have some wannabe-rambo with a gun in the place, he tries to shoot the bad guy and just ends up missing and hitting more innocent people.
> I worry it will become a meme for lunatics that will take on a self-perpetuating dynamic.
That happened quite some time ago already.
>They weren't oppressive because of their atheism. They were oppressive because of their political ideology being at odds with reality and human social structure.
Neither. They were oppressive because that's what happens when you have a dictatorial government with absolute power. It doesn't much matter what religion or or political ideology the government claims to support, or gained power at the head off, once in power the tenets of the ideology are soon happily sacrificed at the altar of expanding and securing power.
Where capitalist dictators ruled - they were no less oppressive. Pinochet was one of the most brutal leaders of the 20th century - and a hardcore capitalist who worshiped Milton Friedman. Franco of Spain came to power as a fascist, when fascism lost it's appeal after world war 2 he turned into a socialist and when the US started getting serious about the cold war in the 1970s he turned into a hardcore capitalist.
He was no less brutal under any of the three ideologies he promoted at various times.
The only ideology you can measure by what dictators did in it's name is monarchism. Stateless or democratic forms of socialism and communism have, where they were tried, often worked quite well.
Brutality is the nature of dictators, and ideology (any ideology that is conveniently available) is never more than an excuse.
>Most people are agnostic no matter how much say they are atheistic and will readily prey when faced with imminent death.
That works very well - if the death is from starvation and you prey on something edible.
>To some, the word God means essentially "nature", or "natural laws", which makes the atheist's position untenable.
Nope, that kind of Spinozan view is, in fact, a form of atheism (and one I find quite appealing myself). It's not a worship - merely a wonderment at something bigger than yourself, many notable atheists regularly express Spinozan views. De Grasse Tyson for example frequently speaks of the sense of wonder he feels when studying the cosmos - that's Spinozan thought.
It differs from religion in being devoid of worship - it does not personify those forces. Recognizing a real universe greater than ourselves and our small part in that universe with a sense of wonder and astonishment is beautiful and a driving motivation for science - but it is fundamentally NOT religion and does not require any believe in things that aren't there. You could call it spirituality without the need for spirits.
And a key aspect is this: because there is no personification of these forces, they cannot be given authority - and thus nobody can claim to act in the name of that authority. People who do the latter always and without exception abuse the power that they thus acquire.