This story is over a year old, but it was still news to me:  it turns out that the Islamic Society of Denmark was not convinced that the twelve cartoons in the JyllandsPosten were sufficiently offensive to Muslims to foment riots, so the imams made up their own far more hateful anti-Islam cartoons and attributed them to the Danish.  How bizarre can religious belief get?

Zilch, Dawkins in The God Delusion has more background material. Apparently Cartoongate was a case wagging the dog, but this doesn’t paint the rioting masses in a brighter light.

I would say that it’s often hard to paint rioting masses in a good light, especially when the cause is not lack of food or human rights, but an imagined slight to an imaginary friend…

it turns out that the Islamic Society of Denmark was not convinced that the twelve cartoons in the JyllandsPosten were sufficiently offensive to Muslims to foment riots, so the imams made up their own far more hateful anti-Islam cartoons and attributed them to the Danish.

Sort of a pen-and-ink “Gulf Of Tonkin incident”.  It takes corrupt leaders to fabricate evidence but it takes a gullible, fearful and hateful public to go along with it to violence.

It takes corrupt leaders to fabricate evidence but it takes a gullible, fearful and hateful public to go along with it to violence.

Exactly, dof.  But what can we do to lessen gullibility, fearfulness, and hatefulness among our fellow humans?  That ought to be a more important goal than securing oil fields…

The education system might help - integrating and making it a non-issue, but gullible, fearful, hateful people are politically useful if you can get them to do stuff and approve the unfair, it also provides a mask behind which you can hide an agenda, like the oil field securing or just generally causing a distraction

I agree these muslims need to grow up. They throw childish tantrums over the smallest things, the big babies. And over some dumb cartoons, get over it move on.

Course Americans don’t always paint them selves in a good light. Even if it’s not the violent- such as Bush’s support for the overthrow of a democratic government by a military dictatorship, then American people seem to be told they should be getting outraged over the slightest thing- Janet Jacksons tit for instance.  Cartoonist Scott Adams once had to edit out the top of the buttock cleft showing above the waist band of a person bending over (Wally being branded if you must know).  The not very well drawn part of the backside was feared to be offensive, while corporate branding of employees was considered ok to show (ok it was satire, but really!)

On The Simpsons, a scene in which the Simpsons’ cat, Snowflake, was violently killed, was edited out as offensive, even though on “Itchy & Scratchy” the cartoon-within-a-cartoon of the Simpsons, the cat is regularly dismembered alive, burned with acid, blown up, etc.

The reasoning was, that Scratchy is a cartoon, so it’s OK. 

*blink blink*

Well, dof, if we want to get picky, the pain you and I feel isn’t “real” either, because it’s

a) “just” electrochemical signals
b) here on earth and not for eternity in hell.

Right, and evil doesn’t exist. What we mistake for evil is just some tough divine love that builds character for the afterlife.

dof - I think it’s considered a lot worse to kill a character that the viewer might get emotionally attatched to, you almost expect scratchy to die

I’ve noticed in films too, many ‘cannon fodder’ unknowns die and that’s acceptable because nobody cares so they’re a lower form of life, but the main character(s) need only be injured to get more empathy, they also seem to be able to take/evade more hits too (like human tanks) - ie boromir/gandalf - even then they don’t always stay dead

elwed: What we mistake for evil is just some tough divine love that builds character for the afterlife

I’ll give some ammo - Something seems a little off with the idea, i meen people do get more resilient and experienced, but even if people need a kicking, we shouldn’t have to need it in the first place-

If a god could make perfect people who need do nothing to retain happiness and never feel bored, who instantly knew everything life could teach and had no needs to fight over, then I can see no way that there would be a need for people to learn to deal with evil

If a god could make perfect people who need do nothing to retain happiness and never feel bored, who instantly knew everything life could teach and had no needs to fight over, then I can see no way that there would be a need for people to learn to deal with evil

Ah, but Bahamat, you know the standard Christian answer to that: if God had made people incapable of choosing to do evil, they would just be happy little robots, and who wants to be worshipped by robots?

Of course, the problem with that viewpoint, imho, is that free will cannot be reconciled with omnipotence and omniscience, two qualities often attributed to God.  I’ve had Christians tell me that even though God knows that I am going to Hell (for example), and He made me knowing I was going to Hell, that I still have free will, and it’s my choice if I go to Hell or not.

This reminds me of a wonderful book I saved up for when I was about twelve called The Boy Mechanic.  It had a series of projects from Popular Mechanics magazine, some of them going back to the thirties, many of which were impossibly romantic to a city boy in the sixties (make a crossbow from an old boxcar leaf spring!  You can find them lying around railyards.  Etc.)

But some of the projects were doable.  One was making a two-headed coin, with which you could amaze your friends and confound your enemies, as the saying goes.  The coin might think that it’s making a choice when it’s flipped, but you know better: it will come up heads, come hell or high water.

How is this different than the case of omniscience, omnipotence, and free will?

Of course, the problem with that viewpoint, imho, is that free will cannot be reconciled with omnipotence and omniscience, two qualities often attributed to God.  I’ve had Christians tell me that even though God knows that I am going to Hell (for example), and He made me knowing I was going to Hell, that I still have free will, and it’s my choice if I go to Hell or not.

exactly! I have had xtians tell me that the free will/omniscience contradiction is not a contradiction. They attempt to define omniscience one way at the beginning of an argument, only to change the definition halfway through.

I’ve gotten something like your example many times talking with believers:
We agree that Omniscience means knows everything, and that if god exists, then god knows everything, but christians continue: god allows us to choose what to do, even though he knows what our choices are, so we still have a choice. That’s utter gibberish of course - omniscience means not a single exception exists to the knowledge of a being that has that property. I can only be a robot if I am not the omniscient one, or I can only have free-will if no omniscient one exists.

They even compared god to an electric fence once -
until you touch the fence, you don’t know if you will be zapped or not, so you have free will to try it or not, but the fence knows if it is currently electrified or not. 

Of course this is not the same as god knowing what I will do. The fence doesn’t know whether I will touch it or not, hence it does not have the omniscience property.

if God had made people incapable of choosing to do evil, they would just be happy little robots, and who wants to be worshipped by robots?

If we start from the assumption of an omnimax creator, then we are robots by definition. It’s just that we can’t reverse-engineer the programming faster than simply living it.

And again, why does God need to be worshipped?

I’ve gotten something like your example many times talking with believers:
We agree that Omniscience means knows everything, and that if god exists, then god knows everything, but christians continue: god allows us to choose what to do, even though he knows what our choices are, so we still have a choice.

And to “prove” it, the more educated ones fall back to the undisputed king of word game creators: modal logic.

Before anybody objects, modal logic in and by itself isn’t the problem. It’s its application outside of the realm of formal systems and the way apologists conflate operators and common language.

I think an interesting aproach is asking ‘why create us’?

It would only be for worship if god was insecure enough to need worhipping
It would only be for having little robots if he was either bored or wanted to delude himself of having power over something he made up
It would only be to send us to inevitable doom if he got a peverse kick outa it
And it would only be for company/pleasure if he felt loneliness/sadness (or at least had room for improvement on those feelings)

It would be difficult to love a robot, unless you could delude yourself sufficiently into thinking it wasn’t a robot - so he probably wouldn’t be conciously controlling and loving the same sockpupet at the same time

On free will - if you had the power to control people’s feelings and wants, you could make them freely decide to do exactly your bidding. You would be quite vulnerable to a being that (1)desired your trust for no objective reason (2) controlled your feelings and (3) tried to sway your choice/views. But such a being could be benevolent, you need to ask yourself whether or not it has a vested interest that would give you a reason to withold trust

And again, why does God need to be worshipped?

C’mon, dof.  Do you really need to ask?

Never too late to join I hope. My thoughts:
Islam as a religion does seem to have more violent followers than other religions. Something that might be explained by the tribalism that runs rampant in those areas, but I am not entirely convinced of this anymore considering there cases of violent Muslims in other industrialized countries. This brings up the case of the American Muslim father that killed his daughter for disobeying him and having sex with her boyfriend.

I think I can say that comparing Islam to Christianity and other religions is bullshit. I have a few Muslim friends and I do know other Muslims that mean no harm, but if there are Muslims that condemn the actions of the “fundamentalists” I haven’t really read about them.

I will say that there are documented cases of Muslims protesting the violence and terrorism. Once such protest took place in Israel. Mothers of Palestinians and Mothers of Jews marched together against the violence of both sides, and thousands showed up. But I think the media in the Middle East is just as bad at reporting these events as our media is. I’m not convinced there is a conspiracy in the American media, but I will say that American broadcasts tend to be one sided and in some cases blatantly false, on the Israeli Palestinian conflict.

While what set of rules and documents a religion uses as pretext to their beliefs shouldn’t matter in the actions they take, the Quron is taken much more literally and seriously in Islam from what I have seen. One Muslim friend takes the Quron very seriously, as he put it, the book is the words of Allah, and it is strictly forbidden to translate the Quron in another language so that it is taken seriously.

I think the problems of living in poor economic conditions, being surrounded by war and fighting, having poor relations with industrialized countries (think US involvement that screws things up worse), a religion that was developed for tribal societies, and poor education all lead to many of the problems we have in the Middle East. And invading countries and dropping bombs on them doesn’t do a damn thing.

People want to fix the Middle East by killing all Muslims. What does that accomplish even if you could? That’s just a cop out for fixing the problems of the world and is a solution I would expect from a tool like Bush, not anyone with a modicum of intelligence. Every civilian we kill in any war we fight generates more terrorists, I think the inverse square law applies here. So how does fighting in Iraq make us safer, or better yet, Iran? Instead of blowing them up why not try to actually fix the problem?

On another topic, I have also gotten into debates with believers that throw the free will shit down. They usually approach from the angle that God created the universe, then just sat back and watched what happened. Which means that there could not possibly be a Heaven or Hell unless God created them, meaning he also has the omniscience property… but I usually just start nodding and say uh huh at the part where God created the Universe, knowing where things are going to head. 

I think the problems of living in poor economic conditions, being surrounded by war and fighting, having poor relations with industrialized countries (think US involvement that screws things up worse), a religion that was developed for tribal societies, and poor education all lead to many of the problems we have in the Middle East. And invading countries and dropping bombs on them doesn’t do a damn thing.

Yep--Drop pretty much any other faith into the same conditions and you’d have the “True Believers” fighting over the scraps in the rubble.

At one time, the places we associate with car bombs and such were beacons of tolerance and community compared the Christian West.  (I have sort of a history-nerd crush on Saladin, actually.) Then the Crusaders moved in.  Followed by the Mongols.  As Will Rogers aptly observed, the problem with giving someone a lesson in meanness is that they usually learn it.

you’re fucking sad, pathetic people who need to get the fuck off the computer. you’re embarrassing to the human race and especially america.

you’re fucking sad, pathetic people who need to get the fuck off the computer. you’re embarrassing to the human race and especially america.

Don’t anyone say it- lets just all think it about chorpo! (One of Zilch’s lot anyway)

[runs, ducks and hides] Last Hussar [/runs, ducks and hides]

Chorpo: you’re fucking sad, pathetic people who need to get the fuck off the computer. you’re embarrassing to the human race and especially america.

Well, aren’t you charming? What’s the matter, did you actually believe that guy when he said he wouldn’t cum in your mouth?