j_b

Before he turned coat during the pre-GE years : [video:youtube]3f0A_P9kNBc

[video:youtube]eAtHXEvImY4

so you decided that more baiting was going to improve this thread?

religious infrastructure helped them withstand political repression a lot better than the secular left wing opposition. It may be that they'd represent fewer in a plural democracy than at present. Also, only ~20% of eligible adults participated in 2005 so the numbers aren't very meaningful.

BS. Egypt gets between $1.5-2 billion/year in US aid. 2/3 of which is military aid, which should provide plenty of leverage with the Egyptian military (where power resides at the moment).

Many(likely most) Egyptians disagree with Mubarak's policies toward Palestine and Israel. I haven't met many Egyptians but they didn't seem any less or more prone to fanaticism than anybody else.

IT was war then but it is not war now? Who is it exactly that you accuse of idiocy? which tends to show that Islam is likely no more evil in itself than many other creed.

LOLZ Your nastiness makes it sound like I struck a nerve, not that anybody needed to be told that you often write without thinking.

spare us your arguing in bad faith.

You said the norm is that "anyone claiming to be Christian is a soldier". No matter which way you'd like to spin now or project your state of mind onto me.

"You must find it equally hard to believe that anyone claiming to be a Christian is a soldier...but that is in fact, the norm." arguing in bad faith Alert!

and you should have thought about that before you stated that being a soldier was the norm for a Christian.

Many Christians on the progressive left would vigorously disagree. It is in fact, I suspect probable, that without religious folks, the US progressive movement would have been dead in the water for over 20 years.

No, I don't but that isn't the point. Moderate Muslims claim that Muslim fundamentalists do not represent the teaching of Islam in any way, although I am no more able to assess whether that's true than to understand how someone claiming to be Buddhist could have been a kamikaze.

and once it had divorced itself from the most basic of the buddha's teachings, it became oxymoronic to call it "buddhism". Buddhism at its core is about non-violence: in speech, in action, in thought, etc. (unless i missed something!) various people always claim to know what is the real meaning of religious thought.

The Tamil movement was primarily secular and political in nature. What drives the need to color every human endeavor with a religious palette is beyond me. Only a first class idiot would think that is what I am doing.

nice. Did you check if the code assumed any physics?

indeed, but as long as the perpetrators didn't mean to commit suicide at the same time, it is A-OK

Terror including bombing of peaceful crowds is a tactic that has been used throughout time, including today by judeo-christians. You should consider reading some history.

Right, I agree but we are discussing what these people claim to be their religion. To be honest, I have no data showing how many kamikaze would have declared Hinduism as their religion but it seems very likely that some of them would have done so. edit: i mean to say Buddhism (and not Hinduism) of course, but I am sure kimmo got it.

btw the Tamil tigers who committed numerous suicide bombings over the last 30 years follow the Hindu religion. The kamikaze of WW2 were Shintoist or Buddhist.

JayB pretends to believe that when central command and politicians decide to drop bombs in cities or put stressed soldiers armed with overwhelming firepower at check points, they couldn't have forecast that score of innocents civilians would die. Is it hypocrisy or blindness?

Here goes the usual canard. JayB and Harris are really upset that Muslim fundamentalists are willing to commit suicide while perpetrating acts of terror, not so much that people of all kind are ready to use terror to advance their cause. Why is it more morally reprehensible to blow up civilians and commit suicide than solely blow up civilians and get away with it, nobody knows.

and for the record, although I did agree with R. Scheer's remarks in this discussion (kind of listened to it while multitasking), I quite often disagree with him. I find Chris Hedges however quite impressive intellectually a lot of the time, surprisingly even when he talks about his religious faith, although I have been an atheist for nearly 40 years.

Isn't there a difference between saying that someone said/did something racist and saying that someone is a racist.