tvashtarkatena

The way to reform and the way forward, regardless of country or religion, is secular democracy.

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.

i whole-heartedly, unequivocally and completely disagree with the above assertion regarding kamikaze being buddhist. their actions (and probably lives) had nothing NOTHING to do with buddhism. i'd also wager that most "christians" have very little in common with the teachings of jesus. and a guess: islam doesn't teach peeps to blow up civilians and their structures. Buddhism was imported to Japan from China as a technique to improve sword fighting. It eventually evolved in the Zen, which employs a variety of art forms today - that still includes sword fighting. Still, discussing what religions kamakazes subscribed fairly constitutes a new level of idiocy, even for this forum. That's like discussing the religious breakdown of those involved DD Day. It was war, people followed orders, hero mystique was manufactured to help them do so, and religion simply didn't figure very largely into the scheme of things.

Regardless of what one believes about any religion, religion is here to stay - as a species, we're apparently genetically predisposed to believe in The Kitty - no small irony there. Secular democracies that determine their own future, not an inter-religious or inter-cultural war, are the solution to the problem.

The USA is rapidly headed for Just Another Nation status where we no longer call the shots, so events like this one, where a previously owned people gets loose from its cement tire, tend to freak out the head-in-sanders on the Right. Their entire universe is based on an assumption of authoritarian control. Nature, human and otherwise, occasionally begs to differ.

Yes, that IS the problem. There is nothing an asset stripping wealth concentrator hates worse than people doing their own thing.

According to our own principles, the Egyptians have a right to democratic self determination. Hopefully, that will be all or mostly secular. That may not be politically possible, at least at first, as our founders deemed slavery to be too hot to handle for their times. And, unlike our revolution, Egypt has the advantage of many prior examples and being a 6,000 year old society. Contrary to the Right, who never fail to patronize popular uprisings against US backed totalitarians like this, the Egyptians will do fine. They've certainly won my admiration and deserve our support in this new beginning.

I'm sure it wouldn't be impossible to construct a set of social conditions in which Quakers believe that it's their religious duty to use the deliberate slaughter of as many civilians as possible as part of a holy war to defend Christianity that's both sanctioned and inspired by the Bible these days - just that it would be rather more difficult to do so than it would for say, Wahhabis. APPLES TO ORANGES ALERT! Your rhetoric kitbag sucks. Here you compare the Muslim world's most radical and violent sect with the Christian world's most pacifist. Let's substitute the Klan for the Quakers, shall we?

Two major secular revolutions in Islamic country in as many months? Hello?

In the aggregate Muslim societies are no more violent than the USA.

The claim that all moral systems that ground some of their precepts in supernatural claims are equally likely to promote violence and repression is every bit as ridiculous as the claim that all political ideologies are equally likely to do so. No one in their right mind would blather on about the fundamental equivalence between fascism and pacifism, but there seems to be a surfeit of erstwhile progressives that are willing to indulge this kind of patent nonsense when it comes to religions. Their fundamental doctrines are not all the same, they promote vastly different ethical norms and behaviors, and these have an enormous impact on the way that people who subscribe to them behave. It's not ridiculous given the historical evidence. Take our own history. Our Christians were the strongest supporters of slavery. They continue to this day to be the strongest supporters of the repression of women, denigration of science, suppression of free expression, discrimination against gays...in general, the violation of our fundamental principle of the separation of church and state. They have been THE largest and most active enemy of the secular principles on our Constitution. That's true - but they were also the most numerous and ardent supporters for virtually all of the liberal reforms from the founding onwards. I'm not sure what percentage of the population atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers has been over time, but I'm quite confident that no social movement composed exclusively of atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers would have gone anywhere in the US, ever. It's quite clear that one can hold liberal political beliefs and firm religious convictions simultaneously. What's also clear is that that's far more common in some religious traditions and others because of the specific religious beliefs and ethical norms that prevail within those religious traditions. There's a reason why there were far more Quaker abolitionists than there were Baptist abolitionists, and there's an equally compelling set of reasons why Arab christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, etc seems far less disposed to detonate themselves inside a Belgian disco than their Muslim peers. There are certainly strains of Islamic theology and sets of moral and cultural traditions that are more congenial to the advancement of liberal ideas and less likely to manifest themselves in everything from stoning adulteresses to slaughtering European commuters to waging jihad against western cartoonists why breech Muslim religious taboos - but it's hard to discern any evidence that it's those strains which are becoming more politically or culturally influential over time. I suppose the secular ideas spawned during the Age of Enlightenment that became our Bill of Rights don't count. Nor the largely secular beginnings of the women's suffrage, anti slavery, labor, and gay rights movements, to name a few. Nope. None of that went anywhere. You're already sure, so as you say, you're good. You FEEL what's right. If you ever bother to go back to the beginning of all of these movements, you'll find freethinkers. That, and Quakers I can already predict your response. "When the movement was won, there were lots of churches involved."...omitting the overwhelming larger number of churches who fought reform. Also...freethinkers know they're in the minority - and that coalitions win the day. Duh. Look at the beginning of movements, however, and church goers are seldom to be seen.

Morale Equivalence. Let's examine that. How does one measure it? From who's viewpoint? From a Palestinian's viewpoint, Osama is a hero. After all, the US buys the guns that kill his people. What about an Afghan wedding party wiped out by drone strike. Are we heroes to them? Oh, we don't TRY to kill those people. But we're certainly willing to, and we do, in some pretty large numbers. In the end, the result is the same. We're led to believe Al Qaeda is pure evil, nothing more. In reality, Al Qaeda is more of a distributed idea than an organization. On the whole, it seeks both a political agenda (the West out of the Middle East) as well as a religious one (the Caliphate), but what is important to any one faction varies as much as the motivations of its members. Some of its members just want repel a foreign invader that openly threatens its main sources of income: poppies. Is it absolutely immoral to believe or fight for that? Jay's clear implication is that We're Right and They're Wrong. Any attempts to understand the conflict from a more objective position is the act of an apologist. It's a Texan's argument. In Egypt, we've supported a brutal, lying thug for 30 years. Superior morality? The history of grievances from both sides doesn't yield such a clear proclamation.

Strawman Alert! No, in fact, I've never made that comparison. At all.

I've given your narrowing the definition of what is evil, reprehensible behavior to include only suicide bombing all the credit it's due. As usual, it takes two (or more) to tango, and the west has been tangoing with the Islamic world for a long, long time now. Oh, and I don't recall the Japanese or Tamil Tigers both the leading user of suicide bombing prior to our invasion of Iraq) being Muslim, but nice run at an AUTHORITATIVE FINISH.

Strawman Alert! Yawn. Having your country torn apart by a highly mechanized army of 300,000 is WAY better than the risk of a terrorist attack...but hey, Iraq's enjoyed both, baby!

Strawman alert! "Muslims uppity cuz their poor." Nobody's ever argued that here...ever. Yawn.

Right Wing ballyhooing about an Islamic Revolution typically fabricated using rubber band analogies: But, but...what about IRAN in '79????!!!!!! Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt

The revolutionary tally so far: Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Sudan.

Not sure what a 'legal fetishist' is or what it implies, but I'll give your comment all the consideration its due. Mubarak has really shown himself as the thug that he is. His openly armed and violent supporters have been waved past all army and police checkpoints. Mubarak needs to go...now.

Iron Lion would have been better.

I saw a red Miata the other day with gold Ferrari logo and stickers. Awesome.

My first thought exactly. You wanna do the job you wanna do or stroke your pretty (expensive) hardware? Evangelism ala Madison Avenue: damn that shit works.

Yeah, "proof positive" that (the majority) of our military volunteers do so to partake in a holy war and kill muslims. Any flimsy "evidence"/excuse to prop up liberal moral relativism and self-hate. Finally, a post form tripK worth dissecting: Strawman alert! "(the majority)"...strawman, no one claimed this. A majority isn't necessary to violate separation of church and state. One instance is enough. No instances, particularly in the military during a time of war, should be tolerated...ever. Strawman alert! You made up the part about a 'holy war to kill muslims'. The evidence of Prole's posts is hardly flimsy. On the contrary, we see soldiers directly violating their oath to the constitution, and their orders by distributing bibles in Afghanistan. They do not share our most fundamental value of freedom to worship...or not, and are actively undermining it. What's even more incredible is that our military leadership tolerates it. Strawman alert! "Self hate". Right off any Right wing blogs list of phrases to insult libruls with. We hate ourselves and our country, blah blah. Very, very old trick. KKK uses this term almost as frequently the one we've all come to associate him with. When one doesn't care about something, one neglects it. When one loves something, like a country, one works to improve it. It would seem that KKK's self described lack of political involvement would qualify for the former condition. Strawman alert! "Morale relativism" - ThumperSpeak for "No morals with the Christian God". If morality is defined by action rather than self image, and we all choose our actions, then we all choose our morals, whether or not we believe they come from God or from within the human heart. Furthermore, American morals are anything but relative...one can read them in our Bill of Rights. The problem is that Evangelicals neither respect nor believe in the authority of our Bill of Rights - they have a direct line to God.

Our fundies are a much greater threat to our liberal secular democracy than their fundies, as history clearly shows.

While the Jesus v mojo cage match may be interesting, egypt's revolution, by all accounts , is secular, as was tunisia's. As was ours.