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Salman Rushdie attacked on stage in New York

I think its important to draw a massive distinction between "people whose religions you disagree with" and "people who call for/condone/excuse in any way murder as part of their beliefs".
I agree with this, but it is also clear that the somewhat lukewarm support for Rushdie among various religious leaders came from a place in which those religious leaders were keen to promote/keep special protections wrt criticism. Robert Runcie's response to the 'Rushdie Affair' was to call for the UK's blasphemy law to be extended to cover Islam.

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What a despicable response.
 
I agree with this, but it is also clear that the somewhat lukewarm support for Rushdie among various religious leaders came from a place in which those religious leaders were keen to promote/keep special protections wrt criticism. Robert Runcie's response to the 'Rushdie Affair' was to call for the UK's blasphemy law to be extended to cover Islam.

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What a despicable response.
i'd love it if that had extended that feeble protection to all minority religions, think wiccans and thelemites and satanists would have had great fun with it
 
When I first heard about the stabbing, my instinct was that the perpetrator was brought up in a not very religious household, and this seems to be the case. His parents were divorced, he went to visit his father in Lebanon at some point, a meeting that didn't go well. Afterwards, he took more interest in religion, and blamed his mother for depriving him of it.

It's the sort of thing that makes the religious fanatic / lone whackjob dichotomy a bit redundant, doesn't it? Pretty common for young people with various background problems and searching for The Purpose of Life to hit on a belief system that claims to have all the answers.
 
When I first heard about the stabbing, my instinct was that the perpetrator was brought up in a not very religious household, and this seems to be the case. His parents were divorced, he went to visit his father in Lebanon at some point, a meeting that didn't go well. Afterwards, he took more interest in religion, and blamed his mother for depriving him of it.

It's the sort of thing that makes the religious fanatic / lone whackjob dichotomy a bit redundant, doesn't it? Pretty common for young people with various background problems and searching for The Purpose of Life to hit on a belief system that claims to have all the answers.
it's disappointing how frequently they hit on something with all the wrong answers
 
it's disappointing how frequently they hit on something with all the wrong answers

It's pretty obvious that the answers are going to be wrong, because religions (and other belief systems) arrive at them before the questions have been asked. The chances of their being right under those circumstances are so minuscule as to be statistically impossible.
 
It's pretty obvious that the answers are going to be wrong, because religions (and other belief systems) arrive at them before the questions have been asked. The chances of their being right under those circumstances are so minuscule as to be statistically impossible.
well that's not exactly true. belief systems like anarchism or marxism are more likely to be correct because they encourage critical thinking, as opposed to most religions which don't
 
I taught English at a university where Marxism was a compulsory subject. It did not encourage critical thinking. Indeed, it was quite a good example of a belief system where the answers had all been worked out beforehand, and everything else had to be adapted to fit them.
 
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