"Using religious belief" to cover up common or garden-variety thuggery? Come on, Cherful. Have you been smoking whatever they put in their hookahs too? Terrorism is firmly rooted in Islam. The hate is certainly there - hammered in by the Koran.

Ttbn
Humans act this way in wars without religious beliefs.

They usually come up with some other excuse to justify their own or their
country's actions.

This is classic, historical, human behaviour.

The hatred is in fact, racist,directed at other tribes, the majority of the time.
But it is also the rise of the warlords or gangs of bandits who prey on ordinary
people for their own gain.
Men who are powerless, who seek to gain power with a gun and a revolutionary
band of brothers.
The behaviour is as old as history, no matter what lie they come up with as a reason.

Hi Cherful,

As you suggest, terrorists are PARTLY " .... thugs with hate in their hearts, using religious belief to whitewash their murderous actions in their own minds" who, as Billyd points out, blow themselves up, and usually yelling out "Allahu Akbar !" as they do so.

Hmmmm ..... can there possibly be some slight, distant, indirect connection between Islam and vile, murdering bastards who hope to get to paradise by blowing themselves up, along with innocent people, while invoking the name of their god ?

May their heads hit the ceiling before their balls hit the floor, and the rest of them paste the walls, as my grandmother would say, perhaps in that instant when they realise that there is no paradise. Religions are wishful thinking (sorry, Runner) and so is the notion that killing innocent people somehow pleases one's god.

Cheers,

Joe

Loudmouth

I agree totally with what you say, Love the plain speaking by your grandma.

ttbn
I didnt mean to defend the Muslim religion I just wanted to point out the
delusion that absolves the perpertrators in their own minds.

The religion is like a dark cloak shrouding and whispering encouragement
to the hate filled hearts. Telling them their actions are holy and true.

Aiding and abetting. The light of truth needs to shine inside that cloak to dispel
the illusions and delusions and to show that the killing is all to human and not any
great holy deed. I think Isis has done quite a bit to convey to the world
and the decent people of the muslim faith that the dark side has to be cast out of the religion.

I heard the analogy with regards immigration. Imagine that someone gives you a large box of chocolates where 999 are delicious, but one has cyanide.

Do you accept the box and eat some of the chocolates, or do you refuse the gift?

Thanks Cherful,

Yes, my poor old grandmother gets lumbered with many unverifiable quotes. Actually she was a very sweet, hard-working woman, born in the Hull work-house at Sculcoates, raised by the Barnardos' in the south, to be a bookkeeper, she worked for Lord Samuel's family as the Shabbas goy and travelled all over Britain before coming out to a dirt-farm near Dubbo. She ran off with a Hungarian Jewish maths teacher and they both were nudists. Many times they took me to a colony near Waterfall. Wonderful days.

I suppose one problem with Islamist terrorism is that it springs directly - and probably has done so countless times in the past 1400 years - from Islam: terrorists can quote, perfectly correctly, from the Koran to justify, before and/or after, any and every vile act.

That's the problem with religious books, especially if that book is supposed to be the absolute, perfect, word of one's god, never to be changed in any way. [I'm not sure that Arabic had a written form in the seventh century, and that Allah didn't dictate the Koran to Muhammad in Syriac or Aramaic].

In that horrible way, Islam seems to be the 'perfect religion', with all the answers, as long as one adheres to the book. But it locks people into a strictly medieval way of life, from which they can curse or condemn all modern technology as alien or 'Western', while every day they are using it.

I'm struck by the two facts (1) that, by the year 1500, in Europe, after the invention of the printing press in 1485 (?) and translations of the Bible into local languages, a million (or maybe a billion ?) books had been printed, and the roots of Catholicism were about to be shaken. And (2) that the first printing press in the Muslim world was set up in 1824.

Of course, the Koran can be copied (and presumably now, printed) only in Arabic, which most Muslims can't speak. As well, a copy has to be kept at the highest point of a room in the house, unread.