Nothing short of an atrocity
God hates people, it seems.
The Taliban drove an ambulance packed with explosives into a crowded Kabul street on Saturday, setting off an enormous blast that killed at least 95 people and injured 158 others, adding to the grim toll of what has been one of the most violent stretches of the long war, Afghan officials said.
The attack came days after a 15-hour siege by the militants at the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul that left 22 dead, including 14 foreigners.
Killed for what? A fascist theocracy.
The large casualty toll was another reminder of how badly Afghanistan is bleeding. Over the past year, about 10,000 of the country’s security forces have been killed and more than 16,000 others wounded, according to a senior Afghan government official. The Taliban losses are believed to be about the same.
United Nations’ data suggests an average of about 10 civilians were killed every day over the first nine months of 2017.
Religion doesn’t seem to be very good for people.
“Today’s attack is nothing short of an atrocity, and those who have organized and enabled it must be brought to justice and held to account,” Tadamichi Yamamoto, the leader of the United Nations Mission in Afghanistan, said in a statement.
“I am particularly disturbed by credible reports that the attackers used a vehicle painted to look like an ambulance, including bearing the distinctive medical emblem, in clear violation of international humanitarian law,” Mr. Yamamoto added.
A filthy move for obvious reasons: you don’t want ambulances to be seen as suspicious.
You mean, not just women? Those who are people, too? (Sorry, I couldn’t resist).
It does seem obvious from reading the sacred texts that God hates people. The question I have is why so many people love God? And make excuses for him? If they really believe in him, they should hate him with the very fiber of their being.
Except they all believe in the God they want to believe in, so it is only people who hate people who think that God hates people. The other people, who like or love people, will search the Bible for the passages all the people-haters miss, the ones that suggest he is more merciful than just, more loving than angry, and that Jesus changed all that, anyway. The liberal Muslims will do the same with the Koran, same glazed over eyes when the see the passages they don’t like.
I think the moderate and liberal believers enable the haters, because they give a picture of a god that would be oh, so, nice if people would just read what he really says. They give cover for the hatred of their god for ordinary people, and they protest that the haters are not really [religion of choice]. And so many people, even non-believers, know nice Christians, nice Muslims, nice Jews, nice Hindus, nice Buddhists (I myself know nice members of each of the above, and can throw in some nice Mormons to boot), that they are able to believe that the problem isn’t religion, it’s bad people. That gives religion a cover for all the nastiness that can be thrown into the mix, because people just say, no that’s not religion.
And it doesn’t help that non-believers have their share of nasty, poorly behaved assholes who claim to use science as their justification for bad behavior.
The fact is, too many people are rotten, so they build rotten gods (whether religious gods or free market gods) and then use their rotten gods to justify being rotten. We need a moral code totally separate from religion, then we can begin to sort out what is and isn’t good and what is and isn’t bad.
I suppose when it’s been hammered into people from childhood what a bastard their god is, and what it will do to punish those who don’t love and obey it, it’s best for them to proclaim that love as loudly and as violently as possible. Stockholm Syndrome on steroids.
iknklast – oh the play on God hates women was quite deliberate, so no need to apologize.
Yeah, with a god like that, who needs the devil? What I don’t get is why people still talk as if the “problem of evil” were a serious challenge to the Abrahamic religions. If there’s one thing that shouldn’t pose any kind of problem for believers in the god of the Old Testament, it’s evil. Something like the Holocaust is exactly what I for one would expect if Yahweh were in charge of everything. It is always embarrassing to hear other atheist rage against the atrocities of the biblical devil-god and then go on to argue that that very same omni-malevolent monster cannot possibly exist, because the existence of evil is incompatible with the idea of a perfectly good and benevolent god…
In my experience believers tend to defend God on one of the following ways.
1. Redefining “good” as “whatever God happens to be/do/want” (the first answer to the Euthyphro dilemma), thus turning a sentence like “God is good” into a meaningless tautology (God is whatever God happens to be).
2. “No matter how cruel this may seem to us, it’s actually both good and just for reasons that are only known to God and of no concern to us.” Perhaps the most disgusting abnegation of responsibility ever put forth.
3. Insisting that the nasty parts are not meant to be taken literally (Ok, so what’s the nice “metaphorical” meaning of all those verses telling believers to stone people to death for victimless “crimes”, to invade the cities of rivaling tribes and kill everything that breaths etc.?).
4. Ignoring the nasty parts altogether (obviously, this is made a lot easier by the fact that most moderate believers have never read the damn thing.)
While I too have issues with Sam Harris, I think he is ultimately right about three things:
1. The problem isn’t just that religion is used “to justify” or “as an excuse for” things that people would be doing anyway for reasons that have nothing to do with faith. There’s plenty of that going on of course, but to me the most disturbing thing about religion is the way the religious doctrines themselves – if truly believed – can make even the worst atrocities seem like the only right thing to do. And of course religion wouldn’t work as an excuse if nobody really believed in it anyway.
2. The fact that not all religions have such doctrines doesn’t really solve anything, since the deeper problem is leaving the most important questions in life up to blind faith in the first place. As I have previously mentioned elsewhere, this is where I disagree with atheists who say things like “I have nothing against faith, I’m only against organized religion”. If I could chose between a world without unjustified beliefs and a world without churches, I would chose the former any time. If people would stop believing things for bad reasons (the definition of taking things “on faith” as far as I’m concerned), the bad ideas of religion would be allowed to die a natural death, and whatever good ideas are in the mix don’t need the bad reasons to stay alive. If people still wanted to go to church for community and support, fine by me.
3. Sacred texts like the Bible and the Quran are not simply the textual equivalents of Rorschach-blobs, that only reflect back what people already believe anyway. Yes, there are plenty of vague and ambiguous verses. And yes, there is no way to harmonize all the various contradictions without the most far-fetched and tortured reinterpretations. But not all interpretations are equally obvious or equally honest. I have in fact read the whole Bible, and it takes a lot more apologetic work to arrive at a nice interpretation than a nasty one.
Exactly. As I once put it, moderate and liberal believers may not promote extremism themselves, but through their dishonest whitewashing of their sacred texts (which more often than not they haven’t actually read) they give legitimacy to books and doctrines that definitely promote extremism.
*Sigh* yeah… I don’t suppose that people need to worry about running out of reasons to be assholes anytime soon – with or without religion. I still suspect that not all the same people would be assholes in exactly the same ways, though…
‘international humanitarian law’ must always come after Gawd’s law. Just ask Roy Moore, or any Trump era appointed judge.
Meanwhile, see how long it takes the Greenwald/Salon set to make it about Bush and Israel.