Ahanu
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I agree with this. It causes me to pause, take a moment to try on another's shoes, and see things from another's perspective.
Terrorism and the forces of evil.
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I agree with this. It causes me to pause, take a moment to try on another's shoes, and see things from another's perspective.
Niblo
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Fair comment.
Ahanu
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No, it is not fair.
The UK gives you a small control of where your tax money goes. If I give £10 to a charity, I can gift aid it, this means that the government will top up my donation by 20%. The £2 would come from the income tax I have paid.
I wish I could agree with you. Sadly, I can only see man's inhumanity to man increase. We seem to push God away, we choose not to love God and neighbour. We don't like to love, pray for and forgive our enemies.
Perhaps it is their own religious ideology and the rhetoric of their religious teachers that motivates terrorists? I’m making the distinction between a ‘guerrilla fighter’ and a ‘terrorist’ here – the emphasis of the terrorist being to target innocent and unarmed civilians going about their ordinary lives – including children?
Why anything? But I don't believe it's my fault a person becomes a serial killer because the society in which I pay taxes allowed him to be born in poverty and sexually abused as a child. The judge will decide if it’s a mitigating factor, balanced against the ugliness of his crimes?
I'm not at all sure about this
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9/11 was regarded as an act of terror. Yet when the American government gave authority to their troops to bomb and invade Iraq, that was not regarded as an act of terror. How so. About 300,000 Iraqi civilians were killed due to the invasion, about a thousand times the amount killed during 9/11.
Victims are victims, whether the war is just or not.
Was the Second Iraq war a just war?
'Amir Alzzalam
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The bottom line here concerning politics and faith is that religion, for the most part, theistic religions are the culprits for far too many wars, bloodshed, and inhumanity. The top ten countries to live in where it is peaceful, safe, and simply 'good' are secularist if not atheist. Theism brings authoritarian governments oppression of speech prejudice and a host of horrors that predominantly secularist countries do not have.
Regarded as? Wrongly so? America has no right to respond? How are they 'allowed' to react? These nations hate America as the great satan and encourage terrorist attacks against innocents.
Not denying the whole business was corrupt -- as politics always is. Do two wrongs make a right? Obviously not. Does that mean the first was not a wrong?
I'm sorry but you guys come across as trying to justify the wckedness of terrorism as a justified response to 'oppression'
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Like Stalinist Russia, or Maoist China?
Just curious as to the source of your numbers, how those numbers are broken down and the time frame covered.
The numbers were taken from Mr Google, roughly a middle ground, so I am not claiming any accuracy. My post was more about justice. Supposedly, the Iraq war was to do with invisible WMDs. This makes America the biggest hypocrite, they only had to look in their own back yard for these weapons.
If you lived in Iraq from 2003, doing an ordinary job, having a family and bringing up kids, your needs are no different to a family in any other country. If you blame an invading army for the death of a family member, and you are displaced from your home, where do you go for justice?
However big or small the devastation was in Iraq, there are now a lot of angry Iraqi living there. There are a lot of angry Iraqi refugees.
At what point do we seek God, and search for a God solution of love, forgiveness, peace and reconciliation.
There are a lot of angry Ukrainian refugees, and quite a lot of angry Nigerian families victim of Boku Haram. I'm sure there are quite a few angry Uigar refugee victims of China living in Afghanistan, and Muslim regufees of Mynnar ethnic cleansing living in Bangladesh.
The list is endless and heartbreaking, as is the historical context of causation of conflict. Whether a lot or a few, are they entited to deliberately target innocents and children?
Why do you focus in on the response to terrorism of Israel and the Western democracies? Are they expected to exercise a higher standard of warfare than their 'terrorist' opponents? And if you believe so -- why?
Ahanu
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Perhaps.
Difficult to pin it down on one thing.
Could it be . . .
Mental illness?
Extreme poverty?
A sense of excitement?
Military occupation by a foreign country?
Revenge?
Whatever the deciding factors are, terrorism is more likely in places of extreme wealth inequality, political instability, military occupation and economic sanctions - or at least some combination of these factors that leads one to choose a life of terrorism.
Okay.
Some societies consistently have more serial killers than others, however. Others consistently have less. That tells me the environment matters. You can help shape that environment for better or worse.
The United States is a society that makes guns easily available. Since many of its citizens willingly want that type of environment despite having the highest number of serial killers in the world, then, yes, society is helping pull the trigger for its serial killers.
Judging from the age of a lot of participants on this forum, they wouldn't have reached the age of 50 if they had been born in the 1800s (which had a life expectancy of 31). Child mortality has fallen off a cliff since then as well, so if you enjoy being around your children in the modern world, then you can be thankful you live in the 21st century.
You try going back to living on under 2 dollars per day then. In the 1800s most people lived in income level 1 in the image below. Show this to anybody that despairs about the world getting worse after citing rising inequality and rising inflation in recent decades. If the world is getting worse, tell such people that they should have simply lived in the 1800s then.
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I was taught that the Devil card in the Tarot represents an archetype which is designed to take man as low as he needs to go before he finds his own foundation, before he turns away in self-disgust from what he's doing and says "enough."
My own view is that man's future on the earth will be full of opportunities for conflict. I would go as far as to suggest that is what we are doing here. Spirit, as Teilhard de Chardin said, having human experiences. As soon as we get peaceful and loving with ourselves/each other, we have the opportunity to move to our next phase of spiritual development.
I do believe that there may be a more peaceful time on the planet. I suspect that at some point a lot of humans, most, probably, will manage to wipe ourselves out. The survivors will be those who choose to reincarnate to caretake the planet through to recovery, and then the planet will once again be commissioned as a school. I think that will be the closest we'll get to a golden age here.
So yes, I agree we are working towards becoming less and less violent to ourselves and the planet. Slowly. Does time matter? Douglas Baker used to say that we are all failures from previous manvantaras (1 manvantara = 306,720,000 years), and I don't think our intellects will ever work out what its all for in the end.
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