Page 2 of 2
Re: Islamic Terrorism, take two
Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2014 8:34 pm
by dualstow
Damn, I thought you said Osama, who is most definitely Sunni.
Not that it matters, but just as a point of interest, I once read that bin Laden's Arabic was poetic and elegant, whereas Saddam's was rough, poor, and gangster-like.
Re: Islamic Terrorism, take two
Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2014 6:28 am
by Mountaineer
WildAboutHarry wrote:
moda0306 wrote:Are animals property? Can we do whatever we want with them? Does a being that can obviously feel pain and fear have no moral relevancy?
They can be. No. Maybe (define the set of morals you want to consider).
I, too, eat meat. I, too, have smacked a dog. I have not shot a grouse (but I have shot a few doves and pheasants).
Needless cruelty is, well, needlessly cruel. Tasing downer cattle seems needless and cruel. But I don't think we need to do a Soylent Green ending for food animals either (i.e. soothing photos and music) before they are dispatched. Death is cruel. But it is not needless, since eat we must (as do other animals). Medical research is necessary and cruel, but not necessarily needlessly so.
Most of us are so far removed from food production that we can afford a bit of squeamishness when considering using animals for food or medical research. Perhaps we need to dine more frequently at "Del Staters Rabbit Hut" to get a dose of meat-eating "reality".
I agree with WAH's post. And, from my point of view, organizations like PETA that want us to put animals on the same plane as humans are a perfect example of what happens when man thinks he knows better than what God has said about the subject (man, animals, and such) in the Christian Scriptures, particularly Genesis - PETA is just another example of man doubting God's word and/or wanting to elevate himself to be like God (the original sin).
Sorry for bringing religion into so many discussions, but there are so many subjects that are at the fundamental level based upon Christian teachings or what happens when we stray from them, it is difficult not to.
... Mountaineer
Re: Islamic Terrorism, take two
Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2014 6:42 am
by Mountaineer
Reub wrote:
This would make a great quiz! So is Obama Sunni or Shia?
Neither, he is a shita.
... Mountaineer
Re: Islamic Terrorism, take two
Posted: Wed Sep 10, 2014 8:12 am
by Mountaineer
Do these animals have rights? I thought it might be useful to open up the term "animal" a bit more than we have so far in this thread. (Perhaps this post should be in the Morality thread, or the Terrorism thread - I deliberated.)
... Mountaineer
“Evil”? is back
September 9, 2014 by Gene Veith
In our postmodern times, morality is supposed to be relative. To speak of “good”? and “evil”? is to be absolutist and retrograde. But now the atrocities of the Islamic State/ISIS have people recognizing evil once again.
From Richard Cohen, The Islamic State is evil returned – The Washington Post:
As Hannah Arendt foresaw, we are once again up against the question of evil. An American photojournalist, James Foley, was presented to the camera and decapitated. The instrument was not the ax reserved for royalty or the whooshing blade prompted by that reformer Joseph-Ignace Guillotin but an ordinary-looking knife. Death would be neither swift nor painless. This, somewhere in the bleached desert, was pure evil.
I used to not believe in evil. When Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union “the evil empire,”? I thought it was a dandy phrase but also a confession of ignorance. The word itself connotes something or someone diabolical — bad for the sake of bad. The Soviet Union was bad, I conceded, but not for no reason. It was bad because it was insecure, occupying the flat, inviting, Eurasian plain, and because it had a different system of government that it dearly wanted to protect. Reagan had it right, though. The Soviet Union was evil.
Now we are facing a different type of evil. The Islamic State, in whose name Foley was beheaded, murders with abandon. It seems to love death the way the fascists once did. It is Sunni, so it massacres Shiites. It is radical Sunni, so it eliminates apostates. It is Muslim, so it kills Yazidis, a minority with a religion of its own, and takes as plunder their women as concubines. Men are shot in graves of their own making.
The Nazis are back — differently dressed, speaking a different language and murdering ostensibly for different reasons but actually for the same: intolerance, hatred, excitement and just because they can. The Islamic State’s behavior is beyond explication, not reacting as some suggest to the war in Iraq — although in time it will try to settle some scores with the United States — but murdering and torturing and enslaving because this is what it wants to do. It is both futile and tasteless to lay off blame on others — the West, the colonialists of old or the persistent Zionists — or to somehow find guilt in the actions of the rich or powerful because they are rich or powerful. You can blame the victim. You can even kill him.
In the weekend Financial Times newspaper, the British writer Martin Amis tackled the question that obsessed Arendt and so many others — the nature of evil and its ultimate personification, Hitler. Amis mentioned some historians who have attempted to understand Hitler — none of them succeeded — and settled finally on Primo Levi, the great Italian writer of the Holocaust who was sent to Auschwitz. It was there, when a guard “brutally snatched”? away an icicle Levi had broken off to slake his thirst, that he asked in his poor German, “ Warum? ”? The guard replied, “ Hier ist kein warum ”? — there is no why here. There was no why in all of Auschwitz.