That whole Shia & Sunni divide, plus all the other sects..there's enough right there to illustrate the futility of religion and the way religions and their schisms hold back humanity

Murder by definition cannot ever be ethical

"Also, I'm opposed to assisted suicide as well." - well at least you are consistent.

"Except most pets euthanized aren't ..." No, but that's not really relevant. Pets who are owned, homed, and loved, are only euthanized when they are suffering.

What we do to pets who are not owned and who have no natural habitat to survive in (unlike deer who are culled because of over population, and us having wiped out their natural predators) - we have become the ones to control and dominate the environment. Thus putting them out of their misery, because a pound can't afford to feed them is indeed to avoid suffering.

Is your arguement that we should treat animals the same as humans, and let them choose suicide if they can't afford to feed themselves? Or that we should make sure suicide is done in inhumane ways??

" the futility of religion and the way religions and their schisms hold back humanity"

No, religion here is merely a symptom. You could use any other political division to divide people, invented or otherwise. Eg: 'tribal' rivalries in Rwanda, linguistic/ethnic divides, political ideologies in the cold war.

People will label their rivals in any way that they can in order to exert power over them. Or use labels that already exist as a way to rally people against the other. Any possible identifier... Yellow stars for the Jews, Pink stars for the Gays, Skin colour, whatever can be used by people in power to exert that power over others.

Religion is just an example, not the cause.

@"Murder by definition cannot ever be ethical" - if your job is in assassination, it would be unethical to not fulfill a contract. Even if it is immoral to kill your target.

Morality and Ethics are closed related ideas. But are distinct.

The point I was trying to make was that in War soldiers are faced with choices where there is often no simple good choice available, they have to choose between a range of shit options, and often without much time.

One of the problems in Afghanistan was that too many of the Afghan National Army chaps simply did not want to fight the Taliban.
Invading Afghanistan is comparatively easy compared to the task of after having invaded..then holding territory, getting competent, honest local authorities to take over and getting out of Afghanistan

At one "level" I am sympathetic towards refugees, but at another I'm not..like I see a refugee family, mum, dad & the kids..and mum and dad are demanding that we help them...so I understand what's driving them..they want safety for their kids
But another "part" of me can't help thinking.. Hey both of knew how shit your country was before you had the kids..why didn't you not have kids and make fixing your country your first priority ? You acted selfishly and now you demand that we provide you with the things you need

""Except most pets euthanized aren't ..." No, but that's not really relevant. Pets who are owned, homed, and loved, are only euthanized when they are suffering."
But then you're just trying to throw his entire analogy out the window. He was talking about animal shelter euthanization.

"Hey both of knew how shit your country was before you had the kids..why didn't you not have kids and make fixing your country your first priority ?"
That's not a choice everyone gets to make.

"That whole Shia & Sunni divide, plus all the other sects..there's enough right there to illustrate the futility of religion and the way religions and their schisms hold back humanity"

Not at all; it only shows the futility of Islam and how it holds back humanity.

"That's not a choice everyone gets to make."

Nonsense. You decide where your penis goes, no one else.

Cough, wasn't holding back humanity when it promoted the growth of science and philosophy and also preserved this knowledge to be used in Europe a few centuries later, cough.

"Nonsense. You decide where your penis goes, no one else."
A) There are family values that promote it and political circumstances that hinder that choice.
B) South Asia has never fallen off the practice of arranged marriage.

"wasn't holding back humanity when it promoted the growth of science and philosophy"

Great that you have to go back half a millennium to find that.

"There are family values that promote it and political circumstances that hinder that choice."

Promote, hinder, not force. And certainly not forced to give birth to 7 children (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/syrian-refugees-halifax-housing-families-1.3413716)

"South Asia has never fallen off the practice of arranged marriage."

The majority of "refugees" aren't coming from South Asia.

"Great that you have to go back half a millennium to find that."
Still disproves your point ;)

Also, you're definitely underestimating the weight of family values in that region.

Maybe America's destroying of family values has really gotten to you.

@TrPrado

to be fair, most of claims for islam developing technologies, is kind of a lie. 99% of the medicinal ideals, the "hindu-arabic system" was entirely hindu, and even zero was a babylonian/indian idea.

India gets ripped off by the liberal press, because it helps them more to congratulate Islam.


@leon112

Christianity DEFINITELY held back humanity. Women's lack of rights were not just an initial Muslim concept, but a factor in all Abraham-ic (how do i adjective) religions.

If anything, the majority of archaic science... although not MADE by Islam, was much more ACCEPTED by it, especially compared to the Church or by any pre-cursor Templar society across Europe

I'm talking more about Golden Age innovations in expansion of thought. There was quite a bit of advancing of science, quite a bit of astronomy and physics, and also taking Greek philosophy and improving on it considerably.

Oooohhh ok, that's a different area than I'm considering then

All men and women can choose to try to have children or not to try..sure there's a huge range of factors that can influence that choice, and sometimes women are denied a choice ( rape ), so I put the ultimate responsibility on the man. No sperm "given"..No pregnancy possible.. except one alleged instance..baby Jesus, if you can believe that

Also there's been the scientific theory of Parthenogenesis.

Then again that gives like zero genetic development, so diseases would ravage humanity, so if it were functionable it would be disastrous.

but I digress

but i also didn't really have another point.

so yea

Still discounting familial pressure. Western countries are more individual-oriented, so we think more easily in terms of that, but countries in that region are more family-oriented.

"Not at all; it only shows the futility of Islam and how it holds back humanity."

Yeah, we're just going to pretend the Protestants and Catholics didn't murder each other for centuries. When they weren't murdering Jews, of course. I take a much more positive view of religion overall than MajorMitchell, but the sectarian stuff is a long and problematic Abrahamic tradition, whether or not it's true of religion generally. It certainly isn't isolated to Islam. (Heck, remember the twelve tribes of Israel? Canonically it took direct fucking intervention from God to keep the Israelites from slaughtering each other...which just meant they got to be slaughtered and scattered by the Assyrians and Babylonians instead.) To say nothing of other powerful cultural institutions...like nations, tribes, and (speak of the devil) empires.

(ETA: they got slaughtered and scattered by the Assyrians and Bablyonians in large part because they split up, which is why I'm keeping that as an example of the perils of sectarianism. So the story goes, anyway. Everyone loves a good Bible story, right?)

Then again @lethologica, there are many sects on progressive Islam, but the majority of Muslims worldwide support Sharia law - poll from PEW 2011

Now there are 4 different main practices of Sharia, but none of them provide near the level of human rights to women as our western culture does.

While some women have gotten to positions of power and heads of state ins muslim countries, it's a vast difference between intra-classist sexism, and religious sexism in non-government classes.

Nothing against progressive Muslims, I have a lot of friends who are Muslim and I like, but a lot of the modern culture in the eastern developed countries, still don't hold up to basic western standards.

Nowadays the only real example of Christian brutality is the funding of murdering tribes in East Africa. It's not reported on well, but it's there: and some are Americans that have contributed.

the main problems we'd have with Judaism would tie in with Israel, but let's not open that door

There's also crazy shit happening in Northern India regarding Christian brutality.

Yeah, lots of batshit stuff goes on in modern Islamic nations, from Saudi Arabia on down the list. I just don't think sectarianism is (a) enough reason to decide all religion sucks, as MM would put it, or (b) enough reason to condemn only Islam, as leon would put it.

^ sectarianism is like rascism or classism, or sexism or tribalism. A political tool to divide people and set them against each other.

Look other northern ireland - no one religion has a monopoly on sectarianism.

@"Great that you have to go back half a millennium to find that."

Great, super short-sightedness, forgetting the past.

@"But then you're just trying to throw his entire analogy out the window. He was talking about animal shelter euthanization."

I think i addressed that in a rant about the exploiting the environment.

@"Nonsense. You decide where your penis goes, no one else"

How naive are you exactly?
A) Not everyone has sex education
B) traditionally big families means more wealth, as the children work the farm and make more money.
C) In patriarchal societies, sex is seen as a right of the man (with his wife... Lets bot get into rape culture)
D) Did i mention lack of sex ed? Something that 'conservatives' in the US are still enforcing.
E) even if it was a choice, you don't know what the country they are fleeing looked like when the had kids.
F) Many societies, including our own, expect you to have kids, especially if you are a woman, in order to be happy. In many cultures this expectation is stronger than it is in ours (look at China and the expectation of only-children to marry in order to continue the family line, there is a huge diversity across cultures in duty to family and freedom to pursue our own happiness; also re: the point happiness = children)
G) your own cultural assumptions that everyone is 100% responcibilr for whatever happens to them. Assumes free will actually exists.