Sad day for intelligence and respect.
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| David Pope |
And let me be clear, now every racist will exult with this opportunity to prove they are not better at trying to live in peace altogether.
Our society is sick when it allows a few worthless persons to spiral to such primitive and prehistoric behavior. Ignorance, repression, war for natural resources, and bare greed all work so well together against education and humanism. Please just EDUCATE yourself, haters! Use your brains!!
You will realize life is interesting, and you may even become happy.
The world is richer when people are intelligent
Reducing the richness of this world and its cultures by asking everyone to stick to a strict subset of its many values is either inflated ego or bare stupidity.
When I do not like something, I may ignore it. When it hurts my own values (like here), I can tell, write or draw about it, for anyone who wants to listen or not. I would most probably be wrong but I can even consider a whole population or a whole culture to be whatever I want for reasons I may or may not enumerate. Morally, I can even be illegal. Some people destroy GMO crops and then get jailed for it, but it sometimes helps others think about it (I tend to agree with them).
I even can write or draw whatever on a piece of toilet paper and use it as I want. I can tell about it or not. And just *everyone* has this right. It will only hurt the people that wrongly believe in physical symbols and want to get hurt by it, which are all "shallow" people.
Values and religion
My values are not made of physical representations, no more than of ink and of paper. Reciprocally, my values do not care about the absence of representation. And my values are most probably not yours, which is something I like!
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| Training my free will with blasphems? Pastafarianism vs. Russel's Tea Pot |
Many of my values are inherited by my parents and their culture, hence also the country I live in.
If was born in South America before Spain invaded this continent and imposed Christianity --so well that it now probably features more Christians than in Europe--, I can tell that chances are that I would not have been given judeo-christian values... What some stupid people do not get is that it would not have made me better or worse! I just feel lucky I was told to educate myself and try to be free.
There are just thousands of cultures in the world, and they keep on evolving.
Thus, it is plain infinite selfishness to try and reduce the world to a very limited set of values (whatever moral or religious). It is naive to think that one is obvious and should not be challenged. In fact I try hard NOT to have "cultural" bias, by visiting the world (I was educated in a Muslim country btw!).
Asking for everyone to stick to something un-provable like a given religion is just wrong. Why on earth would I want that New Guinea tribes to know and respect MY God, or my values? I would instead LOVE to know THEIR values, so I become a more accomplished person by sharing and knowing (hence respecting the other). They live in peace, too!
The ultimate goal ought to be to leave peacefully and in respect, which means that people that like violence are only slightly less human waste than people that practice violence. They are the opposite of what they preach. This way is just plain brutal and worthless.
Blind faith is the root of all evil if you expect others to be blind also
Imagine I manage to force the entire world to respect my own set of values.What is the next step? I would make a crime in the name of my God NOT to believe in Him. Sure, the atheists would be insulting my God since I consider it in an indisputable and obvious matter or evidence as nobody no more contests it!
I would of course also delegate and ask others to behave as I did, until we are all alike. Then no problem is left on Earth?
Now what kind of naive faith is this? Countries that apply "strict" religious rules are crippled with human and social issues as well. This is just another kind of blind dictatorship. Democracy try not to censor people unless they risk the lives of others. Yes, they do fail sometimes even in the name of religion! But insulting God does not threaten the life of anyone, which is why it is legal here.
By the way, "free" country cartoonists and humorists do insult Christians as much as Islamists or Jews, or Pastafarians as I did above. In fact I have mostly never read Charlie Hebdo because it is not always that funny in my opinion (Charb was!). Nonetheless, I love the way they systematically consider nothing is sacred, while they vigorously fight injustice and racism at the same time (and some case in really funny ways). Now their killers are not only brutal extremists, but also racists as they killed Jews at the same time. They probably did not even read Charlie Hebdo in the first place, it would have be a good thing for their education may be...
Considering anything sacred is the root of big trouble, unless "sacred" stuff is kept personal.
Serious things are suspicious and should be challenged all the time: science, ethics, politics and religion are among them. Read Russel and try to
Free speech and law
Free speech is given for each and everyone of us in many countries throughout the world. That is why I just fully respect the right for anyone *not* to be Charlie either. If you want me to behave as you want, then why would I want you not to behave as me? Negating the rights of the other is absurd!
There is no legal, moral, not even religious justification to kill people or even to say it is justified or "normal". When someone does "wrongfully", just shut up or try to bring him to court where it will be discussed calmly and he gets a chance to explain himself. When you think your faith is above human justice, then do let your God deal with it, please. Or are you saying that God in his infinity is unable to sort the thing out Himself, without the help of armed worshipers?
It just does not work, by way as factions of the same religion killed each other all the time during the human history, and that probably happened almost for all religions.
Why do some want to remove liberty from others? I do not believe it is to get better considered by any god. They just bury their own freedom and want other "mortals" to consider them better instead. They are the ones to fix in the first place. Your terrestrial place in the society and in the eye of other people is a very different but sadly common real problem. Confront your issues with yourself before bashing your neighbor, then discuss with your neighbor. If you kill it you get no answer.It just does not work, by way as factions of the same religion killed each other all the time during the human history, and that probably happened almost for all religions.
Do extremists seriously believe they can "kill" their problem?
The killing, nearly as much as some reactions afterwards, were just an example of how primitive humans can be. Moreover acting in the name of a God by strictly sticking to a book also implies a belief that one is a perfect reader... Once again is a problem of ego: nobody is perfect unless he is a God (by the way, gods usually do ask for love, not war). |
| Both critics and humorists are an essential part of the society. They help us get better and think twice, which prevent people from becoming stupid fascists, racists or extremists. |
Some just lacks intelligence, faith, compassion and love. The killers are the real losers in the end, being stupidly dead by doing totally stupid use of their lives, while putting the lives of everyone in more danger. They solve nothing but are at the root of more violence.
The racists will just LOVE them as it will give them an opportunity to harm the immense majority of peaceful and respectful religious people of the common and moderate form of religion.
Saying that elsewhere others are killing people gives no more moral right to kill people, even when it is true! Seriously: when a neighbor is stupid it does not mean one is less stupid. It is all a point of view.
Eye for eye will make the world blind (Gandhi). And Kalashnikovs for pens is a mark of a very very sick way of praying a God.
As some do, considering Charlie asked for such a "divine" repression is the symptom of another serious problem that is within the hand of the gun holder: address your own problems first, then talk! Death never helped solve lost or fragile minds, and cowardly reverting to the lowest expression of the animal within us instead of trying to achieve a moral high stance.