Good, Evil, And Religion

There's been so much rhetoric lately on domestic terrorism, given the recent events in Paris and now San Bernadino, CA.  It seems there's no middle ground for people who think the answer is arming ourselves with more automatic weapons, or banning said weapons, or perhaps banning immigration altogether.

This week, it was taken to the extreme by the non-to-be-taken-seriously Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who suggested banning new Muslims from entering America.  It's an unconstitutional, certifiably insane idea, but he actually gets cheers from other extreme Republicans for saying it.

I plan to blog about the presidential candidates sometime before the Iowa caucuses.  In the meantime, to all who think like Donald Trump, I say in the famous words of Joseph Welsh to Senator Joseph McCarthy, who destroyed lives in the 1950s with false accusations of communism:  "Have you no sense of decency?"

The underlying current behind all of this rhetoric is religion.  We like to think religion reminds us to love our fellow man, but aren't there as many examples of religion making us hate?

I'm not just talking about radical Islam, either.  I know plenty of Christians who have no problem discriminating against gays (yes, that counts as hate), for no other reason than their religion tells them to do so.  Religion and religious differences have promulgated hate for centuries, from the Crusades to the Revolutionary War to the World Wars.

The other day, I came across a quote from more than a decade ago, attributed to Steven Weinberg.  He's an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions on the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.  (Whaaaaat?)  Let's just assume he's a very smart dude.  Oh, he's also an atheist.  His quote pretty much sums up how this deal works:

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things.  But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

Piss On The Taliban

This one is for all the bleeding hearts out there who are outraged (outraged, I tell you!) over the just-released video showing a U.S. Marine sniper team urinating on dead bodies in Afghanistan.

Are you kidding me!?  The only outrage in this whole thing should be directed at the namby-pamby civilian and military personnel who are making the dead people the victims, and the U.S. troops the enemy.

This is not torture.  This is not Abu Ghraib.  This is a group of Marines who are probably damn tired of being away from their families in godforsaken country full of people trying to kill them (possibly including the pissees), and who want to exact a little bit of mental revenge.

Is this really so hard for us to accept?  I can imagine it now, one of these Marines says, "Screw this place.  These people are trying to kill us, and nobody at home gives a damn because they're too busy trying to decide whether to buy the 'grande' or the 'venti' today.  We got them before they got us, and since there won't be any parades, let's celebrate our victory by pissing on them!"  And the other Marines say, "Hell yes!  Great idea!"  And finally one of the dumber Marines says, "Yeah, and let's put it on video so we can show everybody back home some day!"

I get that the U.S. / Obama administration has to officially condemn this conduct.  We don't want to come off looking like barbarians.  The thing of it is, the Taliban and other radical Islamic terrorist group are going to think that about Americans regardless of what we do.  They would kill us in a second if given the chance, no questions asked.

What I don't need to hear are any religious scholars out there suggesting that somehow the U.S. is desecrating Islam.  Does anyone really believe these Marines were urinating on these people as a symbol of their hatred for Muslims?  Of course not, they couldn't care less about their religious beliefs.  The Marines are simply showing their disrespect for some people who probably just tried to kill them.

This is war.  There are no rules in war, at least not in combat.  Did we follow any rules when we captured/killed Bin Laden?  If there were rules, the U.S. would surely lose the so-called war on terror, because the enemy sure as hell isn't following them.

I hope the way this plays out is, soon there will be a groundswell of support for these Marines.  Most Americans are going to see through the pious rhetoric and realize that no one was actually harmed in the shooting of this video - although someone was clearly harmed beforehand.  And piss on them!