The only instancis of this behavior I can find are among humans. But this doesn't mean that humans are more foolish than lemmings, because only *one* of the human religions seems to generate followers who behave in such a manner.
And they're still a miniscule minority of the followers of even _that_ religion.
So neither the human race nor the Muslim religion is indicted by their actions alone.
John Savard
There's a famous essay by C. S. Lewis about the capital punishment issue that I really think you ought to read.
If we abandon the notion that we only inflict penalties on those who deserve to receive them, then we allow the government to lock anyone at all up for any reason to advance any of its pet projects.
John Savard
quoting a third person:
Animals don't know how to make high explosives, or weave clothing. So a reference to strapping on explosive vests must refer to humans.
Among humans, which religious group is primarily associated with "suicide bombers"? I don't think there's any kind of a stretch involved here. Hardly a day goes by without a suicide bomber killing either a crowd of Muslims of a rival denomination in Iraq, or Jews in Israel.
John Savard
Without having to know anything about how the brain works, we can be confident of this.
Because we know how children learn.
They learn how to see because they can feel the objects in front of them, and relate them to what their eyes are telling them.
They learn to make sense of the body's motions through sight and touch as well.
Without the large amount of context provided by the kind of senses humans have, that allow sense data between different senses to be correlated, assigning meaning to sense input would be a nearly insuperable task. You couldn't learn language if you had no sense input besides character text coming in.
John Savard
All completely true, and all good reasons to have the default assumption[1][2] that a suicide bomber is a radical Muslim but to be open to other possibilities.
Not, however, a good reason to assume that someone else has followed the same logical train of thought and has arrived at the same concusion. From his comment above, I would assume that Rostyslaw would claim to not assume that suicide bombers are Muslims, yet he appears to assume that someone who wrote nothing about Muslims must be referring to Muslims. They could have been referring to the miner who recently blew himself up in Bolivia. Or to the Viet Cong who blew themselves up amidst U.S. troops during the Vietnam war.
Note [1] Keeping in mind the billions of peace-lovong Muslims, several of whom work with me. As the Qur'an says, "Do not kill yourselves, for God has been merciful to you."
Note [2] "Default assumption" meaning "lacking any other infirmation." Given the additional informartion that the suicide bombing happened in Sri Lanka, the default assumption would be that the bomber was a non-Muslim Tamil Tiger. If the suicide bombing was in the south pacific during WWII, the default assumption would be a Japanese Kamikaze. Without such additional information, one must go with the statistical probabilities; one report (that I have not personally researched and verified) claims that out of a sample of
306 people who blew themselves up, 99.7% were Muslim and 0.3% non-Muslim and that 31 of 35 organizations perpetrating suicide terror are Muslim. The real figures may be different, but they are most likely close.-- Guy Macon
The validity of this is unclear to me.
Well, it wasn't _just_ a reference to suicide bombers. It was a reference to suicide bombers who attacked others because they belonged to a different religion. That narrowed things down even further.
Your inference here is faulty because it assumes that simply because someone might object to a mention of suicide bombing in a context where such a mention is unnecessary - because it needlessly brings to mind a subject which reflects badly on Muslims - would *also* think that the "default assumption" that a suicide bomber is a Muslim is racist in itself.
Just as some people think that discarding "default assumptions" in the effort to defend ourselves against terrorism is foolhardy, others may feel that discarding them in the effort to search out racists would be foolish. To say they're being... inconsistent... is a "nice try" but, I fear, ineffective. Of course one is permitted to anticipate how one's enemy thinks.
Mind you, if one thinks of *other* ways to slaughter adherents of other faiths than suicide bombing, Muslims don't enjoy *nearly* the same monopoly; one can cite the fun and games in Northern Ireland as an example.
John Savard
Agreed, but I was taking a rather broad view of "typing". My point was that we don't know whether the brain does anything other than respond (deterministically) to its inputs.
In article , "Ken Hagan" writes: |> On Sat, 17 Nov 2007 16:07:50 -0000, Quadibloc wrote: |> |> > Without the large amount of context provided by the kind of senses |> > humans have, that allow sense data between different senses to be |> > correlated, assigning meaning to sense input would be a nearly |> > insuperable task. You couldn't learn language if you had no sense |> > input besides character text coming in. |> |> Agreed, but I was taking a rather broad view of "typing". My point |> was that we don't know whether the brain does anything other than |> respond (deterministically) to its inputs.
It almost certainly does NOT respond deterministically, as the relevant 'components' are very unreliable - but we don't have any more of a clue about the non-deterministic properties than about the rest of it.
Sometimes I think that modern applications are going that way :-(
Regards, Nick Maclaren.
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