Wait. Why are we downmodding this? This news is rather troubling to me. Is this due to the content of the news or who posted it?

As for the topic? Religion & Spirituality? This... is certainly that.

Numbers is our pet troll. We feed him downmods and he gives us shit. It's a symbiotic relationship.

Downmodded for the context in which it was posted.

Lets not pretend this was posted to foster intelligent discussion.

It was posted because numbers is a bigoted closet case self-loathing tranny, whom eclipses maryyugo in fearful disliking of brown skinned people.

Part of me wants to mod this troll, part of me wants to mod wrong category

Seems like it would have been a good fit for the new 'dystopian violence' category

Probably wouldn't even deserve a downmod had it been categorized as such.

“Seems like it would have been a good fit for the new 'dystopian violence' category”

Yeah right.

Because how could any reasonable person think that killing a Catholic priest at the altar while praying to Allah could have anything to do with religion?

Pope on priest killing: World is at war, but it's not a religious one (autoplay video)

So I guess that means Pope Francis is not a 'reasonable person'.

As far as I can tell the Pope is a cretin, a premise your link, with its characteristic inability to grasp the obvious, only confirms.

Killing a priest at the altar while praying to your god is a matter of religion & spirituality - end of fucking list. To debate something so self-evident is absurd.

So anyone who disagrees with you, including the pope, is a cretin.
That's very convenient.

God I am going to hate this.Just agreeing with you makes me want to go take a shower...but There are some on both sides of this conflict Christian and Muslim for who this is a war of religion. There are some on both sides hoping to bring on the "end times". This at time is religious war...this was one of those times.

I would actually like to discuss the article, if anyone's got a thought.

My stance: Europe, in general, has been showing a remarkable amount of restraint in response to this shit. Don't get me wrong, I know they and we have bombed people. Know what they haven't done yet? What we did. That's encouraging, at least.

So, in this case both the victim and the perpetrator are members of religions I am not on good terms with. This offers a rare a moment for me. Roman Catholicism and Islam are current, and historical enemies of reason. But it was not always that way.

Anyone who today enjoys Aristotle, or who likes math, or even reason as a philosophy itself being in existence today owes at least some respect to Islam, because the the Rashidun Caliphate (the guys in the Koran other than Muhammad...) they did in fact preserve and help perfect these things.

The Roman Catholic Church has contributed directly to astronomy since at least the 1200s. The entire field of genetics would likely not exist without Gregor Mendel. I love education, and the very concept of the University as we understand it is from the Catholics.

However, Islam in the 1100s began to do away with science. Abu Hamid Al Ghazali did the world a huge disfavor, because if Islam had continued to contribute as they did, I believe we would have seen many technologies much sooner than we did.

In contrast, the Roman Catholics started off like dicks. We lost so many things because of them, things that took us ages to recover and put to use. But luckily for those of us in the Western World, when real and possibly easily accessed education became the norm... the Catholic church lost their power over civilization.

And so, I know that we are always a revolution or charismatic asshole away from losing deeply important things to me. It's happened both ways, from a people dedicated to the pursuit of science and knowledge losing that in a mire of close minded religious political upheaval, to and relatively unenlightened people learning and throwing off religious shackles.

And that is why I don't hate Islam, and I do not hate Roman Catholicism. Without them, we would not have some of the things I love. But I am very worried about them, as everyone should be. Because they are also the reason we have lost so much.

Today, it's clear that Islam has a problem with fundamentalism encouraging terrorism. It's clear that many of the places that have given over to theocracy are shit holes.

And that will be true for us as well, if we forget that these forces are not dissimilar. It's just that one of them currently has real power in the world, and the other does not.

What happened here is a tragedy. The priest, who was innocent and by all accounts a decent human being, did not deserve to die violently and I do not celebrate his death. As for the perpetrator, I refuse to hate everyone that shares his religion just because he is part of the forces in the world I can't stand.

I really hope someone fucks ISIS in the ass soon.

I think your post could have been truncated to just the final 2 paragraphs.

Eh, sometimes I like to write. Don't read it if you don't like?

Re: Aristotle, Mendel and any other person who contributed to the sciences while also a member of a religion.

My stance is that it really had nothing to do with the religion, outside maybe a structure that provided food and shelter. Guys like the ones you mentioned would have likely made the same contributions in the absence of religion as well, they just happened to live during times when almost the entire human population was held in the thrall of organized religion. They were members of a religion because at that time, there was little other choice. Between being able to live a "normal" life or choose one of apostasy, shunning and possibly death, the clear choice is to be a religious man.

Sure, they may have believed as fervently as others, but again, these were times when atheism and science held little sway and religion informed peoples lives from cradle to grave.

I wasn't talking about Aristotle as a religious person. I am talking about him as a historical figure in the west at ALL. Without Islam, those things would have been totally lost to us thanks to the Catholic Church, it was Islam that preserved them and we were able to translate them from Islamic sources to enlighten us on the roots of western philosophy.

Like I said, the debt is great.

Ah, fair enough. I thought you were saying that their scientific production was as much to do with religion as it was with their own innate intelligence.

Hmm, maybe that is the case with some of them. I honestly could believe that a medieval Catholic astronomer, for example, could have been legitimately interested in heaven because of his religious beliefs, and that is what nurtured his intelligence. That does not seem unreasonable to me.

However, I agree, the real contribution these people have to science is their work and not their faith. However, faith can inspire curiosity. That is why the caliphs preserved information from cultures they were not from, and is why some people stared into the heavens.

I will take that, that is a good thing. It does not excuse the bad things, clearly, but I can not fault anything which leads someone to try and learn something about the world around them.

Sorry guys. I posted this in haste and neglected to provide the name of the murdered man.

His name was Jacques Hamel.

He was named a vicar at the St.-Antoine church in Le Petit-Quevilly and joined the church at Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in 2000, assuming the role as auxiliary priest in 2005.