Exporting Terror
5 Aug
Disturbing yet honest interview with an ISIS defector.
Tag Archives: religion
What We Believe In
19 Feb
If you want to see what a society really believes in, look at what the biggest buildings on the horizon are dedicated to.Joseph Campbell
Wickedness
10 Feb
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes
Hell
7 Apr
Maybe you don’t go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don’t do.Chuck Palahniuk
Heaven On Earth
4 Dec
Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves — or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.Ayn Rand
Religion
4 Jul
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Saddam’s blood Qur’an
22 Dec
Forget the trumped up WMD reports, if they wanted to rally the nation around invading Iraq all they needed to do was tell everyone about this.
Over the course of two painstaking years in the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein had sat regularly with a nurse and an Islamic calligrapher; the former drawing 27 litres of his blood and the latter using it as a macabre ink to transcribe a Qur’an.
[via Kottke]
Keep your identity small
3 Dec
Paul Graham provides an elegant analysis of why religious and political discussions are so polarizing.
What’s different about religion is that people don’t feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone’s an expert.
Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there’s no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.
[via clusterflock]
