TORONTO, ON – NOVEMBER 13 – The CN Tower lit up with the colours of the French Flag in support of France in the face of tragedy, on November 13, 2015 Cole Burston/Toronto Star
The Globe and Mail reports,
Gunmen and bombers attacked restaurants, a concert hall and a sports stadium at locations across Paris on Friday, killing 127 people in a deadly rampage that President Francois Hollande said was the work of Islamic State and “an act of war.”
Justin Trudeau issued the following statement:
“I am shocked and saddened that so many people have been killed and injured today in a number of terrorist attacks in Paris, France, and that many others are being held hostage.
“As the situation continues to unfold, Sophie and I join all Canadians in extending our deepest condolences to the families and friends of those killed. It is our sincere hope that the hostages are freed unharmed as soon as possible. We also wish a speedy recovery to all those who have been injured.
“Canada stands with France at this dark time and offers all possible assistance. We will continue to work closely with the international community to help prevent these terrible, senseless acts.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of France and we mourn their loss.”
Trudeau makes the erroneous assumption that all Canadians’ “prayers are with the people of France.” Trudeau does not speak for me! As one particularly sane tweet points out
“Prayers” ain’t gonna cut it.
That continuous narrative, known as consciousness, is sometimes referred to as prayer. Some people simply address this narrative to an imaginary deity, who they imagine has the time and desire to telepathically receive them, even without the presence of any sound waves. They are delusional of course. It would be just as delusional to imagine that the French could telepathically monitor any of our supportive thoughts about their current grief.
The French must be heartened to hear, or read, reports that Canada grieves for their losses and supports their efforts to restore safety to that part of the glob. It doesn’t matter to them, all that much, that some Canadians are delusional.
“It doesn’t matter to them, all that much, that some Canadians are delusional.”
It certainly matters that the terrorists are delusional.
I’m really out of my depth here but I was trying to make a distinction between delusional people and psychopathic people. The delusions were derived from environmental forces: their upbringing. The psychopathy, personalities aside, were the result of objective planning.
Religion bolsters the delusions and desire fuels the actions. As Tennessee Williams pointed out, desire is like being on a streetcar that is trundling towards the graveyard. The destination cannot be changed: getting off of the streetcar is the only salvation.
As a Redditor said today, “Isn’t prayer what caused this?” As an antitheist, my response would have to be, “Yes it is, more or less.”
30 years ago I stopped calling myself an agnostic and privately declared ‘there is no god’. In the last two years, I have become an antitheist. To be “just” an atheist is to be guilty of the same thing we accuse moderate Muslims of: refusing to tackle the extremism that is in their midst.
I’m an agnostic atheist who doesn’t blame all Muslims for the acts of a few, because that would be xenophobic and bigoted. And this…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy#Guilt_by_association
Don’t much care to quibble about word choice on this issue…
Hopefully he does more than just pray, but wishful thinking seems to be his main talent unfortunately.
We must band together to go beyond imagining a world with no religion and actually working together to make it happen. This is a great responsibility and the past, polite stance of inclusion (even respect) of many agnostics/atheists in relation those who believe that religious thought, language and actions are somehow benign must stop and be replaced by a strong and vocal lobby of reason and humanism.
We spend too much time obsessing about the existence of god and how to argue evolution effectively but the first job must be to expunge religion from public life. Then we can have further debates about the finer points of delusions and the further insults to civilized life emanating from spiritual conformism.
Perhaps the burden should be bourn by the Sunnis who live among us. They don’t have to become apostates. Nevertheless, they could quit the mosque entirely. Many of us have done this same thing to reduce the political influence of Churches or Synagogues. When devout Muslims see the harm being done, don’t they have some responsibility to their host countries? They’re not being asked to enrol in the military or to pay for the damage out of their own accounts.
Canada is a secular country (no thanks to our politicians) united by a social safety net and by either Civil Law or Common Law. At the same time Canada is divided “six ways from sundown” by criminal gangs and imported, for the most part, religions. We should probably also mention stupidly partisan politicians.