@George
After taking a little breather on this topic, I'm ready to jump in again.
What kinda kills me on all of this, especially as the horrific massacre that had happened in Norway is that I see two completely different reactions, depending on what happens...
Had the criminal been potentially associated with some sort of islamic fringe group, the narrative automatically shifts into announcing the crime (rather then denouncining it) and finding almost immediately any sort of justification for his actions.
However, since in this case the criminal does not have any of those traits, instead it's causian nutjob, there no longer any need for any sympathy or justification, add in effective buzzwords such as "right-wing" and "christian" and you now have something that's garanteed to sell headlines.
First and foremost, how they know the nutjob is a christian I have absolutely no idea and I don't think that public domain pictures of the Crusades, photos of costumes and a rushed copy-and-paste manifesto is any evidence worth printing When you start asking a couple of questions, like:
-To which Christian causes has he donated, which group was he affiliated,etc;
Nobody asks this, but they sure milk that angle like there's no tomorrow. I beleive that his actions were political and not in any religious.
The other curious tendency, is that if indeed a christian was involved in any wrongdoing, there is no generalization, no splitting hairs, nada...
The perp is defined as a "christian".
Take someone else from a different belief system, and the label stops being muslim, or hindu and starts being purely and simply "religion", in order not to offend one particular group, an homogenous label is placed on every possible creed. Does that seem rational?
But anyway, here's a shocker: ignorance and bigotry can also be found in non-religious circles and communities.
I would also go far to say that reducing all the historical facts of most major wars into a religious cause is perhaps the single most intellectually dishonest remark I've ever seen.
As much fun as it is to see "scientists" argue, I put scientists in quotes, because real genuine scientists, unlike Dawkins, Dr. Paul Zachary Myers and such, they have better things to do than spent their times writing anti-religious rants filled with pseudo-progressive platitudes and telling people how they should think on their own scientific blogs that really have nothing to do with the scientific method.
How we all came into being, I have no idea, the big bang theory is an acceptable theory, except that, it was the result and not the cause. What was the First Cause? We have no clue.
The universe is in constant expansion, but if that's the case then it is expanding on something that was already there. But we don't know.
I can understand that there are some ruffled feathers between creationists and evolutionists, but you know, at this point, who cares? Creationism as much as a flawed view of the world, barely has any footing in the US or any other part of the world, unless you count one school in the middle of Nowhere, USA, which even then, no longer teaches it, so score one for a battle in a war that's been over a long time.
So when people come to me and preach "ah, ah, ah look at those silly creationists", my response is "who the heck cares?", I don't know anyone nor was I ever taught creationism at school.
We as a human civilization have to move on, find answers. Not believe what some book says is right. If we still did this, we would be in caves, telling our children how the world is flat and how God controls the rain.
Here's another example of misinformation, the "flat Earth" myth is a subject that been embedded into pop culture for years, as apparentely Columbus wanted to prove that the world was round.
This is an insult to every historian known to man, since everybody knew (except maybe some pagans) around that time that the world was indeed round.
And you know, people have moved on, churchs are mostly just building and the Vatican is little more than a city and the Pope is little more than the spiritual leader of the Vatican city. So it puzzles me how the Church is supossed to be dominating mankind when other modern strands of irrationallity and fringe groups have a much tighter grip on politics and culture.
