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Religious extremism is a scourge on an otherwise decent earth we live on.
I have a theory (backed up by nothing but pure and largely comical speculation) that if we got all the idiot terrorists in the world to just stop killing each other for like a few hours and sit them down and have Neil DeGrasse Tyson talk about the universe and shit, they would eventually reach the conclusion that murdering people for no apparent reason is fairly petty in contrast to the massive scale of the galaxy and everything beyond it. I know that whenever I feel like going on a murderous religious rampage and forcing weird and archaic laws on people against their will, all I have to do is look up at the night sky and remember that I’m one dude sitting on one relatively small (and extremely lucky) rock revolving around a relatively small star in a galaxy filled with about 300,000,000,000 other stars.
That’s pretty fucking mind boggling, and makes everything else seem really fucking stupid.
There’s probably a much larger and more intelligent dialog to be had on the idea that lack of education is the source of most evil. As well, this is certainly not a stance or argument against religion as a general thing. Frankly I wouldn’t care if you worshipped Pan, the pagan goat god, as your lord and savior; as long as you didn’t use it as an excuse to cut peoples heads off on YouTube. Unfortunately I really doubt any of the people we’re about to unleash hell on are going to take a step back and examine the intricacies of the universe and all of its infinite splendor. Instead, they’re just going to keep being assholes, and so they are going to be treated like assholes.
It was weird watching the President talk on Wednesday night about the state of affairs in Iraq and the war plan. It was an intense deja-vu for me back to 2003 and watching President Bush sell us basically the same thing. Circumstances are different, naturally, but it’s weird to think that Iraq has been a part of our national dialog for almost half of my life now. Having been there twice myself, I can’t help but wonder if we’ll ever see the end of it.
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