tower of learning
> well, yes. as we've seen in the last few days, no one ever dies
> for empirical truth. I mean, who'd crash a plane and kill
> themselves and thouands of other for pythagoras' therom. all
> religion has an element of doubt, and it's here that believers
> find the (non-empirical) "truth".
well, i've heard of people shooting each other over an argument over a quarter, so i really don't know.
but can you honestly say they did it for religious reasons? we don't know. The thing people forget is that many places in the world are not individualistic ones as a society. Their lives are based on being in a team and not being an individual hero. Over here, we think "they are crazy for willingly killing themselves!" but just like with the Japanese, they don't see their death as an individual loss. They think of it as a sacrifice on behalf of the team. They may do things on behalf of "Allah" but we do many things on behalf of "God" so you can't really point the finger at anyone for imagining God takes special interest in their life and causes. It makes me think of the Bob Dylan song "with god on their side".
All I know is I was reading the teletext on the bottom of the screen of a newscast where they were saying the family of one of the dead terrorists said he could not really be described as a "religious fanatic".
> well, that's my opinion. otherwise, going to church would just
> be like going to maths class, right?
oh wait. you forgot the Chaos theory and all of the people in Jurrassic Park who died because they wouldn't heed it. :^)
And I still can't get my head around any of it. Even on TV. But I don't belong to a church. I was raised without a religious affiliation and most of me wants to stay that way, although I could probably go for Lutheranism because it's catholicism lite. And I was a bit impressed by the priest because he was calling for us to not react with our own attack and not to hate them and so on which is one of the more mature statements I've heard out of anyone thus far instead of carpet bombing half of the planet or sending our troops to rout out some dingbats in Columbia making bombs out of fermented coffeebeans and donkey manure because they just so happened to fall under the edict of "we will rid the entire planet of everyone who hates us."