Claire McNabTerrifying footage of religious extremists taking over the Middle East.
AltbotThat's okay, @altbot.
It fries my head too.
Paul_stilgarNormally as an atheist, I respect other human beings but I admit that in the case of religious extremists, I make an exception.
A little prayer to mother nature so they can join their gods as soon as possible .
Christine Burns MBE 🏳️⚧️📚⧖@2legged As a woolly minded bedwetting old lefty I’m usually unwilling to deploy hard-hitting epithets but occasionally there is no reasonable alternative. I think the term “nutters” is fully justified here.
kit@christineburns @2legged I'm not sure there are more appropriate terms than Christofash and Fundamentalist.
I grew up with these humans, and they are not nuts, just fundamentally opposed to my way of life and existence.
I don't want to excuse them by trivialising their thinking.
Oh, and isn't it interesting in which contexts "fundamentalist" is a slur, especially when used by the West.
@hypostase The term "nuts" encompasses many flavours of nuttiness. But we are looking here at people who believe that their sky pixie is a god of love and justice who is guiding a notoriously mendacious and avaricious fraudster and serial abuser to do God's will by bombing the hell out of humans.
My only objection to using the term "nuts" for those people is that is far too mild and too polite.
Again, I don't want to trivialise their thinking.
I don't know a human who isn't inconsistent in some fundamental aspect of their life, including me.
Yes, they are mendacious, and I will not give them any out about their choices.
They have agency, and this is how they chosen to use it, and that is on them.
From a purely tactical perspective, if I weaken my theory of mind by assuming poor thinking on their part, I expose myself to the risk of unforseen attacks.
Which, come to think of it, seems a pretty common reaction from a lot of folk.
They are what they are, and are entirely predictable, and utterly fucking dangerous to me and everything I care about.
I will not give them an inch.
@hypostase I see where the disagreement arises. But I absolutely don't share you assumption that nuts means a lack of rationality or lack of agency. The world sadly has no shortage of very clever, very rational nutters.
@2legged it's less an assumption as my understanding of the meaning of the word, and how it is used as a derogatory term. See also 'crazy', which I really preferred to avoid as a slur.
@hypostase I have no problem with derogatory terms being applied to people who use religion to exercise cruel and violent power over others.
Madness can be rational. Some of the worst madness is v rational.
Here in Ireland we had throughout the 20th century a religious hierarchy which systematically imprisoned women as slaves and children as rape fodder. Every day I lament the underuse of derogatory terms for the people who rationally applied the bible and theology to get outcomes of evil.