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Comment by DamnYuppie | Hacker News Reader

Question then becomes which one?

All of them...

That won't help one bit. You make the assumption that extremism originates from religion while it can originate from any kind of ideology. Religion is not the source of violent extremism, just the most convenient justification. Not to mention banning another religion (a very extremist thing to do by the way) is completely impractical and will only increase the division between religious and non-religious people which will only fuel the fire.

You're right, but in practice, what other ideologies are behind attacks? Perhaps a few from "eco terrorists", but otherwise?

Targeting religion is not quite fair, to be sure. It's the general war on rationality that is causing so much damage.

It just happens to be so that the people from the countries we have been interfering with for the last decades are mostly Muslim. Before that it was relatively peaceful and extremism was nearly non-existent. The current anti-Western extremism is reactionary.

> You're right, but in practice, what other ideologies are behind attacks?

Remember the anarchists of the late 19th century? The Bolsheviks in Russia? The long Cold War? That was primarily fueled by atheistic progressivism, and killed more people than all the religious wars in history put together.

>Religion is not the source of violent extremism

The violent extremists disagree with you. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the organizer of the Paris attack, said his goal was to kill as many non-believers as possible for Allah.

And Bush said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So what?

ISIS kills believers of Allah in Syria and other places because it's trying to solidify it's power as a government.

Once again, the violent extremists disagree with you.

ISIS is attempting to start an Islamic Caliphate, considers anyone standing the way of them do so as an apostate, and kills them as such.

So it's a government trying to solidify it's power? Got it.

For the purpose of establishing a theocracy to launch attacks on non-believers? Yes.

Like I said, religion is just being used to justify the crime. Like fighting terrorism is being used as an excuse to justify our own crimes (spying on people, torturing people, bombing with drones causing civilian casualties etc.).

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