Trollheart

Who are you to say that? Also, you should differentiate between normal, peace-loving muslims, probably the high majority, and radical hatemongering ones.

As for heroes: well here's what an ex-employee of the mag had to say on the news (paraphrased as I don't have a source but I saw it on the telly), along the lines of "After this, some young people who didn't know what they wanted to do with their lives will see this and say I want to be a cartoonist." So if that's not setting them up as heroes --- and encouraging further acts of blatant stupidity and arrogant mocking of other cultures, I don't know what is.

Josef K, again, for a kid you speak about the most sense here and are prepared to look at both sides of the argument. I salute you, sir.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Josef K

Okay, but when they mock Catholics or whatever it isn't nearly as big a problem - Muslims are an oppressed minority, and Catholics are not. And the cartoons about other religions weren't nearly as critical of the religions themselves and didn't violate basic tenets of those faiths. I'm not even going to touch that second sentence other than to say that it's an entirely different (and potentially horribly bigoted) argument that may clash with your first one, along with epitomizing the attitude I'm talking about - "We mock everyone equally, but Muslims more equally."
I've seen it in a couple places but it isn't incredibly important to my argument. Basically all I was saying with that sentence was that I don't approve of their actions, but whether or not I approve of their actions has no bearing on how awful an event this was and almost no bearing on whether they should have stopped under threat of violence.
I've responded to the "they mocked everyone" above, but I just want to reiterate that they weren't just attacking extremists - they were attacking all Muslims and attacking Islam as a faith.

Unknown Soldier

French rural society is extremely communitarian, cities are just like anywhere else in Europe.

Over the last couple of decades white French society has become more obsessed with retaining its culture largely for two reasons. 1) It seems to feel more threatened by its immigrant population than it should, due to its inability compared to other western European countries in absorbing their immigrant population. 2) It suffers from some kind of paranoia that the English language is completely taking over in cultural and economic matters and so tries to fight to retain what it feels it's losing.

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Chula Vista

Spot on.

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

grindy

Although I don't think religious people are stupid or especially violent (even the best of people are prone to thinking and doing stupid things), I think religion as a phenomenon is wrong, dangerous and ridiculous and should be fought against and one of the ways to fight it is ridicule. Even if it sadly hurts the feelings of religious people. The fact that religion is prominent and respected hurts atheists' feelings as well.
I do think those french cartoons were crude and unfunny, but that doesn't change my opinion about mocking religion.


Too bad you eventually decided to ignore my post, although you might have misunderstood my motivation. It's not that I was trying to bait you to say that this guy is an idiot so I could say something stupid along the lines of "So you support Hitler then?"
On the contrary, I kind of do see your point, although I still can't fully agree with you and tried to explore your opinion a bit more, by presenting another example, although, as I said, bringing Nazi germany into a totally different topic isn't a good thing, but I couldn't think of another example.

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Josef K

The language stuff is interesting; I'll have to look more into that.

Cuthbert

Ridiculous & boring, I said Islam, not Muslims.

That's not calling them heroes mate.

Chula Vista

The two words are pretty interchangeable though.

Islam - a religion practiced by Muslims.
Muslim - a person who practices Islam.

I typed "French cartoonists heroes" into Google and a bunch of links like this one came up.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/c...sts-as-heroes/

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Josef K

Religion is something that creates a lot of joy for a lot of people. I'm not really among those people, but when they aren't harming anybody, why attack their entire faith? It's not even about blind belief - I'm an apathetic (about the existence of a god) secular Jew, but I still strongly identify culturally as Jewish, and that doesn't mean that I don't feel victimized if someone attacks Judaism. (This position of holding onto a culture despite not buying into the faith that goes along with it is especially common among people who are part of religious or ethnic minorities.) By contrast, attacking the people who use religion as a tool to harm others is fine by me - if you want to attack the Israeli government that uses my religion as an excuse for apartheid, I'll probably be right there with you. But it's not okay to attack an entire religion on the basis of a couple people using the religion to abet their wrong, dangerous, and ridiculous actions.

Cuthbert

There are more Muslims in the world than Catholics.

People practice it to different extents, they aren't interchangeable. Even people who identify as Muslim don't necessarily practice it.

Did you watch that Masked Arab video?