General Chat / Shootings and explosions in Paris 11/13/2015

Parallel to the soccer game that's underway right now in the Stade the France, Paris is shaken by what appears to be several suicide bombings and shootings. Right now, as I'm writing this. 18 people confirmed dead so far, with a possible hostage situation going on. Multiple shooting sites.

 

The first post in this thread on Reddit gets updated regularly with new developments:

 

https://www.reddit.c...ris_reports_of/

Following the news as well. Seems to be 60 hostages. Horrible...

 

Edit: And 26 deaths confirmed now...

Terrible... When are we gonna destroy ISIS once and for all?!

40+ victims, about 100 hostages.

Rumor has it that there was a beheading at the football stadium.

Rumor has it that there was a beheading at the football stadium.

I hope that stays a rumor... omg...

Absolutely awful, and absolutely disgusting that there are people out there in the world as unremorseful as this.

wow

Hope everyone stays safe. Not to many Frecnh folks on NE.

I figured I could best post this video here as it has a small link to the shootings and because I didn't want to create a whole post for it.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEnWw_lH4tQ

 

Brilliant 'prank' video.

I don't think they're making a point about religion, but I like how they expose uninformed opinions. It's not bad.

To be fair, both the bible and the quran contain some pretty barbaric stuff. I hate to be that guy, but aside from the occasional nutjob in the US attacking abortion clinics there isn't much christian terrorism (that I do know of, please correct me if I am mistaken) around anymore, and the crusades lie in the distant past. However, we see a lot of religious motivations behind terrorism in/from the east, or at least the terrorists claim to have religious motives. I'd be surprised if politics do not play a major role in this whole affair as well, but religion still has a MUCH higher value in the east, compared to the largely secular west. It is ever present, and much more likely to be used as a convenient tool to motivate terrorism.

And from all that I've seen there is always going to be clashes between such fundamentally different (and dare I say incompatible) systems. Just my two cents. We'd probably be better off without religion. Not because religion is inherently bad (religion served for mankind to explain the inexplicable, and there is something sooting about the idea of an afterlife that you earn through good deeds; at times muslim scholars were among the intellectual elite of their period, and many christian monks preserved pre-medieval knowledge that would otherwise have been lost), but there are always going to be people who will use it to incite hate and terror.

When religion is banned, people will find other things to kill and hate each other over. South Park made a great episode about this once, where different Atheists alliances were at war with each other over some stupid shit. 

Perhaps you're right Faas, I hope not because that would mean hate is a part of humans. I believe we have to get over religion to evolve to the next phase.

Yeah, you got a point. I suppose every ideology has the potential to empassioante (?) people to commit horrible things. Who knows, maybe one day believers in NCSO will wage war agains CSO believers. I think hatred, ambition, maybe even xenophobias of all kinds are deeply embedded in the human nature. 

Don't forget the (sometimes) sick urge to belong to a certain group. 

I agree with you, Ass. We'd be better off without religion. However I doubt that religion is the true motivation behind this terrorism movement. The terrorists don't strike me as sane, integer and devout people. I saw a cool movie about this last week, Four Lions. It's a hilarious black comedy about four British jihadists planning a bombing.

I agree with you too, Faas. Banning doesn't help. We must hope that religion just dies a slow dead, organically. Could take centuries, and I'm okay with that.

Faas, aren't humans pack animals anyways?

I am, at least. "Liam, hold my bag!", "Liam, can you please hold this for a second?", "Help me with these bags!"...

Tell me more Liam. I've never met her.