Let them make that start, why don't we.

Too bad the UN can't do what it was designed to

You seem to conjure up all sorts of images. Actually, no. If I supported anything about the cold war, it would be to keep up the arms race and make sure they couldn't do anything without risking their own annihilation. Those people could be reasoned with. These people cannot.

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In theory, yes. However, you cannot make things better overnight or even over 10 years. Question is, can you wait till it works and religion has no sway? Mankind has not been able to get rid of religion since who knows when. How much longer will it take? Can you wait that long?

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No, you cannot make things better overnight. You can make them incrementally better every day... it all adds up. Things can be a lot different in 10 years. The longer we wait to start, the longer it takes to get there.

Religion will have sway for the foreseeable future. The goal should be for religion to be one aspect in a balanced life. The goal should be to make people's lives on earth decent enough that they aren't rushing so quickly to get to the other side. Make people's lives decent, and the false promises of religion and the afterlife won't seem so attractive anymore.

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We lead a relatively pleasant life here. Yet, religion has a huge sway on our politics. If we can't even get that monkey off our backs, how can we even hope to try help them with it?

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Maybe by not torturing their people and giving the radical mullahs more ammunition.

Maybe by not attempting to force our system on them under false pretenses.

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https://media.giphy.com/media/X3nnss8PAj5aU/giphy.gif

So that instead of having infinite reasons to hate us, they have infinity - 1 reasons?

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There was no moral justification for it. Back then it was acceptable to some to target civilians. Now we at least try not to kill civilians.

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It was done to save the lives of US soldiers. That is a justifible reason. We had to make war so horrible that they knew that even suicide would not work in preventing the total destruction of their nation forever.

The reason we do not engage in torture is better explained by my now favorite Fox News anchor:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEtFMj6ZiHM

So is this. Info gleaned from such interrogations might save lives. If it even saves 1 life, I'd be for it. Hell, I'd volunteer to do it myself.

And it worked then. Wonder why we abandon working strategies.

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Didn't say act like them, either.

keep shooting, you'll hit something eventually.

.... I don't hate the people who kill without regard to laws of war. I just want them to stop or I want them dead. Their choice.

^ since we have been guilty of that Iraq, don't be surprised if that is what you get. One day a generation of orphans created by us will be grown men and women who ask why their parents were killed in our Hitler-style invasion, committed without regards to the laws of war.

But wouldn't Shepard Smith say that is no justification for killing so many civilians and destroying so much non-military property? I only ask because he is your favorite Fox News anchor.

All moral considerations aside, it appears to me that torture is not an effective way to gather intelligence, but there are people, Shepard Smith included, who don't care about that. Even if torture saves American lives, Shepard Smith says that America doesn't torture. By that logic, America also doesn't do what we did to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden. Right?

Define effective. If time were infinite and we could roll back events, sure. But if you have to have an answer ASAP, can you wait that long? If your loved ones had 2 hrs to live without the information I have, would you try play detective and waste their time or try extract it from me?

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Yes, religion has a large (perhaps not "huge") sway on our politics. More than I'd like. But not to the point of fomenting violence, hatred, terrorism, suicide bombing, and revolution on the scale that we see in places without hope.

Veering off topic a bit, I think society rides a pendulum. We've gone through a time when religious fundamentalism has had some resurgence. I think it is partly a reaction to the huge societal changes that happened in the post WWII era. First we had women enter the workforce in huge numbers during the war, then leaving the workforce in huge numbers. Then the rise of suburbia. The rise of mass media. The Vietnam war started a distrust of government and a questioning as to the morality of the US. Then Watergate further eroded trust in the government. In parallel, we had the social upheaval of the '60s with drugs and the sexual revolution. The deep recession and energy crisis of the early 70's. Women's Lib and inflation drove women back to work in droves, and the traditional family organization changed overnight. We had the high crime and drug use of the late '70s and '80s. The increasing disparity in wealth and rise of personal debt. The outsourcing of high-paying semi-skilled work. The increasing complexity of technology. It's been a HELL of a ride, and a lot of people have had trouble keeping pace. They've been desperate for simplicity, for stability, and they find comfort in religion. Some of the more vocal and fundamentalist religious organizations have fed the culture wars by being highly critical of the changes in society and attributing them to a lack of morality and christian beliefs. These people tried to exercise political power, but they were largely duped and used by the politicians. I think the pendulum is now swinging back.... The fundamentalists are, I think, beginning to turn back towards religion and small-scale local activism, where churches always had a big role. People are adjusting to the changes in society. Nearly everyone now knows gay people, bi- or tri-racial people. Many people have neighbors who are Indians, Koreans, Vietnamese, or from other far-off places. Stereotypes are crumbling in the face of people's real-life experience that tells them people have more similarities than differences, no matter what their background, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc. I for one am optimistic that the influence of organized religion on society is waning.

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