Charlie Hebdo attack, Paris, FR

They were all atheists..

Scientologists are a religion as well..

Just because you do not see them as religious organisations is really beside the point. And Heavens Gate never hid their intentions. They were ignored.

Well I did provide you with ample examples. All have followers who adhere to their belief system. All believe that if they fail to adhere to those belief systems, then their deity of choice will punish them. None were punished or banned.

If people can start a religion 'praying' to spaghetti and meatballs, or teapots, umm, you really think you cannot start a religion about anything?

Michelle Mingo was never charged for telling Karen Roubidoux to effectively starve her child (the child dies some 50 or so days later), nor was she charged for preaching to the family about it. She claims she got a message from God.

One pastor and his church preaches to parents to beat and punch their children (and stomp them like bugs) if they show any hint of being gay.

Another church and its leaders preach and demand that followers do not take their children to the doctor or rely on any aspect of the medical profession or medicine and to only pray for their children. 80 child deaths have been connected to the Church of the First Born. It is still allowed to exist, the same with other Churches connected to it, regardless of the fact that children have died as a result of their preaching. In some States, it is perfectly legal to encourage and religiously preach to parents to not treat their children or take them to see doctors, regardless of what is wrong with a child. The few times parents have been charged, they have been given a slight slap on the wrist and allowed to reoffend. They are not banned. Some States in the US have religious shield laws, to protect such parents from prosecution if they kill their children or allow their children to die unnecessarily through their religious beliefs. For example:

4-year-old Natali Joy Mudd was found dead by detectives in her own home, with a tumor in her eye that was almost as big as the rest of her head. At the horrific scene, a police sergeant found horizontal trails of blood along the walls of the house. The trails matched the height of the girl’s head. Natali had apparently been leaning against the wall as she dragged herself from room to room, blinded, trying to find a way to freedom, before the tumor killed her.​

Natali’s parents belonged to the Faith Assembly Church, a Pentecostal offshoot. They didn’t believe in medical care, and they were not prosecuted because Indiana had strict religious shield laws. Two years later, Natali’s five-year-old sister died from an untreated tumor in her stomach the size of a basketball.

The Faith Assembly Church was responsible for as many as 100 childhood deaths and for a maternal childbirth mortality rate that was 870 times the usual rate. The most common cause of death was infant mortality in home births; something that is now rare in Christian Science because it now supports prenatal care and hospital births attended by doctors.
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You can pray to a spot on your wall and tell your religious followers to not treat their children for common medical complaints and especially if you live in a state with religious shield laws, nothing will happen to you.

Actually, it is religious freedom laws and religious shield laws that are the issue.

However since they are in place to protect mostly Christians in the US, at least, they will not be removed, despite repeated requests that they be lifted because of the dangers they pose to children. You see, the harm is not just from one religion. It stems from all religions. The increasing religious flashpoint will most probably be in Israel as moderate Jews are pitted against the rising Haredi Jews who have taken to assaulting women and little girls going about their day to day lives.

The point is that religious extremism in any form poses a danger to society. More often than not, to people of the same religion but who are not extremists. While the media and the world's attention on Paris, nearly 2000 people died within a few days in Nigeria, the target of religious extremists who attacked a large village and massacred everyone in sight. At around the same time, they strapped a bomb to a 10 year old girl and made her go to a market, where they then detonated the bomb. The victims were Muslim and the perpetrators were religious extremists. If you need to eradicate it in one place, then you need to eradicate it everywhere.

I am an atheist. I don't think children need to hear about that kind of stuff. There is more than enough horror and scary crap in the world without it.

If you want to try to combat radical Islam, then young men and women need to be engaged more in society, not feel as though they are shut out to turn to radical Islamists who prey on such individuals. There is a reason why so many are radicalised and converted to radical Islam in prison.

Because prison is full of young men who feel left out of society, disillusioned and who feel they have no prospects.. And they are ripe for the picking. And many are being converted in prison. This is happening everywhere. From the US to France. In France, for example, even petty offences end up in the hard line prisons. And these young men and boys are going in either not religious or mildly religious and coming out as radicals who do go on to commit terrorist acts or threaten acts of terrorism. They are, literally being radicalised while in prison. They go in, feeling they are excluded from society, away from their parents, poverty, lack of education or lack of encouragement to remain in school, they are unemployed with few employment prospects. Easy prey. And they are being preyed on.

I do believe any religious group that preaches extremism, regardless of the religion, should be banned. I say this because I have family members who are becoming Christian fundamentalists who are into the Old Testament. And it is terrifying to watch and witness. It is like watching someone descend into madness.

 

Yes it is. However in today's political climate in so many parts of the world, atheism is not trusted. US politics, for example, is focused so much around God and Christianity, and frankly, I wouldn't trust right wing Christian fundamentalists who continually try to foist their religious beliefs on others through governance to do it either.

The alternative is to render the extremists impotent and deny them the chance to convert others. They can be banned. Instead, they are ignored by the authorities. Man Haron Monis, the terrorist who took the hostages in Sydney just before Christmas, had been reported multiple times to the federal police because Muslims knew and felt that he posed a risk to society, and they were ignored. In 2009 he had threatened the principal of a Muslim school in Sydney, via dozens of faxes, because the principal had arranged an ANZAC Day commemoration ceremony (ANZAC Day is a very important day in Australia) and because the principal had established an inter-faith relationship with the local Jewish school. Monis found this offensive and though unconnected to the school, he began to send a series of threatening letters to the principal, threatening him, even threatening to kill him for associating with "infidels". The principal also felt that Monis posed a danger to the students, as he was the type of person who could radicalise the students in his school. The letters were given to the Australian Federal Police in good faith that something might finally be done. Instead, Monis was removed from the terror watch list. While the letters stopped and the principal had assumed something had been done, the reality is that nothing had been done. It, like all other threats that Monis had made to Muslims in Sydney were ignored.

We know that prison is the recruitment ground in the West. It makes sense that it is. I don't understand how and why radical extremists are held and allowed to mingle with the main prison population, where they are recruiting. And we know they are. Most of the terrorists who have attacked the West from within spent time in prison, where they were radicalised. So why aren't they isolated? We are seeing it here among the Aboriginal population. Over-represented within the criminal justice system, they feel oppressed and rightly so in Australian society, because they are treated so terribly, so they are ripe for the picking and they are converting to Islam, and radical Islam at that, while in prison. And it has been going on for years, it was flagged as a danger back in 2006.

DOZENS of violent criminals are being brainwashed by hardliners and converting to radical Islam in jail, creating a serious national security time bomb.

Federal police yesterday warned that criminal converts could become "a significant issue in the future", and Muslim leaders fear Aboriginal inmates are most in danger.
"Radical fanatics could convince my people to become killers ... they're already prone to violence because they grew up in racist, violent society," Koori Muslim Association director Rocky Davis said yesterday.

Already there were hardcore criminals, including Aborigines, at some maximum-security prisons who had converted to Wahabism - a fundamentalist branch of Islam practised by Osama bin Laden - by radical clerics or fellow prisoners.

Mr Davis, head of Redfern's Aboriginal Youth Centre in Sydney's inner south, said he regularly visited jails and was concerned about 40 Aboriginal prisoners he believed were Wahabi converts. His fears were also shared by the best-known Aboriginal Muslim: champion boxer Anthony Mundine.

Mr Davis, a 40-year-old former inmate also known as Shaheed Malik, said Aboriginal prison converts were highly susceptible.

"I've been to a few talks where imams have talked about jihad and violence and oppression and it's very, very simple to convince someone that's already oppressed to become an oppressor," he said.

"If you're disenfranchised and you're oppressed and you've got no economy and you've always been discriminated against, you're the most likely to become a terrorist, you're the most likely to become a fanatic - and that's the thing that I have to worry about because my people are disenfranchised, they're oppressed," he told The Australian.

Mr Davis, who is completing a degree in social welfare at Sydney's Macquarie University, said Wahabis were increasingly infiltrating the prison system to poison the minds of Muslims.

"Wahabi clerics, they're already in prison recruiting," he said. "Most of the Muslims in prison now are Wahabi ... including the Aboriginals."

The concerns raised by Mr Davis, who converted to Islam in the early 90s while serving a 14-year jail sentence for armed robberies and other offences, come as Muslim leaders urged the Howard Government to back a plan to tackle the radicalisation of converts. The Australian revealed this week that the Muslim community was worried about marginalised converts turning to extremist clerics.

The Australian Federal Police has also identified prisons as an emerging problem. While not an immediate issue, "the experiences overseas show that there is a potential that it will become a significant issue in the future", a spokeswoman said.

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As of 2014, nothing has been done about it. France is facing a similar issue with non-practising or very moderate Muslim men being converted in prison. They know who are doing it, but again, nothing is done to segregate those individuals from the main prison population. If you want a prime example of the dangers of allowing young men to be radicalised in prison or ignoring what is happening in prisons, then you need only to look at what happened last week:

One of the Charlie Hebdo attackers who led a deadly shooting rampage at the magazine’s Paris office last week was radicalized by a militant jihadist network that has produced some of Europe’s most dangerous extremists, the New York Times reported Monday.

Chérif Kouachi reportedly trained with the Buttes-Chaumont group, a homegrown cadre of radicalized young Muslim men from an immigrant neighbourhood in the 19th Arrondissement whose members were arrested in 2005 for sending some of their own to fight in Iraq.

While in jail, Chérif Kouachi was recruited by the French-Algerian jihadist Djamel Beghal who had plotted to bomb the United States Embassy in Paris in 2001. It was during this time that Beghal recruited Amedy Coulibaly, the shooter who killed four hostages at a kosher market in Paris on Friday.

Buttes-Chaumont may have largely disbanded when the 2005 arrests were made. But its members’ most important connections were made with other extremists in French prisons.

The boys of Buttes-Chaumont, intermingling with prominent jihadists in jail, became increasingly hardened and committed to radical Islam.

“He [Cherif] was much more radical when he was judged in 2008 than he was in 2005, when he was arrested,” Buttes-Chaumont defence lawyer Dominique Many told the Times. “So perhaps in jail he became what he is today, the Kouachi that we knew these last days.”

According to a leaked French intelligence report that the Times cites, close to 300 Muslim inmates were deemed radical “time bombs” who officials believed would pose a threat once they were released.

The men of Buttes-Chaumont comprise just a handful of the several hundreds of young, aliented Muslims in France who have traveled to fight with jihadists in Syria and Iraq. French officials are now starting to question whether they may have underestimated the influence of extremist networks like Buttes-Chaumont.​

Which begs the question.. Why are hard line radicals allowed to mingle with the normal prison population when everyone knows this is where they are recruiting?

While we may not be able to create laws to control religions, there are several things that can and should be done to reduce the impact and deny extremists the ability to recruit. We can monitor religious schools and yes, we should be monitoring home schooling programs which we know in the US, is exceptionally popular with Christian radicals (who also go on to commit acts of home grown terror). Prison inmates who are radicals should be segregated from the rest of the prison population and not allowed to have any contact with the rest of the inmates (treat them like we do paedophiles and isolate them completely from everyone else) and frankly, ban, extremist or radical and firebrand imams and priests from having access to inmates. It might be a start.

 

Why would you sell yourself out?

That depends. It is a bit of a hole to be honest. I don't believe the State should interfere with religious belief, but I also do not believe that extremism should be allowed to be taught in schools, nor do I believe it should be allowed anywhere within government or public sphere. I also believe that fundamentalists who find their way into our prison systems should be segregated completely from the main prison population, treat them like paedophiles and keep them completely away.

Our former prime minister is an atheist. And so much was made about it at first. It shouldn't have been. I look at the US political system and I am appalled at just how much religion intrudes in governance.

It should not be. Then again, education should not be ignored full stop. Battles in public education systems about teaching evolution and teaching sex education should not happen. And yet it does. And it's bloody stupid.

What official recognition do you think is needed? The biggest dangers are the ones who are doing it on the sly, quietly, creating extremists under the guise of freedom of religion. It's not the big churches, mosques, temples that are creating extremists. They are so well publicised that word would get out. It's the little ones, the out of the way ones, the ones doing it quietly, out of sight. Like in prisons and home schooling and small and exclusive private schools. 100 deaths of babies and infants attributed to a religion and nothing is done about it. Prisons becoming breeding ground for recruiting and creating religious extremists, and nothing is done about it. Home schooling creating religious fundamentalists, and nothing is done about it.

The problem with any such ideology, as we are seeing in Israel, is that they have distinctive influence over the political process. We see it in the States with right wing Christians and we see it in many Middle Eastern countries who try to bow down to extremist ideologies. The problem with extremists is that they prey on the most vulnerable in society. That is where they are recruiting from. Breed a culture of fear, hatred, coupled with people's desperation to escape their own poverty, unemployment.. This is fast becoming a cultural phenomenon with exceptionally dangerous consequences.

I agree with you. But the problem with that is that it does not deal with the aftermath. It will create a cycle of poverty in the population who are then easy prey to the extremists who will and do tell them that the world does not care about them, and so, they turn to those they think are trying to help them.

I think the best way to combat it is to not give them the grounds to be able to recruit. Make secularism more appealing. Provide better health care to the poor, employment, facilities to African nations to feed themselves, trade their wares so that they do not feel the need to be attracted to extremists who are trying to recruit. In the West, try and provide better employment opportunities, better education, interfaith programs in religious schools, better monitoring of religious schools and religious education in public schools (should be banned personally) and more stringent control over home schooling programs and segregate extremists and fundamentalists in prison. Completely segregate them from the main prison population. Offer better rehabilitation programs that deal directly with extremists and radicalisation in prison.

My former sister-in-law filed several complaints when the nun who taught RE at her children's school started to attract more students by having a TV and an xbox in her office. She also organised that when children are sent to sick-bay, they be sent to her instead. The conversion process did not take long for many children. Nothing was done about it. In my home state, even though the courts have ruled that RE is not legal in public schools, the current State Government, led by a religious man and a right wing party, demand that it continues, in direct contravention with the law. So we opt our children out of RE. We have no other option. And RE is taught everywhere now.

I agree.

It is very difficult for us. I do know domestic abuse plays a role with one, the beatings and abuse slow down when he preaches. We've tried everything to break her out of that relationship and away from the fundamentalists they have become, but he is manipulative and he has literally broken her and she is terrified. With the other, it was depression that led her down that path after she suffered from post partum-depression, despite our desperate attempts to help her. They gave her what she felt she needed. Convinced her it was demons attacking her, and she was in such a bad place, she believed it. While ignoring the doctors who were treating her, she thought it was their prayer that cured her of the demons she thought were possessing her.. It is insidious. Over the last 10+ years, I have watched two talented, intelligent women descend down to this.. They literally prey on the vulnerable and they chip away at them until they get them. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.