Humanism

People have always been afraid of change. Here and now is not perfect, but it is stable. It is reliable. It is dependable. The future may seem strange and unknown and scary and it might include things that make you uncomfortable, it might include things you personally do not like. But please try to see past that and try to have faith in humanity.

19. 06. 2017, on Monday morning, around 12:20 AM a terrorist has driven a van into pedestrians in London. The man intentionally rammed into worshippers attending Ramadan night prayers at the mosque. All of the casualties were Muslims. This is truly a despicable attack as it was targeted at peaceful worshippers. Same as other terrorist attacks, victims turn out to be people who generally have nothing to do with current problems in the world – innocent bystanders.

The times we live in are difficult enough without people trying to sell so-called “fake news” as facts. Fake news is a term which was popularized by Trump in order to basically deceive his supporters that the media is dishonest. But just because in his case “fake news” cry has proven false, that does not mean that this phenomenon does not exist. We live in times where people spend huge amount of their day scrolling. Many times they scroll across some headline and believe it, without thinking or even clicking on it. Combine this tendency for instant gratification with the plainly simple truth that media these days does care a great deal about clicks, in order to get advertisements, so they form headlines like in a “you won’t believe” manner that are designed for people to click, just co confirm their bias or see something incredible.

As all atheists know, there are a lot of preconceived notions what atheism is and what atheism isn’t, what it means, what it doesn’t mean. There are jokes and stories about how theists (religious people) think that atheists eat babies, worship Satan or something similarly absurd. In reality, these stories are shown only to be a slight exaggeration.

Even if the London attacker turns out not to be Muslim or Islam-motivated, this latest attack has again spawned various debates and opinions on Islam & Terrorism, so let's write something about this.

Nobody is condemning all Muslims. This is just a given.

But to ignore the facts and to say that this has nothing to do with religion is plain wrong.