Consider this story from the UK Independent.
Excerpt:
Abdulmutallab, 23, had lived a gilded life, and, for the three years he studied in London, he stayed in a £2m flat. He was from a very different background to many of the other al-Qa’ida recruits who opt for martyrdom.
[…]Abdulmutallab’s father, Umaru, is the former economics minister of Nigeria. He retired earlier this month as the chairman of the First Bank of Nigeria but is still on the boards of several of Nigeria’s biggest firms, including Jaiz International, a holding company for the Islamic Bank. The 70-year-old, who was also educated in London, holds the Commander of the Order of the Niger as well as the Italian Order of Merit.
Dr Mutallab said he was planning to meet with police in Nigeria last night after realising his son had joined the notorious roster of al-Qa’ida terrorists, and is said to have warned the US authorities about his son’s extreme views six months ago.
People who deny the reality of evil put us at risk by advocating policies of appeasement and redistribution of wealth. Those policies incentivize crime and terrorism by making criminals and terrorists feel a sense of entitlement to act immorally, since their behavior is really the fault of society.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
So you believe one person makes a pattern? That’s ridiculous!
If you’re poor, especially in the third world, you’re less likely to be educated, if you’re less educated, you’re more likely to be swayed by simple arguments because you only know a fraction of the truth.
LikeLike
Jerry, do you have to take the dumbest positions on every single issue? Just look at Osama bin Laden if you want another example.
LikeLike
So your following wintery’s argument – a handful of examples makes the rule? Now who’s taking the dumbest position?
while you need money to make terrorism work (think osama bin laden) you need also need a large pool of uneducated people with no futures and nothing to loose. You generally don’t see osama bin laden’s strapping bombs to themselves – they get some POOR idiot to do it for them.
LikeLike
Here is a Time magazine article entitled “Most Domestic Jihadis are Educated, Well-Off”. Time is a radically leftist publication. Maybe just a hair to the right of Newsweek.
LikeLike
Like I conceded, I have no doubt that the leaders are – you can’t hate people that you don’t know about (by this I mean, when I was poor and living in Appalachia, I had no clue about most of the rest of the world until later in secondary school, so the poor and destitute and the third world would probably not hate us if they weren’t taught to by educate people with money and power), but it takes someone who has nothing to loose and doesn’t know better (generally speaking) to strap several pounds of explosives to themselves and run into a square full of people.
As far as a magazine being left or right, I don’t much care, I care more about the argument made…I like Rick’s statement below, I think it has a lot of validity, even if a wee bit short-sided.
LikeLike
The leaders don’t do the actual attacks, those are well-educated wealthy FOOT-SOLDIERS who are attacking on our soil.
LikeLike
oh please. If poverty caused crime and terorism, one would expect all poor people to be criminals and terrorists. In fact, that is not the case. I’ve worked with poor “uneducated” people. They know the difference between right and wrong, and most choose right.
It is definitely the evil in the heart of a man without God that causes crime and terrorism.
LikeLike
I think you might want to take a second look at who all the terrorists have been lately – people who believe in god, not atheists.
I have yet to read a word on this page that indicates anyone thinks poor people are immoral – that was your wording.
LikeLike
1) This is of course to neglect hundreds of millions of deaths caused by atheist religions like communism (purges & wars), environmentalism (DDT bans), feminism (abortion), etc. and the other misery caused by the sexual revolution (broken homes, crime). The first step in all of these tragedies is to say that there is no way we ought to be, and that the purpose of life is for the strong to pursue happy feelings at the expense of the weak.
2) You have to produce an argument that the content of a religion leads to violence using the text of the religion and the life of the founder – his specific teachings. I can get racism and genocide out of the founder of your religion (Darwin), e.g. – “survivial of the fittest”. I can’t see to make it work as well with our “love your enemies”.
The question you have to answer on each worldview is this. If you are powerful and can cause the deaths of others to your own advantage without discovery and/or reprisal, what are the consequences? On atheism, there are no consequences. You’re trying to make yourself happy and killing the weak helps you to do that. (Even better if you can invent a smokescreen like “global warming” or “embryonic stem cell research” to justify killing your own children in order to save money and keep up your level of hedonism). On Christianity, even if no one ever finds out, you’ll still pay fr everything you do to one degree or another, so it’s never rational. And I don’t just mean Hell, I mean by ruining your relationship with God through selfishness and irrationality.
LikeLike
You make the assumption that people in 12 step programs make. They think if you call something god, then it is.
A chair is no more god than what muslims call god. If you deny Christ is the Son of God, sent by the Father to suffer and die for our sins, then you deny God.
LikeLike
He can’t getinto the specific teachings because then his argument would fall apart. What you get from Jesus is “free the slaves so they have time and leisure to think about God”. The problem with atheists is that they think that there are some stupid people who are not worthy of life. But everyone who can relate to God is worthy of life, and for few people who lack the mental capacity, they are useful because they elicit compassion and love from others who can learn from taking care of them and trying to help them anyway. Atheism struggles with this because they have no purpose other than happiness, and no use for relationships other than happiness. That is a fundamental difference between them and us.
When I look at a person, I think of how to expend effort, time and money to help them know God, in a way that mimics the non-coercive, rational, evidential approach of Jesus. When an atheist looks at a person, they think of how to use them to make themselves happy. And both of those responses are RATIONALLY GROUNDED by their worldviews. If you say that the universe is designed, you ask yourself “how ought I to act”. If you say the universe is an accident, you ask yourself “how should I maximize pleasure”. This is where all of this selfish, destructive behavior like abortion, single motherhood, divorce, etc. comes from. There is no duty to do right on atheism, there is only the selfish pursuit of pleasure.
LikeLike
muslims aren’t ascribing what they do to Jesus – while they consider him a prophet, Muhammed (bad spelling, sorry) is the last (and main) prophet and their teachings and moral codes allow for this. But it is what I have been saying, while your personal moral codes that you ground in christianity may not allow for this type of activity, there are other christians who ground their moral code in jesus/god and do allow for it. It’s all interpretation of the scriptures.
As for your last paragraph wintery, I can show plenty of examples of preachers (one just recently:http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/wayoflife/12/25/RichJesus/index.html) where preachers are not preaching your morality. So even how religious people within the same branch or religion (in this chase christianity) see things differently.
WBMOORE: I do deny that christ was the son of god – christ was the son of mary and some other mortal man, maybe joseph, maybe not; he was just good at selling his point. If you read the link I provided, there are a growing number of preachers that believe Jesus was wealthy and that makes sense since no one listens to poor people and as Drew and Rick maintain, the poor worry more about feeding themselves than they do about activities such as preaching/stealing.
LikeLike
Jerry, are you claiming that the hedonism and materialism promoted by televangelists like Joel Osteen are as equally grounded in the Bible compared to, say, William Wilberforce or Jennifer Roback Morse?
LikeLike
I’m saying, like the muslims, you choose who you want to be conveyor of your beliefs. You like what wilberforce and Roback have to say, they say it eloquently and in an educated manner, it makes you feel happy and content with your religion and it aligns with your moral beliefs. The televangelist is capitalizing on god (generally just to a lesser educated populace) just as practically every other person of religious power has done before them and that makes you feel bad and angry, but it’s religion – another layer of control.
I’ll leave it as this and stop with this topic.
LikeLike
Jerry,
The argument that Jesus was wealthy is a specious one and without merit – used merely to justify fleecing people of their own money.
Muslims deny that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God, just as you do. And I realize you will jnot and can not understand or accept it, but according to what God has written, that is proof they do not have God – regardless of what they claim.
LikeLike
Oh, and you are the one who said poor people are easily swayed by simple arguments – since we are speaking of crime and terrorism, then you made the connection.
LikeLike
Poor people are too busy trying to feed themselves to contemplate terrorism. It tends to be done by the middle and upper classes–student radicals. It’s vulgar Marxism to blame it on poverty, and in fact, terrorism is produced by a distorted type of idealism.
However, I wouldn’t blame terrorism on “evil.” I’m okay with using “evil” as an adjective to describe what terrorists do, but I wouldn’t use it as a noun, as if “evil” or Satan has independent ability to cause something.
LikeLike
Of course I am using it as an adjective, and more consistently than you, since I mean “a departure from the way things ought to be”, a notion which is well-founded on MY worldview.
So we agree across the board.
LikeLike
This quote from Viktor Frankl seems appropriate:
“…I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment—or as the Nazi liked to say, ‘of Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”
In regards to the less educated being the ones susceptible to terrorism, that is almost only true when they have educated terrorists to be susceptible TO.
LikeLike
Frankl’s book is a classic that everyone should read.
LikeLike
Watching a favorite movie of my wife and mine, Ever After, it always irks me when she goes to purchase the freedom of the estates groundskeeper. When the prince accosts her and she begins her argument against such imprisonment, first she begins the incorrect argument. Her man is enslaved to pay for her ladies taxes, not for theft, and she uses the argument crime comes from poverty. And second, that her argument is so very specious.
Mid-20th century Germany was one of the most highly educated societies, both in percentage of the population educated and in the level of degrees attained, and yet the majority of the nation fell prey to such an evil ideology.
Yes, the nation had been impoverished by the onerous treaty of Versailles, but shouldn’t the high level of education have pointed the poor but ambitious people towards technological dominance without the accompanying evil of anti-semitism?
LikeLike
The reason I believe many people fall for this idea (crime comes from poverty) is no one I have ever known (or even heard/read of) has been mugged by a rich person (lets ignore the banking fiasco for a minute). I have lived in 2 very poor areas – appalachia and buffalo. In both places I was mugged (twice in buffalo, neither successfully – I had some military training that helped me out) and in buffalo I had my house broken into. You know the common characteristic about all 4 crimes? They were perpetrated by poor people. Rich people don’t drive their BMW’s or Mercedes around robbing people. What I have been arguing is that the rich and powerful get the poor and destitute to commit the crimes for them in the case of terrorism.
LikeLike
The type of crime is different based upon level of access to tools or things which tempt, but crime is not caused by, nor restricted to, poverty. I have lived in poor, lower middle class, middle class, and upper middle class areas. All had break-ins.
While some terrorists are probably poor, the articles I see are stating many of the terrorists are not poor – they are well educated and are being recruited in universities.
LikeLike
I know I said I wouldn’t post on this again, but I found an interesting article that talks about this and several of the topics brought up:
http://www.slate.com/id/2240157/
It asks why so many terrorists have engineering degrees. A small excerpt:
“…propose that a lack of appropriate jobs in their home countries may have radicalized some engineers in Arab countries. …But the promises of modernization and development were often stymied by repression and corruption, and many young engineers in the 1980s were left jobless and frustrated. One exception was Saudi Arabia, where engineers had little trouble finding work in an ever-expanding economy. As it happens, Saudi Arabia is also the only Arab state where the study found that engineers are not disproportionately represented in the radical movement.”
LikeLike
Right, this is the worldview of the secular left – that no one is responsible for their own destructive behavior. No one is capable of choosing right and wrong. Therefore, people need to be coerced and controlled by the state to keep from acting in “destructive” ways.
LikeLike
One problem with the idea that it was because they did not have jobs is that many of the people who are doing the terrorism are being recruited while in college – before worrying about whether they can get a job.
LikeLike