In his blog Pharyngula, PZ Myers writes about the death of bin Laden:
While it’s necessary to stop terrorists, sometimes with violence, it is barbarous to gloat over the execution of an enemy. I find the chanting crowds cheering over the corpse disturbing, and the triumphal tone of our leaders is misplaced. We killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and threw away trillions of dollars, and our trophy is the bloody corpse of one old man? There’s no victory in that.
I’m also cynical. What was the point? Nothing will change. We live in Idiot America, which is also Fearful America, which is also Paranoid America, which is also Solve-Our-Problems-With-A-Gun America. One figurehead is dead, now the focus of our country’s fear will shift to some amorphous mass of generic Muslims, and the troops will continue their destruction, and we’ll still flag our cowardice with pointless color changes at our airports, and we’ll continue to sacrifice our civil liberties at the altar of national security. Nothing was accomplished, our purpose is as vague and tyrannical as ever, we’ll need to continue to kill more to feed our illusion of safety.
Does this have anything to do with Myer’s militant Atheism? No. . . . Well, maybe! Read Pharyngula (about two posts down) and see where he reminds us:
. . . Are we smug and arrogant? Damned right, and with good reason. . . . As individuals, atheists tend to score high on measures of intelligence, especially verbal ability and scientific literacy. . . .
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