RE: A muslim's perspective on the terrorist attack in Nice, France
Religious belief is irrational. They are muslim just as you are and that is precisely the problem. Your system of belief might not include the murder of people, but the belief system you subscribe to subjugates reason, and in doing so creates the slippery slope that allows this sort of absurdity to happen. In the US, we have anti-abortion and anti-gay fanatics of the christian variety, obviosuly the vast majority of religious people don't think bombing or gunning down gays and abortion providers is right, and yet many churches talk about the sins of homosexuality and abortions. The churches that don't do that are still culpable for relieving people of their duty to think about life rationally. There is no god and the sooner people can let go of these dangerous myths the sooner we can move on as a species. Of the thousands of gods who have existed, why is this one god so hard to put down? Is he not just as absurd as zeus or thor?
A lot of things to respond to, by I'll start with this - there is no historical evidence of zeus or thor existing. There is, however, historical documentation of the Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Mohammad existing and actually walking on this earth (along with other people that are alleged to be sent by God and documented in religious scripture). These human beings are not mythology like the Greek gods, they are actually real humans that were on this planet and seen and documented. Once we agree that these people were real people, the next thing to be debated is their message regarding God and whether their message was truthful or false and whether they were actually Prophets. If you believe they were Prophets that came with a true message, then you believe in God. If you believe they were liars or con artists, then you may not believe in their God.
The historical evidence is thin. Jesus like much of the bible seems like a combination of several mythic tropes from other cultures. The magic powers and miracles of christ have neither scientific or credible historical evidence to support them. No one wrote down anything he said, it was all crafted long after the fact. That being the case what good is it if a man named Jesus existed but everything said about him was made up? Moses has similar legendary status and there is no real historical evidence for any of his deeds or that he really existed("Scholarly consensus sees Moses as a legendary figure and not a historical person."wikipedia). There really isn't strong evidence for anything in exodus or that the jews were much more than an unwanted rival warring tribe of people, the slavery myth has zero archelogical support. The old testament reads like an after the fact reckoning of the plight of an ignorant group of nomads who when times were good their god was happy and when times were bad they had done sinful things. It is all nonsense, and since muslims piggy back on this nonsense they too are living in fantasy land. Zeus and Thor could have similiar roots as these legendary christian figures, they could very well have been normal humans deified by the ignorant fearful masses of humanity desperate to understand the chaos around them, historical records from those periods are incomplete so we can never know the true origin. Historical obscurity makes myths, and eventually the bible and all its characters will be seen as purely mythological. We have almost killed off all the gods, just a handful left to put down, and then humans can rise to our full potential.