<p>If you think that Islamic extremism isn’t a threat anymore, I don’t know what to tell you. Heck, 200 Americans came very close to being blown out of the sky just a year ago on Christmas day, the Times Square attempted bombing only occurred last summer, the UPS planes with bombs in them were discovered a couple of months ago, and the Portland plot was disrupted last December (3 months ago). The United States is still very much at war now, and will be for the foreseeable future. </p>
<p>Additionally, going on your hypothetical, if all of the incidents on the list had succeeded, I’d wager that there probably would have been close to 100,000 additional American civilian casualties, a scale of devastation that this country hasn’t seen since the Civil War.</p>
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<p>No argument here, but at the present moment in time, Islamic fundamentalism poses the biggest threat to the majority of Americans. </p>
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<p>While the Bible may have been used to justify slavery in some southern circles, I think it is a stretch to claim that the Civil War was a religious war in nature.</p>
<p>I didn’t say that Islamisist terrorism isn’t a threat, it clearly is.</p>
<p>But when your enemy’s absolute max fantasy all their plans come off 100% effective over 10 years casualty rate is 100,000 of a population of 300,000,000 then you’ve got to question just how serious that is.</p>
<p>I mean, the Soviets were a genuine threat to America. And they could have killed 100,000 Americans without getting out of bed.</p>
<p>keepit - And if you took an even longer perspective and expanded that perspective geographically, you would find people of all faiths committing atrocity in the name of a warped interpretation of that faith equally. One thing that is uniquely Christian in contemporary America is that Christians are extremely vocal in condemning those who deliberately abuse the Word as a justification for violence. </p>
<p>(Also…OK City bombing was not about religion. Tim McVeigh made very clear statements that he considered himself an atheist and… to be very truthful… that he admired the first WTC bomber. A lot of inconvenient facts in the OKC case, so not necessarily something that bolsters your argument. btw…my uncle worked the OKC investigation. )</p>
<p>1) I hereby award this thread the highly coveted “Veered Most Off Topic” award.</p>
<p>2) You have validated the wisdom of my Mother, who told me when I was a kid, “Discussions of politics and religion generally do not end well, and almost never change anyone’s mind.”</p>
<p>That’s interesting! I was wrong, I stand corrected. I had thought (wrongly) that they were ‘God and guns’ American right-wingers. How embarrassing!</p>
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<p>Whilst your mother obviously had a fine ear for cliche, I don’t see how that applies in this case: as far as I can see, what we’ve had is a polite and well-reasoned discussion.</p>
<p>Keepittoyourself: I could have done without the snide comment about my mother. The next time you are tempted to repeat your performance, you might want to go to the blackboard – as wayward students were asked to do when my mother was in school – and write your screen name 500 times :-)</p>
<p>Blue_box: Thank you for the observation that no one seems to have changed his or her mind, and that the discussion did veer off-topic. That is my sense. </p>
<p>Keepittoyourself: In the second paragraph of one of your posts, you state that Islamist terrorism is not a particularly serious issue. The evidence you use to back up your assertion is based on actual, not potential, outcomes. Then, in the third paragraph, you employ a potential, not actual, outcome to provide additional support for your assertion. Specifically, you make the point that the Soviets, in contrast to Islamist terrorism, were a genuine threat to America. Do you see the logical inconsistency?</p>
<p>Actually I have changed my mind – about the Oklahoma city bombers.</p>
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<p>No, I don’t see any inconsistency. Let me explain it to you.</p>
<p>We are trying to evaluate the threat posed by two enemies. If the ‘threat’ means something like ‘the worst damage that they could realistically do’, then is some cases that damage will be actual (if the enemy gets a chance to do the damage) and in other cases potential (if the enemy doesn’t actually get a chance to do that damage).</p>
<p>So it’s not an inconsistency to compare the damage done by enemy X (when they are trying their absolute best to hurt you) with the damage that enemy Y could do (if they were to try to hurt you).</p>
<p>Put it this way. You are in a fight with a wuss and a real tough guy. The wuss has landed a punch on you, but it didn’t really hurt very much. The tough guy hasn’t hit you yet, but if he did then he would knock you out. In order to devise your fighting strategy, you compare the threat posed by the two opponents. Would it really be out of order to take into account all the information you have, about both actual and potential damage.</p>
<p>Ok, so you admitted your ignorance about a specific fact having to do with the Oklahoma City bombers. However, throughout this entire four-page thread, can you find examples in which someone changed his or her mind about the core issue of Christianity vs. other faiths? </p>
<p>Concerning the issue of potential vs. actual outcomes, let me try it another way:</p>
<p>1) “The War on Terror” is generally recognized to have started on 9/11/2001. We can say today, slightly less than ten years later, that – despite quite a few attempts – the Islamic terrorists have not been able to inflict massive damage on the United States. Hence, you say that Islamic terrorism is not really a threat anymore. </p>
<p>2) The Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear weapon in August 1949. By 1959, the Soviet Union had not used its nuclear weaponry to inflict massive damage on the United States. Hence, would you have said the following in 1959: The Soviet Union is not really a threat anymore to inflict massive damage on the United States with its nuclear weaponry? No fair fast-forwarding to March 13, 2011! What would you have said in 1959? I’ll give you a hint. The Cuban Missile Crisis took place in 1962.</p>
<p>Nope, I can’t. But what about the other part of the cliche? The thread doesn’t seem to be on course to ‘not end well’ (ie, I assume, descend into insults).</p>
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<p>Nice summary, but you missed one big difference. Since 11/9/2001, the terrorists have not been able to inflict massive damage despite trying very hard to inflict damage. So I say they are not really a threat.</p>
<p>The difference is that the Soviets had not been trying hard to inflict as much damage as they could. If they had been trying to do that, they could have wiped out the population of the US with the press of a few buttons.</p>
<p>Another way to put it: what is the realistic worst case scenario?</p>
<p>Islamic terrorists: they kill a few thousand people, cause economic disruption, maybe even destroy parts of a city.</p>
<p>Soviets: they wipe out the human race, including the USA.</p>
<p>Re. HighSchoolDropIn’s “I feel we got way off-topic”:</p>
<p>Precisely my point in post #44 when I said, “I hereby award this thread the highly coveted ‘Veered Most Off Topic’ award.” :-)</p>
<p>Re. keepittoyourself’s “But what about the other part of the cliche? The thread doesn’t seem to be on course to ‘not end well’ (ie, I assume, descend into insults)”:</p>
<p>Well, you did make fun of my Mother, and you did call me sophomoric :-)</p>
:-)</p>