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Other Title: Captain Paul Watson's Thoughts on the Attacks in Paris My Thoughts From Paris Commentary by Captain Paul Watson I have just now returned to Paris from Provence. The terrorist assault in Paris happened on Friday, just three days ago. I had not had a chance to fully appreciate the gravity of the situation until today but that did not stop some people from sending me angry messages chastising me for not immediately addressing the situation along with messages demanding that I pray for the victims or that I post a French tri-colour on my page. I have not addressed the situation in Beirut or in Kenya yet either. Things are a little different now than when I left ten days ago for southern France. Far fewer tourists, barricades before Notre Dame and I counted about twenty armed soldiers guarding the cathedral. My deepest sympathies to the families of the 129 people killed and the 365 or more wounded in Paris. Of the number killed some 36 were foreigners. We do know that 8 terrorists were killed, 7 by suicide bombs. My deepest sympathies for the 42 killed and over 200 wounded in Beirut and for the unknown number of innocent civilians killed in the bombing of Raqqa in Syria yesterday. I have empathy for all the families of those slain and for the wounded survivors. I recently met one of the people who died in Paris although I did not know her. She was a waitress who worked at a restaurant in St. Tropez. She was alive and now she is dead. That is very real for me. I can’t even begin to imagine how it must be for fathers, mothers, son, daughters, brothers and sisters and for those who lost friends in this massacre. The tragic events have unleashed a cyclone of conflicting churning emotions ranging from extreme sadness and depression to heated anger and frustration to blind and misguided hatreds that run the spectrum of irrational bigotry to extreme racism. I have sat at street cafes in Paris and I can appreciate the fear that this attack has provoked amongst average people, Parisians and tourists alike. It was a horrific and despicable assault. It was not the first such assault and unfortunately it will not be the last. It was troubling to me personally to realize that some of the attacks took place at places we would normally go, like to see a film at Les Halles or for dinner or a cafe in Districts 10 or 11. It illustrates that there are no really safe places and tragedy can strike at any time or anyplace. I have no intention of praying for the victims because prayer seems to be a factor in this slaughter. Too many people praying to a non-existent god for no other reason than to make themselves feel good, and that is fine if it makes them feel good, but it would not make me feel good, so I choose to not pretend to think it would. If prayer actually did work none of this shit would be happening. The violent attack does represent further concerns, especially on the eve of the Paris Climate Change Conference, although I suspect security will be exceptionally tight when the conference begins, more so than previously planned. Unfortunately the very real danger of escalating green house gas levels in the atmosphere may be placed on the back burner in light of this event in Paris. A present tragedy distracting from dealing with a very real future tragedy unless it is addressed. There has been of course the usual senseless response from many quarters. As an American I am ashamed of all the comments and postings, twitters etc, especially from some American politicians that are using this tragedy to advance their self- centered positions on guns and immigration and of course to condemn Islam as the reason for the attack. Note to Donald Trump: The attackers were not Mexicans and your ridiculous wall is not the answer, this is not the middle ages. And this nonsense about how an armed civilian population would have prevented the killings is ridiculously absurd. Armed civilians in American have not prevented the many massacres across the nation. How could a few armed civilians with concealed weapons have stopped terrorists armed with AK-47 assault rifles and wearing explosive vests? Ben Carson says that the victims should have attacked the men with the guns. Easy for Ben Carson to say. He was not there. Talking head Republican tea-party clowns are not doing anyone any favors with the bile spewing from their lips and they are in truth a disgrace to Americans who truly have empathy with the people of Paris. Give the rhetoric a rest people. There is a time for your silliness and today is not such a time. Save it for the next debate. Common decency would dictate that this tragedy not be used for political advantage. Saying these terrorists represent Islam is like saying the Ku Klux Klan represent Christianity. Not all terrorists are Muslims as evidenced by Christian extremist Timothy McVeigh who murdered 168 people and wounded over 600. And Anders Brevik who slaughtered 77 people, mainly children in Norway. There are Jewish terrorists, Christian terrorists, Muslim terrorists and the very first act of religious terrorism in America was the Mountain Meadow Massacre by the Mormons on September 11th, 1857 where about 140 Christians were slaughtered. In other words, not a single religion is innocent of having terrorists who kill in the name of their religion. There are a billion Muslims in the world and to declare war on Islam is a recipe for on-going tragedies and it would be a profound mistake. These extremist killers simply do not represent the vast majority of Muslims. The killers were psychopaths using Islam as an excuse just as Brevik was a psychopath claiming to kill in the name of Christianity. These psychopaths have been condemned as being a disgrace to all Muslims by the decent Muslim community. I agree that the Koran is an extremely violent book. I’ve read it. So is the Bible, which I have also read cover to cover. Both books are full of stories of excessive violence, brutal incest, merciless rape, endless war, unspeakable cruelty and destruction. In both books, some fantasy god, which for all intends and purposes is the same god supports these extremist actions. Just one reading of the book of Joshua will illustrate that this particular book is little more than a justification of genocide, and don’t even get me started on Leviticus. In addition to reading the Bible and the Koran, I’ve also read the Torah, the Bhagavad Gita and the Book of Mormon. In truth I found more credibility and ethical teachings in Lord of the Rings and Alice in Wonderland and certainly more in The Lorax. Personally I don’t like any of these anthropocentric religions that are based on humans being semi divine apes and special to some god that they themselves created. The planet is 4 billion years old. It was not made for us. And all these deadly religious squabbles are nothing more than silly insecure arguments over whose God has a bigger dick than everyone else’s God. But belief in these fantasies is a right and everyone should have the freedom to believe in whatever they wish to believe in or not to believe in. I have no problem with what people believe in. My problem is with people violently telling other people what they should believe in. Religion in many ways is simply a form of collective mass psychosis and out of each religion emerges a very small minority of psychopaths proclaiming they speak in the name of whatever fantasy is current in the culture they were born into. Is there a God? Who knows and why does it matter? The answer is that there is no answer and that is the only real answer that any of us will ever get. The secret to a happy life is not a simplistic belief in a fantasy. It is in loving others, loving oneself, loving nature and loving life. Love and empathy should be the defining paths to a good, productive and fulfilling life. Recently I was asked what I will say to God when I meet him. Not sure why they think it would be a “him” but that seems to be another common and misguided belief. My answer is that I am not concerned since I will never meet anyone after I die but in the completely ridiculous scenario where I did meet “him,” I would not say a thing. I would spit in his face, although not sure how I would do that without a body but figuratively that’s what I would do. Why? Because if there is such a God, it would be such a vain, cruel and evil creature for allowing such suffering and hatred in its name and not revealing itself as real, leading of course to endless squabbling over the existence of such a thing. Such a creature could allow such horrors only if it took delight in suffering. But let’s say there is this immortal god creature. What will it do? Kill me for denying its existence? “No,” my critics say, “he will not kill you, he will cast you into hell where you will burn and suffer for eternity.” Presumably according to them, because he loves me. Wow, now that is a bizarre definition of love. A lot of trouble could have been avoided if god simply appeared and spoke to us and said, “hey I’m God, I’ll perform some miracles for the nightly news and after that when I tell you to be good and to love each other you better do it.” But apparently this creature that we have no way of knowing if it exists want me to burn. How do you burn without a body and if you have a body, how does it burn for eternity? And as for suffering, I think boredom would take over, you can only suffer so much before it simply gets boring. People are already suffering from war, starvation, hunger, abuse and they have not even had a chance to go to hell. Hell came to them and they are still alive and being alive is where suffering gets very real. But why would I believe in a fantasy fabricated by Dante? Hell was created by a poet a thousand years ago. There is no description of hell in the Bible. Dante invented it and a thousand years from now, based on this logic, we will be following the teachings of the Jedi knights. But whose hell? Catholics are going to Protestant hell. Protestants are going to Jewish hell, Jews are going to Islamic hell and Muslims may be sent to some Scientology planet somewhere. Who knows and really, what does it matter? Millions once believed in Valhalla or Olympia or sacrificed their children to Ba’al. Now both places and Ba’al himself are on the shelves marked mythology. Yet hundreds of thousands were murdered or died in the name of these now officially mythical gods who were considered quite real in their time. Anyhow an absurd answer to an absurd question. What does matter is that an end be put to this silliness. Killing in the name of god, any god or ideology is insanity. Humanity needs to shift from this anthropocentric deity dominated view of reality to a biocentric world view whereby we see ourselves as a part of the natural world and not dominant over it. And until we do, the killings in Paris, like the killings in New York, in Palestine, in Syria, in Egypt, in India, will continue with every one blaming everyone else and everyone using each tragedy to justify the infliction of more tragedies in a vicious circle that has no foreseeable resolution. There is a hell. We created it, It’s called anthropocentrism, this idea we invented that all that exists is because of us humans, for us humans, and created by whatever fabricated fantasy character, whatever each group chooses to pretend to exist and each group thinks god exists just for them. What I do know is that there are hundreds of grieving families in Paris, in Beiruit and around the world, lives senselessly destroyed in what is just another bloody link in an endless chain of tragedies that we are forced to endure in societies where hate dominates over love. This latest atrocity resulted in an immediate bombing of ISIS HQ in Syria which has me scratching my head. I can certainly understand President Francois Hollande needing to act, both quickly and decisively. He really had no choice politically. However if we knew where the ISIS HQ was located, why was it bombed the day after the massacre in Paris? Where have all the allied bombs been dropped over the last few years? I would think that in all these bombing raids by America, France, the UK, Canada, Russia etc, that someone would have actually dropped a bomb on a real target. Syria is a monkey house with the U.S. and it’s allies bombing ISIS and Assad’s military, and Russia bombing the Rebels who are opposing Assad. The rebels opposing Assad are presumably also fighting ISIS and the Kurds and the Kurds are fighting ISIS and Assad and Turkey. It’s really hard to keep track of the players but one thing for sure is that the chaos never seems to end and it is not even certain that any of the players want it to end. What we have now with the latest French bombing in Syria is just another retaliation in response to a retaliation which was a response to a retaliation that was a response to an earlier retaliation. The deaths on both sides incite anger and hatred and this becomes an endless cycle of murderous attacks either justified or condemned depending upon each side. There is a solution to this endless cycle of violence but it is a solution that many do not wish to hear. It’s a simple solution however. Dump the gods, all the gods. Dump the guru’s and the prophets, all of them. Yes I know it won’t happen but it would be a nice solution. Another solution is to have everyone just pull out and let the Syrians fight amongst themselves and of course it would help if all foreign parties cease their weapon sales to all sides. What we have now is slowly advancing to the use of nuclear weapons and that will place us in a completely new level of hell, far more unpleasant and dangerous than anything we are seeing now. The Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the Book of Mormon etc. are not sacred or divine. These were all books written by mere men, not Gods. Life should be sacred. Kindness should be divine. Compassion should be the foundation of our actions and empathy should be what guides us in all things, not some silly obscene books written by primitive peoples who did not even know that the Earth revolved around the Sun. I think the best tribute I can post in solidarity with the wonderful, beautiful, romantic and eternal city of Paris is this song by Josephine Baker. Paris will endure. I just hope the primitive superstitious fantasies that are the root of all this violence will not endure. Enough people have died over the last two thousand years. How many more must die before we recognize that killing for a god, any god is delusional, insane and psychopathic? And that also includes the corporate gods of oil, overconsumption, greed and war. John Lennon gave us the inspiration with “imagine there’s no heaven.” And the Beatles got it right because. “Love is all you need.” -- Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 2.
#2. To: All (#0)
(Edited)
That came out REALLY wrong. Oh, dear. Recap: he's saying France has fewer tourists, he saw a waitress who worked there that's now dead, religion is bad and god is a myth; all religions, compares sacrifices to Greeks who sacrificed people to Olympia; we should dump all gods and dump religion since its bad, also Donald Trump is an idiot, oh and there's no heaven since John Lennon says so and Josephine Baker gives us inspiration; then proceeds to call belief in god primitive and delusional and psychopathic even though he quoted two known violent psychopaths/sociopaths. these types of people are great aren't they? we either get this stupid fedora tipping atheist type or new age psychos now. Saying religion is evil and bad is simply not the problem, mankind will twist any ideology and use it for their personal gain. But keep on pretending men can love one another and no differences can be made, okay.
#4. To: ebonytwix (#2)
I hate to step on your toes, but GWBush is one the primary reasons for the current issues in France and around the world concerning Islamic Terrorism. 0bama is the GREATEST reason for the current issues, however.
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