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What if the shooter had been a christian republican?

There is zero evidence that religion played any role and a lot of evidence that he had a long standing conflict with these individuals for other reasons.
In addition, it is illogical to think it was about religion given that the evidence suggests he had just as much or more of a problem with the non-Muslim religion of 90% of the people around him and all others who parked in that spot. Until there is a shred of evidence suggesting religion as the motive, the ration position is that it had zero to do with religion, just like 99% of all other murders.

First, stupidity does not validate counter stupidity. Second, there is nothing comparable about these situations. This guy was not critical of Muslims in particular, but of all religion and if anything more critical of Christians than Muslims. There were hundreds Christians around he could have killed, but did not, despite all evidence showing he had a more animosity toward them. This is strong evidence against religion being a factor. If a person in a region with relatively few Jews were to selectively target Jews for public ridicule and then, of all the people around them, target the few Jews for violence, then this would be a much more improbable co-occurrence and thus make the victims' Jewishness are more probable factor.
The actual current situation is more like a person who says "I don't like people who eat bread", then they kill someone who, like 90% of people, happens to eat bread, and people claim "He killed them because they ate bread!!"

This case is among the countless that show why ignorance in understanding probability is not just a threat to intellectual progress, but a massive threat to political and moral progress.

Did you actually read anything I posted or what? I noted from the outset that his Facebook page seemed to target Christianity moreso than Islam, and have been pretty clear that I doubt religion was that important of a factor. Based on the currently available evidence, this occurred because the guy is a fucking psychotic asshole.

My point about a Muslim perp stands. Yes, there was a third party here (Christians) that were not targeted. Fine. Mess around with the variables if you want: a Muslim who mostly bitches about Christianity, and occasionally Israel/Judaism, shoots three Jews over a parking spot. The immediate assumption within the media and most of the general public would be that he was motivated by religion.
 
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My point about a Muslim perp stands. Yes, there was a third party here (Christians) that were not targeted. Fine. Mess around with the variables if you want: a Muslim who mostly bitches about Christianity, and occasionally Israel/Judaism, shoots three Jews over a parking spot. The immediate assumption within the media and most of the general public would be that he was motivated by religion.

Actually, your original comment was:

You can bet your ass, though, that if a Muslim with a Facebook page critical of Israel or Judaism shot three Jews in the head you wouldn't see so many people, even here, so quick to accept the claim that it was purely the result of a parking dispute coupled with psychological issues, and that ideology didn't play a role.

Give that the majority of the general public and/or media are insisting that the murder of the three Muslim students was motivated by their religious beliefs, I don't see the difference. Yes, here we do have far higher proportion of people here rejecting that argument, but you would have to show that "so many" of those same people would reject the same argument with the same facts if the shooter had been Muslim. Perhaps you would be correct as to one or two people, but your assumption of "so many" "even here" is what is off base.
 
Give that the majority of the general public and/or media are insisting that the murder of the three Muslim students was motivated by their religious beliefs, I don't see the difference. Yes, here we do have far higher proportion of people here rejecting that argument, but you would have to show that "so many" of those same people would reject the same argument with the same facts if the shooter had been Muslim. Perhaps you would be correct as to one or two people, but your assumption of "so many" "even here" is what is off base.

I know what my original comment was. Ron was nitpicking over the fact that there were three parties in this scenario, versus two in mine. But even when that's accounted for, the point still stands.

And furthermore, you are incorrect on both counts. The media and general public are not insisting that it was motivated by religion. Only people with a specific agenda (Muslims, Christians with an axe to grind with atheists) are doing that. The media reports are consistently focusing on the parking issue and the perp's evident imbalance. The majority of the general public, from everything I have seen, thinks the guy is just a nut.

And while none of this is inappropriate given the available evidence, the response would not be this thoughtful or even-handed in the scenario I described.

And no, it's not just "one or two people" on this board who make prejudiced assumptions about how and why Muslims behave. There are several of them, and they're not terribly hard to find.
 
Hey Tiger, can you point us to a single time on this board where a person shot another person and the consensus here was that it was religiously motivated, despite there being no evidence of such other than differing religious views of the parties involved?
The threads about Anders Brevik, Jared Loughner, Timothy McVeigh et al spring to mind
A deist, a person that was mentally ill, and a Catholic?
 
But the atheism didn't make him a killer - that's just an unrelated coincidence.

Being a "progressive" is what made him into a killer.

Being a gun nut is what made him into a killer.
I would have thought that the gun allowed him to shoot the persons rather than cause him to shoot them.
 
Give that the majority of the general public and/or media are insisting that the murder of the three Muslim students was motivated by their religious beliefs, I don't see the difference. Yes, here we do have far higher proportion of people here rejecting that argument, but you would have to show that "so many" of those same people would reject the same argument with the same facts if the shooter had been Muslim. Perhaps you would be correct as to one or two people, but your assumption of "so many" "even here" is what is off base.

I know what my original comment was. Ron was nitpicking over the fact that there were three parties in this scenario, versus two in mine. But even when that's accounted for, the point still stands.


No, the point as you made it does not stand. It fell. I wasn't "nitpicking". I was engaging in basic rational thought and pointing out fatal flaws in your argument. By any standard of rationality and probabilistic reasoning, all unbiased observers should give the "religious motivation" hypothesis more weight in the scenario you described than in this present situation. Same goes for if the perp was a conservative Christian who singled out Muslim's for abuse, or singled out atheists for abuse, then shot the few open atheists in that town.
If you want to speculate that a Muslim shooter would be more likely to be presumed motivated by religion given all other factors being equal, then go ahead and speculate about that, but even thought experiments should be set up so the comparisons are meaningful and informative, otherwise, like poorly controlled real experiments, they are useless or misleading.
 
Parking must have been tight in Copenhagen judging by events there.

No. It might surprise you to learn that different events often have different causes.
In the Copenhagen event, every relevant fact points toward a religious motivation with a killer who selected two separate targets (a cafe where a cartoonist condemned by Islamic leaders was speaking and a Jewish Synagogue) which are both relatively rare in the area and whose sole connection to each other is "places that a Muslim terrorist would target".
 
I just hope the Danes don't get on their high horse after all those brutal Viking raids.
 
No, the point as you made it does not stand. It fell.

No, it didn't. And since you clearly haven't been reading what I actually post, that should not be a surprise.

By any standard of rationality and probabilistic reasoning, all unbiased observers should give the "religious motivation" hypothesis more weight in the scenario you described than in this present situation.

No, they should not. There is no more reason, in the scenario described, to assume that the Muslim would have killed the Jews because of their Jewishness than there is to assume that Craig Hicks killed these people because of their Muslimness. And you haven't presented one. But that's exactly what would happen, even when your original objection is accounted for.
 
Who really gives a flying fuck whether such an act was religiously motivated or not.
 
I would have thought that the gun allowed him to shoot the persons rather than cause him to shoot them.

Being a gun NUT is what made him into a killer.
Nope. The gun was the tool/weapon he used to kill those people. The gun itself did not make him a killer. He was a killer in waiting before that fateful time.
 
Being a gun NUT is what made him into a killer.
Nope. The gun was the tool/weapon he used to kill those people. The gun itself did not make him a killer. He was a killer in waiting before that fateful time.

Religion doesn't kill people, guns kill people.

"Remember, a Jedi never uses his powers to kill. That's why we carry these handy lighsabres, so that we can use the Force to hit people with them, and have the fusion beam kill people, instead of us doing it..."
 
ronburgundy said:
By any standard of rationality and probabilistic reasoning, all unbiased observers should give the "religious motivation" hypothesis more weight in the scenario you described than in this present situation.

No, they should not. There is no more reason, in the scenario described, to assume that the Muslim would have killed the Jews because of their Jewishness than there is to assume that Craig Hicks killed these people because of their Muslimness. And you haven't presented one.

I did present the reason, you just don't understanding how to reason about combined probabilities and how they imply whether the shared features of the co-occurring events had any causal impact on their co-occurrence.

In your hypothetical scenario where "a Muslim with all kinds of Facebook posts critical of Israel or Judaism shot three Jews in the head" the Muslim is directing his negative judgments specifically at the small minority group that he then shoots and kills. Had the Muslim shot a person for reasons having nothing to do with their Jewishness, the odds would be tiny that he would happen to shoot the small group he specified in his posts. In contrast, Hicks critiqued mostly people who comprise the majority of the people around him (Christians) and do not belong to the small group (Muslims) that the people he shot belonged to. Thus, had Hicks been motivated by the hate in his posts, it predicts he would have shot Christians and not Muslims, AND had he shot someone for non-religious reasons the odds are 90% that it would be a Christian, so even then the random co-occurrence odds between his posts and actions would be high and not imply co-causality.
 
Religion isn't important. It's the behavior that's important. The behavior stands regardless it's religious association or not.

Well, by their definition, hate crime laws are not applied based upon the behavior (or really upon presence of hate), but whether the behavior was motivated by particular kinds of hate attached to groups of persons, but only when those group categories are highly politicized.

So, those who support hate crime laws care because it will determine his punishment (although first degree 3 homicides should lead to his execution or death in jail).

A different reason to care is not regarding the punishment this guy should get, but regarding more general theories of human behavior and the causal relations between religious views and willingness to commit violence against those who do not share them.
As an isolated case, it is little more than an anecdote and means little compared to larger samples of observations, such as societal level of support for use of force and coercion against outgroup members (both within and outside the US).

However, even as a single case, it is of theoretical psychological interest as to whether an open atheist (even just one) would actually kill Muslims largely because they Muslims with nothing to gain other than some other monotheists he dislikes equally or more moving into their apartments in his complex.
 
Being a gun NUT is what made him into a killer.
Nope. The gun was the tool/weapon he used to kill those people. The gun itself did not make him a killer.
It is what allowed him be a killer.
He was a killer in waiting before that fateful time.
You do realize that killing isn't possible by thought for Humans.

Would have been a bit harder to hang them, or stab them to death, or attack them with sharks with laser beams.
 
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