Posted this to my main blog by accident:

Recently wrenthekwack on Tumblr posted the below graphic:

The caption he added to it was “Because how would a plane fly without oil? :)”

Very cute. :)  Of course, without oil we wouldn’t have most of our world without oil, including planes and skyscrapers to fly them into (or the computers to create and view this graphic).

Obviously, this is a very complex issue and the doctoring seen above was done on a graphic that originally suggested religion was the key to 911.  But which is it? Oil or religion that, if removed, would scatter the terrorism equation into the wind?

Well, FriendlyAtheist, one of my favorite atheists on Tumblr, took great issue with the idea that it was oil and not religion.  In short, he made some wild stabs at wrenthekwack graphic, 1) sarcastically suggesting that perhaps the hijackers were yelling “Oil Akbar” instead of “Allah Akbar,” 2) that somehow the graphic puts forward the idea that the USG was behind 911 (like I said, wild stabs), 3) the weirdest statement of all:

Last option would be to say that somehow the need for oil by the US made it worthy of attacking by these “atheistic” terrorists (since religion has nothing to do with it per the cartoon). Sure, whatever. Like the US is the only country that uses middle east oil.

Crossing religion out of that graphic doesn’t mean religion has nothing to do with 911.  So, that’s a very odd, extreme assumption to make.  And then the claim about the US not being the only consumer of Middle East oil?? As if America wasn’t the big kid on the block??  Who else would terrorists go after?  Seriously, FA, I’m thinking you banged this reply out in 30 seconds rather than thinking it through. Seems like such behavior is going around.

FA also added that it’s not about the money, either.  He quotes a study that says “The evidence we have assembled and reviewed suggests there is little direct connection between poverty, education and participation in terrorism.”

The suggestion of poverty being a part of it reminded me of something, so I left a waaaay too long comment on his post suggesting that, in fact, it is not about money per se, but is also not really about religion.  Here’s the comment I left:

Have you seen Thomas PM Barnett’s seminar “The Pentagon’s New Map”? (It’s on Google Video here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4689061169761152025 ) I HIGHLY recommend you watch it. In it he says a LOT about how the world functions, but he puts forward the idea that the world can be divided into two sections. One section is the core and the other is the gap. The core is what we’d recognize as the “rich” section—the First World. The gap is largely the Third World. The gap is also where most of the terrorism in the world comes from. However, Barnett suggests that it’s not money that is the determining factor here, but connectivity. As in, communications. I distill this down to a simple concept: if you have a voice, you’re less likely to turn to terror. If you’re being ignored, you need to do something to get people to pay attention to you. Timothy McVeigh said as much before he was executed. Violence, he felt, was the only language the USG would respond to.

Now, most of US foreign policy tends to be determined by oil. Our involvement in the Middle East is largely about oil. So, in a sense, oil *is* a reason extremists in the Middle East are so pissed at us. If we would only find a way to replace the oil we buy in the Middle East with something we could make here in the West, we’d remove US troops from oil-rich countries (aka Muslim countries) as well as one of their main excuses. See, that’s what religion is—an excuse. A tool. ObL didn’t give a shit about Allah or 72 virgins. He was so rich while he was alive, he could have had 72 virgins any time he wanted. No, this was about power and influence. Sure, “Allah” might have been the excuse the actual hijackers had, but the guys who put the hijackers up to it are only interested power and influence. If religion didn’t exist, they’d use some other lie to convince those poor idiots to do what they did.

I’m all for atheism and spreading the idea that truth and proof are what should determine our actions and not some fictional god, but the reality is that religion is just a tool—an excuse—to do horrible things. It is not the true corruption that greed and power are. Religion is the lubricant.

Sorry for such a long comment…

I’m truly happy to see all of the new voices speaking up and against the louder voice of religion.  However, there’s been a lot of stupid-thinking on the part of my fellow atheists.  They think contradicting Believers is enough to “win.”  What good is it to make an argument against religion if it is faulty?  Remove religion from the planet and all of the religion-based strife goes away?  I don’t think so.  It won’t be religion-based anymore, but there will be other strife in its place.  We humans loooove conflict.  We’ll use nationality, race, sexual preference, gender, hair color, TV shows-preference, or some other bullshit excuse to divide ourselves up.

I’m against religion in its most common form, but to say it’s the sole thing that motivates terrorists is to adopt a rather shallow view.  If terrorists didn’t feel under attack, if they felt as though their way of life wasn’t being threatened they wouldn’t need to look for an excuse to “kill infidels.”

Religion is an excuse for everything.  Like I said, religion is the lubricant.  But fear and hate work, too.

From blogdrop.posterous.com:

Just to put this into perspective, Ariana Huffington transported, for free, around 10,000 New Yorkers to Washington DC for the Rally for Sanity and/or Fear on October 30, 2010.  That’s a third of the Taliban and more than Al Qaeda.

Here’s another graphic I nicked from blogdrop.posterous.com:

If you are pro-life you should be horrified by this.  Of course, if you are pro-only-your-own-life, you’ve already rationalized this away.  Sad, either way.

Just saw this in my Tumblr stream (minus the blurring on the names, of course):

That top part is an animated gif of a handful of frames-worth of one of the towers falling. The bottom part is where Tumblr users react, either in sadness or in recalling “where they were when”.

I get that people are still freaked out by this event. I understand.

It’s one thing to mourn quietly at Ground Zero in NYC.  It’s one thing to quietly light a candle to remember those who died.

But animated gifs of the towers falling?

Blog-based confessions of sad-feelings?

Yeah, let’s keep things in perspective kids.  911 was nothing compared to, oh, say, what we dropped on Japan.  Not just the atom bombs (which killed tens of thousands the *instant* they were dropped), but also the firebombing of Tokyo, too. 

What we did, as a country, to Japan not recent enough for you?  Then consider the 106,000 Iraqi dead—most of which would still be alive if we hadn’t invaded their country unprovoked (which only happened because 911 happened). 

Oh, no—let’s pour over pictures and videos of the day we lost a whopping 3k people—better yet, let’s give it the same treatment we’d give a LOLcat pic or a gif from that blog that features 2 frames of a movie. 

Mourning should be done on a personal level—somber, respectful.  Doing it on Tumblr practically requires a lack of respect for the dead.  So, please, it’s been 9 years—you don’t have to be over it, but can we chill with the ghoulish replay of videos and uber-emotional remembrances of “where we were when”?

I *hope* you weren’t expecting tolerance for this sort of crap from the guy who runs Website666.com.  I may be a puppeteer, but I also draw Ballpoint Adventures.

underpaidgenius:

Truthers,” left-wing conspiracy theorists who believe (among other things) that 9/11 was an inside job, that no plane hit the Pentagon, that Ted Olson did not receive a call from his wife, Barbara, shortly before she perished in the crash of Flight 77, that the anthrax scare was also a government hoax (although the anthrax was real and deadly), and that hurricane Katrina was the result of weather manipulation by racists or profiteers or both.

This makes for some truly chilling reading: otherwise average-seeming Americans who sincerely (?) believe that 9/11 was created by the US government to control us. Yikes.

Nah, what’s scary is how much of what they believe is reasonable.

It’s easy to point at a bunch of people and yell “FREAKS! YOU BELIEVE WEIRD STUFF!” but much harder to consider what they say and admit that some of it seems reasonable.  I’m not saying all of it or even most of it is reasonable.  There’s evidence for almost none of it and what evidence there is is not proof. 

The thing is, trusting the government story, or anyone’s story is tantamount to letting down your guard. We need to keep questioning and keep challenging.  Writing these guys off like they believe aliens are controlling our minds is wrong and it does the truth a disservice.  The government, on the other hand, lies all the time and has done so to get us into war, too.

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident

“Remember the Maine” (OK, so we don’t know for sure the USG lied, but then we don’t know for sure that Spain sank the Maine, either.)

Pearl Harbor was a surprise (ok so there’s still some debate about this, but really?)

Hell, George W. Bush’s granddad (who went on to be a US senator) was a banker for a guy who financially supported the Nazis.

Do I believe 911 was an inside job?  I’m an atheist in most things.  I’m not sure what I believe, but I know what’s possible.  So, no, I don’t believe 911 was an inside job, nor do I know if it was.  All I do is look at the evidence and, of all of it, my biggest problem with 911 is Payne Stewart.  Yes, the late golfer.  Google “Payne Stewart crash” and read about the circumstances surrounding his death (or just check out the NTSB’s report here).  14 minutes after air-traffic controllers lost contact with his plane  F-16s were flying along side it.  From a WaPo article reporting on the October 25, 1999 crash:

The military aircraft were not armed with air-to-air missiles, and Pentagon officials said they never considered shooting down the Learjet.

“The [Federal Aviation Administration] said this thing was headed to a sparsely populated part of the country, so let it go,” a senior defense official said.

Contrast this with fighter aircraft taking more than twice that amount of time to reach any of the planes less than two years later on September 11, 2001.

The areas of Washington DC and New York City are minutes from Air Force bases. Yet three hijacked planes were allowed to crash—two of them into populated areas.

This is what I’d like to see investigated.  So far, I’ve not heard an explanation for this inability of the military to do its job.  

I’ve got other problems with what is the official explanation for 911, but that’s the biggest.  Because if the plane that crashed into the WTC had been shot down, more than two thousand people wouldn’t have died that day and, more importantly, as a result, it would have been much harder to justify invading two countries with only a few hundred dead.

So, don’t assume everyone who questions the official story, or even the apparent facts, of 911 is a wing-nut who listens to Alex Jones.  I don’t.  I just look at what I’m told are the facts and ask questions. Which, you know, is what we should all be doing more often.

I could go on and on about “conspiracies.” In fact, I already did in the 666cast a couple weeks back.