On a slight adjourn from my news-critic position, this is clearly an opinion piece about why we should not be going to war.

I’ve spent a large part of my day watching the Syria debate in the House of Commons. The best arguments for bombing Syria centred around the fact that France have asked us to and that we’re already bombing Iraq. The best arguments against bombing Syria noted the lack of a longterm political solution, the unacceptable cost of civilian’s lives, and the fact it increases risk of future ISIS acts occurring in Britain.

ISIS is an ideology; a belief system that can’t simply be bullied away by bombing it, because future extremist generations can and will arrive at the same conclusions about the Islamic teachings concretised in their holy book. The ideology can, however, be refuted and defeated by educating everybody in the matters of religion, specifically Wahhabism in this case.

It is often uncouth to broadcast religious opinions, however in many of the affected middle eastern countries it is illegal to even scrutinise the merits of religious beliefs, so we should count ourselves lucky that we live in a country where we can freely exercise a debate about how religions encourage people to do morally reprehensible things – conversely, can you think of a good deed that a religious believer can do that a non-believer cannot do?

Because it is clear to me that we are blaming the problem on steam and refusing to acknowledge the boiling water creating it. The great conflict of our time is of free thought vs authoritarianism, with the most prominent version of this taking the form of the West vs ISIS (in simple terms).

Theocratic regimes are by definition totalitarian – they say we cannot be moral without a supernatural ‘big brother’, that we can’t be good to one another without this, that we must be afraid and that we are commanded to love someone who we fear – the essence of abjection and sadomasochism; or being the master’s slave.

It is time to acknowledge the difference between Theism and Deism, because belief in a God does not necessarily require belief in these outdated religious doctrines. I personally don’t care much if you believe in a God or not. What I do care about is people brainwashing children and violently imposing any beliefs upon others because of the self-conviction that God is on their side.

There is also the religious apologist position, to which I similarly object. That is to say, those who ignore or disregard all the immoral teachings in a holy text and only believe in the ‘good’ teachings. I ask these people, where do they get their morality from? The answer, of course, is secular teachings and one’s own personal moral compass. These people, I would argue, are Deists in denial and it is about time the Deist position was encouraged in favour of the Theist position.

So I oppose this war on three accounts – that innocent people will die, that it doesn’t attack the ideology, and because there has been no talk of introducing a secular democracy (a-la-Bosnia) in place of Bashar al-Assad’s regime after the bombing is over.

tl;dr – learn stuff and don’t kill people who won’t kill you.

-Sherlockingnews