I don't like talking about things in the political or socio-economic realm. I abhor it, even. A couple reasons, A) I'm bad at it, B) it requires an emotional component that I don't have enough of. That said, I'm going to make a societal rant.

I of course am going to be speaking of the recent unpleasantness going down in France. I've been quasi-monitoring various threads on reddit and - unsurprisingly - it would seem the collective world's head is turned to look at Islam (or, rather, Muslims) as being the cause. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if extremists who claim to be working in the name of this religion are involved, but that's not why I'm here. Well, I suppose it is. A lot of the sentiment seems to be around the notion that this particular religion is making people do this.

No. No it's not. And the people who claim this are themselves probably hypocrites.

I had an interesting thought as I was grabbing a piece of cheese from the fridge. It's the exact same argument as "video games make those who play them violent". I've written about this before, maybe here, maybe for school, but the answer is: no, of course they don't. A video game, movie, book, or piece of music doesn't make you violent. If you're acting out on things, you were probably pre-disposed to such things already. The exact same idea applies to this notion that a religion will turn somebody violent.

These individuals chose to kill of their own free will. We as humans kind of have that privilege.

In the end it's not video games and it's not religion causing people to cause fucked up mayhem against innocent lives. It's extremely disturbed individuals who will find any reason to validate the horrendous crimes they already want to commit. Intangible concepts don't cause people to kill.

People do that all by themselves.

And it goes without saying that they are acting and representing themselves and themselves only, not the whole. They may represent a subset of people, but simply by being human, they actually represent all people.

So, if you subscribe to the group mindset, does that not make all of us murderers?