h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"they had NO legitimate reason to do it when they did..."

"wow fraeya, i never realised you had such strong opinions about anything except your anti-me attacks!!!" lol

yeah i agree he had to be got rid of but that was the stupidest, most wasteful way to have done it. what's wrong with snipers?
and iraq is still a mess even with him gone,but what can you expect from americans running it. things are just as bad in zimbabwe but they dont do anything about that. why? becasue there is no oil there.

hang on WE agree on something!! the world is ending! the americans ares so obsessed with freedom yet they dont even understand it. arrrgh!! lol

WAKE UP!!!!!

I'm afraid a lot of American's aren't happy unless they're oobsessed with someting, be it religion, freedom, discrimination or law suits. Harsh but from my slightly blurred perspective possibly uncomfortably true. And now all this stuff with the photographs that now look like some of them have been hoaxed- well, the Iraq people heard that there were some photos floating around of troops assaulting Iraqi prisoners so they're descecrating the graves of war veterens who have done nothing wrong, who were killed before most of them were born. A mess if ever I heard of one...

yeah, i reckon religion is the cause of all wars and bad things in general.

the crusades-religion

the civil war-religion

the holocaust-religion

theireland thing (apart from the gorgeous accents and westlife)- religion

hitler attacking the russians in ww2-religion

people being assulted- quite often religion

september 11th- partly religion

are you beginning to see the picture? oh yeah peirs morgen ahsd been sacked!!! how ood is that sentance! just dont let the americans have anything to do with anything its much safer.

The religious conflicts arise from Man's inability to see that what works for them may well not work for somebody else. I spoke to a religious fanatic that cornered me in the High Street yesterday who said that our God was the only righteous one. I didn't bother to argue, it wasn't worth it, but in my opinion ALL Gods are righteous, it's just the people who believe in them that make a hash of this beautiful philosophy. To kill is wrong in every religion, to love your fellow men is part of all religions, but people forget that, they only see that the people who abide by a set of slightly different rules where they were instructed by slightly different people but are basically the same, are evil and horrid. There's nothing wrong with being devout, don't get me wrong, but you can be TOO devout.

i'd agree about religion, except that almost all the bad things that happen have been because of one religion - Islam.

-> crusades - against Islam.

-> 9/11 - by Islamic Lunatics

-> all suicide bombings (xcept Pearl Harbor) - Islamic extremists.

-> Kashmir conflict(s) - Pakistanis - Muslims

-> Holocaust - Jews deprived of their homeland - no where else to go - because of the Muslims.

Seriously, if Islam was wiped off the face of the earth in all its forms, the world would not only be free from oppressive dictatorships, subversive societies (to women), suicide bombers and Abu Hamza, but it would not have lost anything. except a few nice looking mosques perhaps.

Maybe, but if the Muslims were wiped out, who would we start on next? The Jews again? Jehovah's Witnesses? We never really understand other religions- in some ways, Christianity is by far the worst religion. Look at all the places we colonised, and the way we did it. All that bloodshed, just because we thought we were saving the world from Heathenism.

thats not necessarily true - europeans didn't colonise to stop heathenism - they colonised to get lots of cotton and tea and coffee etc p*ss cheap. and if the muslims all disappeared, no one would have to start on anyone. there would be no religious conflict whatsoever. the kashmir problem wouldn't exist, and Israel would have control of the Holy Land. Meanwhile, islamic terrorism wouldn't be a problem either, so no more suicide bombings. there is no way that removing any other religion would have such a perfect effect, because the problem is purely Islam.

i think islam is just as bad as all the others to be honsest. you cant blame them for all the major religious disasters. i did think that buddhists were a bit better but i saw a bit of that this world programme last night saying how they were into the death penalty which doesnt really fit in. i and i think what lizzy said was right about if you got rid of islam then people would just start on another religion. i think christianity is far the worst, partly becasue its the biggest so therefore obviously causes the most trouble becasue people cant agree on how they should be christians. and then you get all the nutters like that woman who cornerd you, lizzy. Those sort of people who take it so seriously that they get some stupid ideas. like the people who say they are religious but are so religious that they think that everyone who doesnt thihk the same way as them is an evil heratic who must be destroyed, which again isnt what its supposed to be about. going back to christians mucking things up: the aztecs. antoher case of christaisn going in to another country, destryoing everything the people who lived there ahd and belived in. They decided that the aztecs killing thousands of people in the temple was wrong and needed to be stopped so made the entire country obey to their rules...by killing them if they disobeyed. oh the hipocracy.

no i'm afraid i completely disagree. if christianity never existed, half the world would still be illiterate (missionaries), even more of the world would be in poverty, and human rights would not even exist.

there is no way you can say christianity is worse the islam unless you actually go to the middle east. leave alone how terrible islamic activity is for the rest of the world, just look at their own countries. in saudi arabia, a woman is not allowed in the same car as a man unless it is her father, husband or brother. when walking down a road with a male (again, must be one of the three above), a female is not allowed to walk equal to him, she must stay behind him. if she is caught breaking one of there petty little rules, she will be stoned. oh and of course, just to make the system even more crap, males can have as many wives, mistresses and jobs-on-the-side as he should desire. and if a woman is caught sleeping with a second man.. guess what - she's stoned!

now this is not like Singapore, or Nazi Germany, where it is a crazy ideology behind the absolute power of the powers-that-be. no, this is because of ISLAM. how can anyone defend it is beyond me - they do not do anything to help anyone else (like Christian missionaries, whose Christian descendents provide 85% of the education available in India and Africa), all they do is cause conflict and refuse to integrate.

ok i agree that islam is a really stupid and sexist religion. but all religions have stupid rules in.

who votes for everyone going back to being pagans? :P

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"Without Christianity the half the world would still be illiterate"...

CALIBAN:You taught me language, and thy profit on't
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!

(The Tempest)

The only reason Christians taught the world to write and speak English was because they dismissed them as barbarous, witless and evil. Let's talk about evil, shall we? Let's talk about the practice of separating aboriginal children from their families and bringing them up in English households in the to refine them. How about colonising Native America, befriending the people, learning and taking what they could, then taking the rest by murdering and turning out the people there, and preaching against them? How about the custom of Prima Noctae? This was a custom where a lord would sleep with a young woman living on his lands on the first night of her wedding to another man.

As for paganism... Heyy,like it a lot! Must go hug a tree, excuse me...

exactly lizzy, they are hippocrites. and i expect that quite a lot of the world is still illiterate, see africa

the viking's had a cool religion too, all their gods were mortal. have you seen that series on channel 4 on the pagans. its really good, pretty amazin for channel four i know...

well lizzy i can't say i fully agree with you...

being a 1st generation indian, i know for a fact that if it wasn't for the Portuguese bringing Christianity to the west coast of India in the 1600s then my parents, and their parents, and so on and so forth would all be illiterate, and thus in the modern day they would be in poverty, as there is no decent job in the entire world that can be done being illiterate. so while Will Shakespeare is a literary genius, i'm afraid he's talking absolute bull - perhaps colonial powers shouldn't have killed loads of people, but the fact that they taught them how to educate themselves is the greatest legacy of anything in history. and i'm saying this from experience...

i cant be botherd any more... no matter what lizzy or i say it isnt going to make any difference

Of course it isn't. But you do not make allowances for differences in culture. In certain cultures, such as the native Americans, reading and writing was only important when the English brought their own values and ways of doing things overseas. Before that, all the natives needed to know was how to stay alive- Who the Gods were, where to find food, water and medicine, and those skills alone were very useful to the English when they arrived.
Reading and writing is a serious advancement in civilisation, and has given us many profits over the centuries; but its necessity spread with the English influence and way of life. In the days before we colonised places the people lived happily enough and some cultures did read and write, after a fashion. It's only important now because our influence has spread so far it is an unavoidable thing. Not necessarily a bad thing in modern context, but you must not lose sight of WHY the English educated these people in the very beginning.

well that is all very true, and there is nothing there i would disagree with. i would add that, while colonisation was (and still is) bad in economic and possibly literary terms, the one thing it did bring is order.

India has a population of over 1 billion people, spread across an area so vast that the fastest train journey from north to south takes 5 days.

YET, in June's general election, despite around 50% of the population living rurally, often in poverty, there was a voter turnout of almost 85% - something we could only dream of here in England. This is only possible because of 2 legacies of Britain - communications and infrastructure, and, most importantly, democracy.

India is by far the world's largest democracy, and more people voted in India's election this year than the combined votes cast in every others democracy's last election. A country so vast, so populated, in some areas so poor, yet they can manage to run one of the most thorough democracies in the world, and as of writing, have avoided nuclear war with Pakistan despite the fact that Pakistan invaded their land and are a menace to the entire world.

And just finally, how many countries can say, with a population of 85% Hindus, that your President is a Muslim, the Prime Minister is a Sikh, and the Leader of the Ruling Party is a Catholic...

oh and i forgot to add, somewhat importantly, that this is all and purely down to the British occupation. If Britain had never ruled India, it would be like Africa is today - a mish-mash of rival tribes and war-lords vying to seize power (not to mention coups by the son of a long-reigning British PM...), or alternatively, like the Arab nations, with a military dictatorship wielding absolute power over the state and the people. But it is neither, and as it grows economically it is a shining beacon of how democracy can flourish. give it 57 years (the time since Indian independence from Britain), and Iraq, or Afghanistan, will be NICs making themselves heard as global economic competitors...